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There's a player in our group who plays a tiefling barbarian. He's one of our few melee guys, but he always bricks his attack rolls. Even with his bonus being as high as it is he still misses.
He's getting very discouraged and we've all tried ways of cheering him up. He gets so upset when a wizard does more damage with her longbow than the tiefling barbarian.
Any advice on how to cheer this guy up? Some of the things we have tried were to let him use different dice, the GM let him reroll his attacks (3 times) in one session for EVERY battle, and we've even been given lower level monsters to fight. The barbarian bricks his rolls 95% of the time, and it's really upsetting the guy.
But he also refuses to make another character. Our GM is as stuck as the rest of us.
I remember a barbarian who rolled 1s for HP for nine levels straight. It was pretty much unplayable in the end. That was the last game they used random HP rolls. :)
Dice can be just plain evil sometime!
Get him (or encourage him to get) his own set of dice - special like... metal or different than the norm.
He'll get use to their wieght and feel and when they start to roll his way the monkey will be off his back :)
Dice absolutely have their own idiosyncracies... I've a blue 20 sider that I got back in the 80's... it's known for rolling 20's and was famously called "Blue-tooth" or "The Blue Devil" depending on which side of the screen I was on!
Like Volaran's idea of the cleansing ritual too... could be fun.
You might want to think about using hero points. They are a good way to make sure you make important rolls (without cheating)
My solution involves the offending dice, a hammer, and a nice clear spot of pavement.
Likely, the die he's using has imperfections that make low numbers more probable. Most dice have this.
Smash the die, buy a new one. They're cheap.
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My solution involves the offending dice, a hammer, and a nice clear spot of pavement.
Likely, the die he's using has imperfections that make low numbers more probable. Most dice have this.
Smash the die, buy a new one. They're cheap.
Thank you! I printed this page and gave it to our GM. We've agreed to smash the old set of dice and then we will present him with a brand new set that we, as his friends, are going to purchase for him.
He'll be getting the dice once he gets back from his R&R.
This person seems to be a vessel of bad luck. You should make a sacrifice of him to Tyche. Appropriate methods of sacrifice include binding him hand and foot and pushing him down a steep incline, where he surely will hit his head on every single rocky outcropping; or clothing him in metal and tying him to a tall tree on the highest hill or mountain during a thunderstorm.
;-P
It does seem that you have a Zed there. Zed was a blackguard in one of our games. He had decent stats and was decent in way of being optimised (not a munchkin's wet dream, but not messed up at all). And he would fail. All the time. Try to rob an old lady on the street and get beat up style failure. And he wouldn't die, either. Because the DM (not very good at that) refused to let the guy die or make a new character.*
Eventually, we managed to convince the DM that it would be best to let the poor player have another character already, since he isn't enjoying that one at all, and the guy's playing for the enjoyment, so he got to roll against the Cosmic Ray of Death (1000 damage, reflex DC 1000). Of course, he rolled a natural 20 (and had evasion) :D
After that, he didn't have to let the old character die, he just went away and the player made a new character.
The spell of bad luck seemed to have been broken with the new character. Your friend might want to reconsider sticking to his character. Maybe the fates have cursed that one and want him to play something else. Or maybe his luck will change soon.
I also suggest buying some shiny new dice and starting dice rituals. Sometimes they are just what the mind needs to reset, and things start working again!
*This got really ridiculous. We already knew that the DM wouldn't let characters die. Because he changed tactics to prevent character death. And he was not the least bit subtle with it. It couldn't have been more obvious if he had said that he wouldn't let anyone die. Which he basically did. "You only have 3 HP left? Then the guy doesn't attack you any more". Combine that with DM fiat all the time, and you can see he was no master DM... We stayed in the game because we had a great time doing "character acting", the party consisting of evil bastards.
And since we tried to see how far we could take this "nobody dies" thing, and wanted to give the player a chance to get his character killed, we walked into the biggest city on the planet (Waterdeep if you're familiar with the Forgotten Realms. The city holds over 100.000 people, has a special forces of high-level characters of level 15 and up that has police power, and is home to several epic-level wizards that are also Chosen of the goddess of Magic) and just start killing people on a main street.
We kept up our ridiculous assault for several minutes and all got out alive. I think eventually, some guards arrived that weren't total newbloods and managed to chase us off.
We should have been toast after less than 2 minutes.
I had the same luck in an online 4e game. Hard to do your class' job when you can't hit anything. I managed to taunt some monsters through roleplaying and/or the DM taking pity.
Since it was an online game I had no investment in I left, but if it was in real life, yeah, I'd be trying for the different dice approach. Some days I wish I could do that online as well. I have bad luck streaks quite often, though recently they get offset with some good luck streaks.
Be sure that only a female buys and handles the dice before you give them to him. That will give him some "lady luck."
Any superstition in a storm!
Be sure that only a female buys and handles the dice before you give them to him. That will give him some "lady luck."
Rubbing the dice on her cleavage might help things further. I saw that in a film once. (Though to be honest, the guy lost all his money and was indebted to crazy Mafia guys afterwards.)