Epic Dice Fail

[Qik]

Hi all.

I'm new to tabletop RPGs, and just started playing my first ever game (a PBP game over on Mythweavers) earlier this week. So far, I'm enjoying the heck out of it.

I just thought I'd share what will probably be remembered as one of my formative Pathfinder experiences. My group encountered a prison break in progress; it was mostly goblins and hobgoblins, but there was also an ettin that was tearing up everything in sight (all the more awe-inspiring since we're a bunch of level 2s). Anyway, the ettin eventually was brought to his knees via a grease spell, and beat up pretty good by the party summoner's eidolon. The eidolon got thrown clear, however, and my PC (a gnome alchemist) squared off from a distance. I set the scene thus (I've edited it slightly for language):

Post:

Turning back towards the ettin, he was just in time to see the wolf who had so valiantly stepped into (err...I mean rudely interrupted) the fight take two brutal blows from the planks wielded by the kneeling giant, sending it flying. That s.o.b. just doesn't know when to quit, does he? Well, let's see how he likes this. Right hand still aflame, Qui once again reached for a vial strapped to his side; with a fluid, peculiar flick of his wrist, he executed the very particular kind of violent motion necessary to bring the chemical agents therein into reaction with one another. Eyes narrowing, he focused in on his target. In that moment, everything else seemed unimportant: the sounds of people in the crowd screaming in fear, the noise as those nearest the conflict struggled to get away, the shouting of the guards behind him. Time stood still, and the very air held its breath. Qui stood, focused, a tiny, defiant figure staring down one of the biggest living creatures he had ever seen.

Suck on this.

He lobbed the bomb.

Right. So anyway, he's standing there, focusing, sizing up the ettin, throws the bomb, and....I roll a 1. Epic whif.

So anyway, I just thought I'd share this formative roleplaying experience with you all, when my sense of the scene ("here's our great hero preparing to slay the giant") totally clashed with the outcome via the dice. Laughter is welcome. Anyone else want to commiserate?

[drbuzzard]

This past weekend I was playing PFS on my 10th level fighter, and we get to the final combat(s). The appetizer is a giant purple worm. My fighter has a pretty solid AC, though not high enough to make a GPW have too much trouble.

First round I get bit and grabbed. I slash him with my falcata for fairly solid damage.

Next round I'm in the mouth waiting to be swallowed.

I get my two attacks to try and save my behind- lo and behold I roll an 18 and 19- two critical threats. I only needed a 7 to confirm on the first hit and a 12 on the second. The GPW by this point had been hammered by a goodly number of spells, and was ailing noticeably. Had either confirmed, it would have been dead worm.

I roll to confirm :1,2

In the gullet I go with one round of consciousness possible.

[mathpro18]

This last weekend I was playing in my friends homebrew Pathfinder game. We were facing off a Huge gnoll that the GM had made up himself. We have a gnome druid who has a T-Rex as an animal companion and towards the end of the battle the Gnome decides to be all noble and charge his T-Rex(he rides it) at the gnoll to try and take it out. The party had gotten it down to about 4 hp left(thanks in large part to a land slide that was set off by my character...got to love dwarf mining explosives). So he charges and rolls for the bite attack and gets a 1 and ends up doing damage to its self. The entire room erupted in laughter...well except the druid who was almost in tears. That just goes to show you...druids should never charge in on there dinosaurs lol.

[Evil Lincoln]

mathpro18 wrote:

So he charges and rolls for the bite attack and gets a 1 and ends up doing damage to its self.

Just making sure, but you know that's a house rule, right?

I wouldn't use self-damage in my game, the Fumble deck keeps things plenty interesting!

[Kavren Stark]

My party had a couple of these early in our RotRL campaign. One was my wizard (the persona I use to post here) rolling a 1 on a crossbow attack after casting True Strike. :-P Then our rogue got hit with a poison-needle trap on a lock she'd forgotten to check before picking it -- needless to say, her player has been fanatical about checking everything for traps ever since. I wrote that session up as a story, which you can read on my LiveJournal, if you're interested.

[brassbaboon]

Everyone has their epic fail stories.... Mine involves rolling five 1s in a row (one on a d6, one on a d8 and three on a d20). We calculated the odds and decided they were roughly comparable to winning the lottery. I've never seen anything like five ones in a row before or since.

My favorite epic fail was in a 3.5 game when our cleric cast some sort of blade shield on himself and then forgot he had the shield going when our ranger went down and he rushed to heal him.

Chopped up the unconscious ranger like a portable Cuisenart.

Luckily his magic bow survived, which my druid now uses... :)

[Qik]

brassbaboon wrote:

Everyone has their epic fail stories.... Mine involves rolling five 1s in a row (one on a d6, one on a d8 and three on a d20). We calculated the odds and decided they were roughly comparable to winning the lottery. I've never seen anything like five ones in a row before or since.

My favorite epic fail was in a 3.5 game when our cleric cast some sort of blade shield on himself and then forgot he had the shield going when our ranger went down and he rushed to heal him.

Chopped up the unconscious ranger like a portable Cuisenart.

Luckily his magic bow survived, which my druid now uses... :)

This reminds me of the This American Life episode "Meet the Pros" where they're at the world series of poker and this guy gets back to back pocket aces and loses both hands; afterwards, he calculates the odds (about a million to one).

And the blade shield story - gold.

[MultiClassClown]

My most epic fail was actually achieved on a successful attack. It was a modern CT RPG. We were sneaking into an enemy base, and it was my character's job to take out the base's generator with a LAW. As he was setting up for the shot, he was detected and charged by a guard dog. Reacting, he turned and shot the dog -- thanks to a then inexperienced player, he shot it with the LAW. Within the blast radius of the weapon. Our medic almost didn't save me.

[Lurk3r]

.
.
I was in this one game where the party was trying to make its way down a muddy slope to get to this cave. It required three climb checks to get down safely. I get, in order:

20

20

1

...and end up with a -1DEX sprained ankle. Fortunately my character had an odd DEX at the time, but it makes me wonder how bad it would have been if I hadn't passed the other checks.

O_O

[Weekie The Dazzler]

Most epic failure:

Suspension bridge that gets cut (I think it was book one of RoTR).

My DM makes me roll my tumble to see if I can make it off before it drops (we were by the end): 1

My DM makes me roll again to see if I fall off or if I hang on: 1

My DM makes me roll my tumble to make a 'graceful' water entrance: 1

Thats a 1 in 8000 chance.

I think the sheer amount of 4 letter words (and dice throwing) I used after he rolled the damage was enough for him to take pity on my poor character.

[Pygon]

Twice I wanted to capture a drow in the adventure City of the Spider Queen, using their own sleep poison against them.

Both times I critted with my ranger's longbow.

One sent the drow guard tumbling off a cliff. The other, I think, killed him outright.

Most times my PC said "Whoops" in one day.

[Bob_Loblaw]

I haven't gotten to actually play in a long time. I usually GM. A couple weeks ago I finally got a chance to play and I played something that I don't normally play: the healer. I build an oracle of life. I had shield other going and the mystery that lets me take some of the damage the party takes. My plan was to take their damage and heal us all fast with my selective channels. Well I didn't take into account area of effects. I took far too much damage and ended up dying. It was in the final battle and we won because I sacrificed myself but it was not necessary and I should have planned better. I'm so used to playing the losing team, I forgot to make sure I won this time.

[AvalonXQ]

brassbaboon wrote:

Everyone has their epic fail stories.... Mine involves rolling five 1s in a row (one on a d6, one on a d8 and three on a d20). We calculated the odds and decided they were roughly comparable to winning the lottery.

Winning the lottery is a lot, lot, LOT less likely than this.

[brassbaboon]

AvalonXQ wrote:

brassbaboon wrote:

Everyone has their epic fail stories.... Mine involves rolling five 1s in a row (one on a d6, one on a d8 and three on a d20). We calculated the odds and decided they were roughly comparable to winning the lottery.

Winning the lottery is a lot, lot, LOT less likely than this.

Well, the odds are one in 384,000, and technically of course you are right, but I didn't say "equal" I said "comparable" in the sense that it is something you know can happen, but you never expect that it can happen to you.

For what it's worth, most state lotteries have odds of about 18 million to 1 to win the BIG jackpot. That's 46.75 times less likely to happen than rolling the five 1's I rolled. I think when you are talking about million to one odds, getting within half of two orders of magnitude is pretty "comparable." Just my $.02.

[Ravingdork]

My low-level wizard killed himself with his own alchemist fires because he would miss and the deviation diagram would cause them to land more or less at his feet.

[Wolfsnap]

As GM, I have had a surprising amount of these.

I had a big bad try to demoralize the party with a Dazzling Display, only to roll a 1. It was supposed to be his "big entrance" as well. Did not do much for his rep.

Once there was a hapless druid in the party who stupidly strayed within charge range of a raging Bugbear Barbarian Chief. The chief set on her with his great axe and could easily have killed her with a single hit... IF he had rolled anything but a 1.

I don't know if my players are lucky or I'm unlucky...

[AvalonXQ]

brassbaboon wrote:

For what it's worth, most state lotteries have odds of about 18 million to 1 to win the BIG jackpot.

Ah, that explains our disconnect. I interpreted "winning the lottery" as "winning one of the multi-state lotteries", where odds are in the hundreds of millions. I couldn't reconcile the thousand-fold probability difference as comparable. I agree that "comparable to winning a state lottery" isn't an unreasonable statement.

[Just Pete]

Poor guy in a game I was running was having terrible luck with the dice. Every d20 roll came up 5 or less, with a really disproportionally high number of fumbles.

Finally, after he'd rolled 3 1's in a row, I decided to cut him a break - I announced that from there on, all his d20 rolls would be subtracted from 21 to give the result.

Next roll up - natural 20.

[drbuzzard]

Just Pete wrote:

Poor guy in a game I was running was having terrible luck with the dice. Every d20 roll came up 5 or less, with a really disproportionally high number of fumbles.

Finally, after he'd rolled 3 1's in a row, I decided to cut him a break - I announced that from there on, all his d20 rolls would be subtracted from 21 to give the result.

Next roll up - natural 20.

Funny thing is, in my home campaign I have a player who is so convinced that the dice are out to get him, he took a level of sorcerer just to be able to pop True Strike. He saves this for particularly egregious streaks of bad luck.

I have suggested before he should be playing Villains and Vigilantes where you always hit on a 1.

[Ravingdork]

Just Pete wrote:

Poor guy in a game I was running was having terrible luck with the dice. Every d20 roll came up 5 or less, with a really disproportionally high number of fumbles.

Finally, after he'd rolled 3 1's in a row, I decided to cut him a break - I announced that from there on, all his d20 rolls would be subtracted from 21 to give the result.

Next roll up - natural 20.

ROFL!

*wipes away tear*

Poor fella'.

[Jandrem]

We've got a weird phenomenon occurring in our respective gaming areas, wherein if you roll a 20, more often than not(like, 5 to 1 odds) you WILL roll a 1. If you roll a 1, then chances are you will roll a 20. Multiple gamers, countless dice, multiple areas(each other's houses).

[Major__Tom]

Our most notable epic fail goes back to 2nd edition. Of course we use the Skip Williams suggested fail, you have to roll 2 1's in a row to damage self or party member.

Our ranger, an archery specialist (doesn't mean the same thing in 2nd Ed that it does now, but still potent), spyed a thug on the bridge into town, menacing an old woman. He aimed an arrow to hit the thug in the hand as he reached for the old woman's basket. Double ones, he hit the old lady in the thigh. (Our DM wouldn't force him to kill the old lady just because of a ONE bad roll).

Later, feeling responsible, the ranger is hanging around the old woman's farm, when he spies goblins stealing her milk cow. Right, Double ones, he killed the cow!

Last scene - he feels really responsible now, he is going to offer to pay for the cow. He looks in the window, and she wakes up and sees her attacker in the window. DM ruled that a system shock roll was called for, let the ranger make it, Anything under a 92% and she would be okay. Result of course, 00. The old lady collapsed dead, of a heart attack. We, and the rest of the authorities ran the ranger out of town, the player started a druid who never got near a missile weapon.

[Qik]

Pygon wrote:

Twice I wanted to capture a drow in the adventure City of the Spider Queen, using their own sleep poison against them.

Both times I critted with my ranger's longbow.

One sent the drow guard tumbling off a cliff. The other, I think, killed him outright.

Most times my PC said "Whoops" in one day.

The thing I like about this is that you're getting a "good" roll at the most inopportune of times.

[mathpro18]

I just remembered something that happened during the exact same session I posted about earlier. About 4 hours before the T-rex fiasco we had just arrived in the gnoll camp and I get into position to sneak attack one of the gnolls. I took two weapon fighting and have a keen masterwork rapier so I crit on a 15-20 and do 5d6+d4+4 with out a crit so I'm looking to mess this guy up and probably drop him. I roll init and am at the top of the round. I proudly look at everyone at the table and say "this is how you start out a night of battle" and roll...natural 1. Pick up the fumble card and hand it to the DM who almost falls out of his chair laughing. "You slip and fall on a rock on the ground and are unconscious for d4 round" he read after he caught his breath. He then rolls a d4 and of course it comes up with a 4. I caught so much crap that game...

[Symar]

I probably have a 75% or greater failure rate on caster level checks. For anything. Be it Dispel Magic, trying to bypass Spell Resistance, you name it, I fail it. And it's not that it's a hard check to make, I just roll horrible on it.
I really should have taken Spell Penetration, and will in the future, but it's almost a joke by now.

Also, my TWF Rogue/Fighter, unless she's invisible, generally only lands one or two attacks. It got better with the last level up. But when she does hit with multiple, it's usually nasty. Keen Rapiers help with that.

[Maerimydra]

Evil Lincoln wrote:

mathpro18 wrote:

So he charges and rolls for the bite attack and gets a 1 and ends up doing damage to its self.

Just making sure, but you know that's a house rule, right?

I wouldn't use self-damage in my game, the Fumble deck keeps things plenty interesting!

Sadly, there IS self damage cards in the Fumble Deck, but I never use them. When I draw one of those, I just discard it and draw another card. Self damage is stupid and has no place in a heroic-fantasy game IMHO.

[Martin Sheaffer]

I was DMing a 3.5 game a few years ago and we had a necro with a couple of skeleton minions. They were in an area which had a blue mist that acted as a confusion spell if you failed your save. The fight starts off and the necro tells one minion to go attack something and tells the other to defend another party member (bascially if they are attack go after the attacker). The next round he fails his save and gets the attack nearest creature. Yep it was the very same party member he said to protect. So when it's minion's turn she sees her charge being attacked and reacts. This goes on for a few round with minor effect but the necro can't shake the confusion (and it was a will save even). Not too bad until the round where: Whack natural 20, crit. Whack natural 20 crit. Dead necro. And he was even rolling for her and not me. The true irony was Miss Minion was the skellie of the BBeG from the level above who they just wipped the floor with much to my discust.

[WilyQuixote]

My Epic Fail story was one in which I was a witness too. This was years ago in D&D 3.0, the setting was Greyhawk in the Northern reaches of The Pomarj. The party was rather large with eight PCs. At any rate the group was heading deeper into the Pomarj to stop the Scarlett Brotherhood from summoning an avatar of Tharizdun. In our campaign the SB wants to release Tharizdun. At any rate three of the PCs were revealed in the course of the game to be needed for a sacrifice to summon this avatar. By this point in the campaign we were all in the lvl 10 -14 range.

We were ambushed by a huge (100+) number of orcs, all with varying lvls of barbarian. It was a brutally hard fight and we were getting our butts soundly kicked. We all got separated into smaller groups. Our half orc cleric of Cuthbert, being one of the needed sacrifices, was particulary beset by the barbarian orcs. He was surrounded and being clubbed to unconscousness. The cleric though was inflicting horrendous losses on the orcs with his judicious use of Great Cleave and his clerical spells. Here comes the Epic Fail, the party wizard (invoker), flying around the woods, and laying waste to all the orcs he can find sees the plight of our poor half orc cleric. Uncharacteristically for our wizard who thought any problem can be fixed in one of three ways, those ways being Fireball, Chain Lightining, or Horrid Wilting, decided to use a non-damage spell. We were shocked! This would mark one of three occassions he didn't resort to a damage spell when faced with a problem.

He cast Otiluke's Resilient Sphere and englobed the cleric in a gerbil ball. Well this certainly saved the cleric for a few minutes alright but the orcs rather then stand there dumbfounded, which admittedly they did that first round, just rolled the poor cleric off into the forest using the gerbil ball. The wizard had just made the orcs' job safer and easier! Everyone but the wizard and the cleric's players laughed long and hard at this. The wizard yelling "Thats not what was supposed to happen! I was trying to help!" and the cleric saying "Great! I can't get myself out of this thing either!" The orcs managed to get two of the three needed sacrifices in that ambush and decide to call it a day, leaving the rest of the party to regroup and try to mount a rescue attempt.

Good times, good times!

[RaistusObskura]

You roll enough dice and eventually you'll beat the the odds and given the amount of dice we all roll odds are we've all managed something a little special in character as a result. Here's my story. It may not be Pathfinder, but don't hold that against me...

As to the odds of the following story I make it odds of 1 in 16,000 multiplied by the odds of having this particular set of friends as party member :)

Because the odds are dry here's the long version.

In a galaxy far, far away and in a time far removed from our own is the Spear of Destiny with her crew of misfits trying to survive in a hostile galaxy after having managed to anger space pirates and alien creatures with gribbly mind control powers - A la Star Trek, the command crew are the heroes and abandon ship at every opportunity to go on adventures. At the moment thanks in part to a space battle going badly wrong (and the Captain thinking he knew how to fly and crashing the ship into the attacking vessel instead of giving it a broadside) the Spear is grounded and being repaired. The repairs are costly and so the party have undertaken some freelance work to help fund the repairs.

The party have been investigating what appeared to be a missing persons case. Through our investigations quickly led us to conclude it was a kidnapping and following leads we have uncovered a witness, who having overheard the kidnappers speaking allowed us to identify the kidnappers as space pirates.

As the missing person was the son of a starship repair company it wasn’t too hard to figure out a motive, take hostages and return them in exchange for parts for the ship – Going back to the company who had hired us, we presented them with an update on what we had found. They informed us that, “The case is closed. Oh, and by the way could you tell us who your witness is?”

Not being completely stupid, we decided not to hand over the details of our witness and instead set up a sting. The plan was simple, give them a false target and then tail them back to their source. The false target was to be one of our team, with the rest of us on hand in case it all went wrong and turned into a gunfight.

So we sat and waited and sure enough as evening came, so did a kidnapper. Sticking out like a proverbial sore thumb I saw the droid from where I was watching the front of the building and gave the alert. He then entered the building and went up the stairs. It was at this point I noticed something wrong with the scene, a sole droid had walked up to the building. This suggested to me that perhaps they weren’t going for a kidnapping and were just going to silence the witness, a not unplanned for circumstance as everyone had guns handy.

The droid being polite knocked on the door instead of just barging it in, at least until he figured he’d been rumbled. He tried saying he was police and that he was raising awareness of attacks in the area, so could he come in and advise her. When asked for ID, he decided a fist shoving the door aside was ID enough. Again this was not entirely unexpected.

What was unexpected was the response of the player acting as the bait – Instead of playing the helpless woman role as planned, or even grabbing her gun and initiating plan B – Susan decided to head out of the flat by the nearest exit. A first floor window, head first.

Figuring that the gig was up and it was time for a gunfight, as another player was still in the flat concealed in a cupboard, I ran into the building and started heading up the stairs. Olsen, instead of staying in the cupboard come out into the flat and engaged the hostile droid briefly in hand to hand (not that he choose to do that) and shortly after followed Susan out the window and to the ground. This happened just as I reached the door to the flat, with Susan having dusted herself off following a few seconds behind me.

I took a couple of shots at the back of the droid and did little more than get his attention, and then things started going badly for

As Olsen flew out of the window, Failes drew a bead and unleashed a couple of rapid lasblasts from his pistols into the turned back of the droid. More pissed off than damaged the droid turned around and ran through the corridor towards Failes and colliding with him and throwing Failes bodily though the window he had carelessly stood in front of. (Metagame – The droid bullrushed me and on out opposed strength checks I rolled a 1 and he rolled closer to 20 and had lots of bonuses as well).

Relatively undamaged, but severely unhappy about this Failes rolled over and raised his gun to shoot up at the droid. (Metagame – For my attack roll I rolled a natural 1, which usually means something like a weapon jam or something else that means you can do nothing else that turn whilst you sort it out). However his aim was thrown off wildly, as he noticed that a) he was lying in a road and b)that he was directly in front of an oncoming car and decided too late that getting out of the way of the car was more important than taking the shot. (Metagame – I was given a reflex save to notice the car and rolled the third 1).

Failing to get out of the way of the car in time, Failes was hit by the car and left stunned lying in the road by the force of the impact. (Metagame – The fourth, but not fatal 1 is rolled. Incidentally when the gamemaster rolled for how long I was stunned he managed to roll the maximum).

Seeing me thrown out of the window, Susan decides to run away again whereas Olsen getting back up to the window he had been thrown out of earlier opens fire on the droid scoring a telling hit. Figuring discretion is the better part of valour the droid jumps to the ground through the hole he had made using me and walks over to Failes’ prostrate body and raises a stompy metal foot.

As he does this Susan, the coward is just across the street trying to get into our getaway car in plain view of my body. Heroic Olsen on the other hand is in pursuit and gunning for the droid. The droid then tells Olsen, “Give me the girl, or your friend gets it.” Slightly less heroically Olsen points out Susan to the droid and then shoots the droid in the back as it turns to face Susan.

Susan however had earlier been wearing a wig when the droid saw her, a wig that she had removed after jumping out of the window and so the droid didn’t recognise her. At this point the boot came down and it was time for Failes Wildly; one of my favourite characters, to die.

The plus side for me though is that whilst things had gone badly for me, they continued to get worse for the rest of the party after this, with them almost dying, destroying a chunk of a spaceport and one of our spacecraft (one destroyed the other), having our mothership stolen and looted by pirates before being given the choice of joining a pirate crew or being ‘cut loose’.

tl;dr

Rolled 4 ones back to back. Got thrown out a window, hit by a car and stomped to death by a robot - And then it got bad for everyone else, a shuttle and a spaceport.

[psionichamster]

I was witness, but not really participant here:

Savage Tide, deep into Serpents of Scuttlecove.

A certain tower infested with winged baddies turns into a bloodbath when:

Paladin goes first, flies up, smites evil baddy, critter fails massive damage save on Nat-1.

Rogue/Assassin goes next, pulls some stunt that lets him death attack in 1 round. Result: Nat-1, dead baddy #2.

Bad guys get to go, the last one left sings a "run away" song, which only the bard fails, again on a Nat-1. Of course, said bard has Flight of the Dragon running, so hightails it across 1/4 of the city before he gets back under control.

Fast forward to the end encounters of the adventure:

The party has used ridiculous amounts of AoE spells to take down the BBEG's lair. (Earthquake, Storm of Vengeance, some targetted Dispel Magic's)

BBEG storms out, ready to chop us into bits. Fort Save or die spell from the Warmage (maybe Phantasmal Killer)....again, Nat-1, dead baddy.

LBEG comes out to investigate the commotion, sees dead boss, PCs, destruction all around. Assassin again pulls his "Death Attack in One Round" trick, boom, another Nat-1 and dead bad guy.

This became a running gag in the game...any "boss" monster, no matter how tough, eventually died to a Nat-1 save vs. death, pretty much every time.

The final boss to the whole AP? Yeah, you guessed it - massive damage from some Orb spell, Nat-1, dead.