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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 3436752" data-attributes="member: 3146">Good to hear from you.Both of these facts explain a lot. Also, the original poster noted that the cleric archer is a multiclass ranger/cleric which doesn't help matters--in terms of straight-up fighting power, a ranger/cleric is generally a few steps behind a straightforward cleric archer.I'd also guess that your relatively new players probably haven't made the optimal choices in character design that often make cleric archers and melee clerics strong. (And they're not yet into the levels where melee clerics really come into their own either).Bad luck and poor tactics will do a party in pretty quickly. And from the sounds of the later part of your post, the party's response--using combat expertise heavily and otherwise sacrificing offense for defense probably doesn't help matters here. An overly brash group can often power through even after making a bad decision or two. On the other hand, if they go defensive will often compound the initial blunder by allowing an enemy to follow up on their advantage without suffering in turn.Unlike some other DMs, I heartily recommend rolling in the open. It's plenty survivable by PCs unless luck really goes against them. Even things like the players seeing what you rolled and figuring out the monsters' attack bonuses isn't a problem. "That goblin just rolled a 5 and hit AC 18!?!" "You know, he did seem awfully strong for a goblin..." That is exactly the kind of information that players who are fighting an ogre mage disguised as a goblin should get.The best bit about it is that it builds trust between the players and the DM and that there is no suspicion of favoritism and there is also no need to fudge your rolls. Do you fudge for one player but not another? When you judge it to not be the player's fault that he's getting reamed? How much do you fudge? All of these choices make it difficult to really be fair to players when fudging. This is especially true if players decide to gamble. "I'll go for the 1/20 shot of getting the evil fighter/barbarian with a destruction spell." OK, you roll a 1 on the bad guy's save. Do you fudge it and have him succeed? After all, you've fudged in the PCs' favor before and it will make the encounter much more interesting. On the other hand, if you do that, the player might as well not bother with his spell. In general, I think combat ending spells like slay living, finger of death, and even color spray and sleep change from calculated risks that the odds will work in your favor to risks that have to be calculated on how the DM is feeling at the time. That's not a good thing.The gamble goes from being a long shot to being no shot. The same is true for the character who takes a seemingly low-risk gamble that ends up backfiring. "OK, so my character is going to walk past all the zombies, provoking AoOs. I  have elusive target, so when they miss me, I'll get a trip attack against them and I'll thus keep them from swarming the other party members." Not a bad tactic (and one I've used myself upon occasion). But, if the first three zombies roll twenties, the character is going to take a lot of damage and won't accomplish his goal. If you're rolling behind the screen, are you going to fudge the second and the third twenty? How about the 19 after that? If you do, the player is essentially being given a pass on the risks that his strategy poses. They're good risks, but even good risks are still risks--and should remain risks if you want your game to involve real risks and your characters decisions to have real consequences. If, on the other hand, you let the dice stand while rolling behind a screen, you foster suspicion that you're cheating against the players (particularly on a very hot streak of dice) and players might get the sense that you just don't want them to try that tactic.On the whole, the fact that random dice rarely produce an average result makes me very leery of going back to rolling in secret.I'd gently suggest that he ask the cleric when he wants healing then.Do the players enjoy this? If not, you should have an out of character talk about getting some more unity among the players.On the other hand, if your players enjoy the kind of every man for himself mentality, but don't enjoy getting reamed, you still might want to briefly point out to them that, they would have a much easier time of things if they worked together more and that the individualism that they enjoy might need to be mitigated a bit so that it doesn't produce the defeat that they don't enjoy.Bad luck happens. This should be cured simply by keeping playing. The law of averages dictates that unless a player accidentally bought one of those 8 sided d4s (that people use to avoid having caltrops in their dice bag), the d8s should average out to 4.5 sooner or later. Also, the players are just entering the zone where cure light wounds is no longer sufficient combat healing and when, with higher caster levels, the dice are a smaller overall portion of the healing result. For out of combat healing, 3 1s in a row on your wand of CLW is just a matter of inefficiently used resources. For in-combat healing, it's a matter of life and death.I mentioned this before in passing, but another thing to note here. If multiple PCs have Expertise i a 28 point buy game with half the party as clerics of one stripe or another, they've spent an awful lot of points on Int when it doesn't do a lot for their characters. Are players dumping Con? That would go a long way to explaining the death toll.One possibility: give them a match against their dopplegangers (NPCs with similar builds and levels) and run the NPCs as a team. If the players see the bad guy rogue readying his attack for when the fighter gives him a flank instead of attacking without sneak dice, having the fighter move into a nonflanking position and then having to take an AoO to get the flank next round, they may be inclined to try it themselves.</blockquote>

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