Rolling all 18s

[ptrpete]

I had all 18s once, but it was with point buy.

Our DM might have been a tad generous.

 

[francisca]

I have rolled back to back 100s before, in front of 3 friends. After they put their eyes back in, they said they wouldn't believed it if they hadn't seen it.

I don't think I've rolled a 100 since then.

But no, no straight 18s. Never done it, never seen it.

 

[Kichwas]

Kinda hard to roll all 18's on 28 points.

 

[Larry Fitz]

For all our mathemetician friends, the odds of rolling 6-18's on 3d6 is not one in 55 trillion, unless you are using dice from Las Vegas, where they have managed to make dice that have the same mass on all four faces. My guess is that the vast majority of dice being used to create D&D characters are "pip" dice with hollowed pips. That means that the side with six pips is the lightest, and it's opposite,the side with one pip, the heaviest. The other two opposing face pairs are both closer to each other in mass/weight and so are less affected. I have rolled two and three 18's using the 4d6 drop one die method, and done so more than once in 26 years of gaming. I do not belkieve that to be exceptional, yet if we do the math we would find it more than just a little unlikely. The opposite however for the same reason is rarer still, I doubt very much if even one person on these boards will claim to have rolled up a character with all 3's, no matter the method.

 

[Shard O'Glase]

I once played a wizard in 1e where I rolled 5 18s and 1 17. Str was my dump stat.

 

[Sixchan]

I saw 4 18s, a 17 and a 16 once. What makes that more amazing is that we were using Straight 3D6s! My jaw was almost literally touching the floor. That was one L-U-C-K-Y guy.

 

[officeronin]

I was in a cheesey game where the DM permitted as many re-rolls as you wanted, all 4d6, drop the lowest. So, I set up my laptop to roll for me, and only display characters that were 18's down the line.

They were in the middle of an adventure, so I sat down and decided what I wanted to play (flipping through the rulebooks that they owned and I didn't) for an hour or so, when one popped up.

But no, I never actually rolled the dice for an all 18 PC.

Officeronin

 

[Tyrrell]

The exact probability of rolling an 18 on 4d6 drop the lowest is 1.62037%, or 1 out of every 61.7 rolls. 61.7^6 power is about 55,247,704,840, so that's how many characters on average would have to be rolled to get one with 6 18s.

Thank you for posting the correct odds. These are the same that I came up with after a few minutes figuring.

There are 21 different die roll combinations on 4d6 that will get you an 18. there are 1296 different die roll combinations.

 

[Ziggy]

I once rolled 14x6 in a row
.
.
.
.
playing ASL

.Ziggy

 

[Silver Moon]

A long time ago I had a very young player once try bringing in a character sheet with five 18's and a 17, claiming that it was appropriately generated.

When I questioned him further he said that he had written a computer program to generate it, and then showed me a printout of the Fortran code. He then showed me a one page sheet totally filled with rows of six number, with that combination about half way down. I saw the page number of 389 on the bottom, and asked "Did you print out and review almost 400 pages until you found this one!" He said yes, and I suggested that he needed to find himself a life. I told him we used dice, and made him roll at the next game, and he got a pretty good but more reasonable character out of it.