I loosely named this thread so others can post things that has happened to their characters or campaigns which is highly rare, unusual, or down right crazy.
What lead me to start this is, for the first time in all my years of gaming, I have rolled stats for a character that are all 18s! I have found one other person that has done this. Anyone else?
What method did you use?
That's statistically improbable to say the least!
|
I loosely named this thread so others can post things that has happened to their characters or campaigns which is highly rare, unusual, or down right crazy.
What lead me to start this is, for the first time in all my years of gaming, I have rolled stats for a character that are all 18s! I have found one other person that has done this. Anyone else?
Since the odds of doing this (assuming 4 dice, drop the lowest) with real dice rolled correctly is about 2 in a trillion then one has to be rather amazed that it has even occurred twice.
After all, if a million people had each rolled up a million characters in the life of RPG we'd only expect to have seen 2 such cases.
There is a reason why, when money is involved, people don't get to lightly shake the dice in their hand and then kind of drop them on the table :-).
What Paul said. :)
I'm not calling you a liar, OP, but there are several methods to 'set' the die in your hand to affect its outcome. I'm not saying you did this but your friend may have. ;)
I once rolled a "1" on five dice in a row. The first "1" was on a d8 for damage, but the next four were all attack rolls on a d20. The odds of that happening are 1/8 * 1/20 * 1/20 * 1/20 * 1/20 or 1 in 1,280,000 or LITERALLY less than 1 in a million.
Yeah, that's not near 1 in 2 trillion, but our gaming group was amazed anyway.
I did this once. Made a Paladin with it. Second character I ever made for DnD. That was in 2nd ED. Haven't since.
In a homebrew game once my cousin rolled three attacks in a fullround. All 20's. The damage dice was 3d6 for each hit... he rolled max on all 9 damage rolls. That was an interesting night.
I've only done the triple 20 thing once. We were playing with the instakill rule, so my evil priestess decapitated the paladin in the first round with it. Was quite cinematic.
I find that people are much more willing to believe that I rolled five 1s in a row than they would be to believe that someone rolled 5 20s...
Way back in AD&D days I rolled my first fighter character and rolled 18/00 strength.
Unfortunately I was a little uninformed on the rules and didn't realize my half-elf could not have 18/00 strength.... sigh.
I have to ask: you did this in front of witnesses? ;)
I've seen a few triple 20s at the table, too (over 10+ years). It is always cool... I didn't use instant deaths when it happened as I DMed, but awarded some extra XP for a cool description of the critical attack.
I'm curious if anyone has ever been able to destroy the knucklebone of fickle fortune *blink*. I was planning to place one in my campaign and had thought of changing to 3 identical rolls on any side.
I once rolled a "1" on five dice in a row. The first "1" was on a d8 for damage, but the next four were all attack rolls on a d20. The odds of that happening are 1/8 * 1/20 * 1/20 * 1/20 * 1/20 or 1 in 1,280,000 or LITERALLY less than 1 in a million.
Yeah, that's not near 1 in 2 trillion, but our gaming group was amazed anyway.
Wow that D20 must be really lucky now, because the odds of rolling 4 nat 1s in a row are so slim. It's like you're guaranteed not to botch on that die the next time you use it, you should save it for a clutch moment :O
Also probability totally works that way.
As for straight 18s, best I ever got was two 18s, two 16s, a 14, and an 8.
I can't remember a time in my multiple decades of playing RPGs that I've ever rolled TWO 20s in a row, much less THREE. Of course my inability to roll critical hits is legendary. That's one reason I find crit-fisher builds so pointless.
About the only time I ever remember rolling a crit in a critical situation with awesome results was when my ranger leapt on a flying dragon from a tree and critted with favored enemy attack doing so much damage the dragon had to roll a fort save, which it failed.
That's about it for critical hit stories in my 30+ years of gaming.
Sigh....
I once rolled a "1" on five dice in a row. The first "1" was on a d8 for damage, but the next four were all attack rolls on a d20. The odds of that happening are 1/8 * 1/20 * 1/20 * 1/20 * 1/20 or 1 in 1,280,000 or LITERALLY less than 1 in a million.
Yeah, that's not near 1 in 2 trillion, but our gaming group was amazed anyway.
Wow that D20 must be really lucky now, because the odds of rolling 4 nat 1s in a row are so slim. It's like you're guaranteed not to botch on that die the next time you use it, you should save it for a clutch moment :O
Also probability totally works that way.
As for straight 18s, best I ever got was two 18s, two 16s, a 14, and an 8.
Chaos, actually I roll multiple attacks and damage simultaneously so those four 1s were actually on two different d20s, two each. Which added to the drama since I rolled TWO double 1s in a row on my attack rolls.
Once I was fighting Wights in a sewer with my wizard. I casted magic missile for 4d4+4 damage. All dices rolled were 1's so 8 points of damage.
As the wight was far from destroyed, I decided to cast another magic missile. Again all 1's so 8 points of damage again...
From that day on my wizard found that wights were "some kind of immune" to magic missiles ^^
Damn, it's like your dice wanted you to die.
As for character attributes, of my three currently active PF characters which I rolled up (4d6 drop lowest) only 1 has a natural 18 in any stat. That's my witch who is probably the best statted character I ever rolled up. His original RAW attribute rolls were: 18, 16, 15, 13, 12, 9. We use an online secure dice rolling service, so the roll was as legit as the online site is. Since he was a human, I stuck his +2 into intelligence, and he started at first level with an int of 20. I actually feel a little munchkinny about that.
In one particular combat I had rolled 2 20s for attack followed by a 1 which was followed by another nat 20.
The combat was described by the GM from the perspective of onlookers as:
The fighter was dealing death easily to each foe he came across. He swings one dies. He swings again another dies. The fighter sees one of his friends in trouble and throws his sword, turns and punches the 'trouble' of his teammate, killing it with his battle gauntlet.
From then on he was considered a 'god' on the battlefield.
In one game I played we had a Tiefling fighter who dual wielded longswords. In-game he was a well renowned and feared "Blademaster" but he always botched on one of his attacks. Always. Atleast twice a session. It always led to him inadvertently throwing his sword, and the DM would let him roll again to see how bad it was. Quite often he'd salvage that roll and sword throwing became part of his character's unique and feared fighting style.
One time in particular we were fighting this greater undead warrior of some kind, but it was tethered to what it was guarding by some sort of negative energy tentacle. Fighter ran up to it. Botch. Roll again. Botch. Roll one more time. Botch. The DM concluded that he failed at failing and he ended up throwing his sword through the negative energy tentacle, severed it, and one shot the enemy miniboss... things like that seemed to happen a lot in that game, but hey we were unstoppable badass heroes.
During a Dragonlance campaign our dual-wielding Ranger rolled all three of his attacks at once, Nat 1's all of them. The table was deeply amused by successively louder groans of "Awww" as he read each die.
Once I was fighting Wights in a sewer with my wizard. I casted magic missile for 4d4+4 damage. All dices rolled were 1's so 8 points of damage.
As the wight was far from destroyed, I decided to cast another magic missile. Again all 1's so 8 points of damage again...
From that day on my wizard found that wights were "some kind of immune" to magic missiles ^^
Similar story, many years ago (a 2ed AD&D game).
I was playing an enchantress, and the big plot of this campaign was that this ancient cult of an evil god was rising to bring about the return of the Ancient Ones. The campaign became a "collect the artifacts" plot, so that we could stop them.
Anyway, every time we encountered actual cultists, they managed to save against my character's enchantments spells! She concluded that the cultists were so devoted to their cause that they were immune to mind-affecting magic. So from then on, whenever we encountered cultists, she used illusion or conjuration magic-- or just threw knives at them!
We had a woman in our group who claimed she had real bad karma with her dice. Some of us offered up our dice to change her luck. She continued to roll so badly that the rest of us protected our dice from her and the ones that let her use theirs...they didn't want them back.
As the GM, I offered a solution. Because of what had happened in the campaign earlier (they witnessed the transcendence of a god), I gave them the 'power of belief'.
Her rolls actual became more random after that.
Once, with a dire rat (a very minor enemy, keep in mind), I rolled a 'one'. Since I have a fumble house rule, I rolled again to confirm, and I rolled a second 'one'.
Curious, I rolled again...and I got a third 'one'. I rolled again and got a 'two'.
There was a moment of silence.
ME: "The rat explodes."
I lose coin flips. 99.99% of the time. In fact, if a coin flip is involved and I'm one of the parties, the result is almost never random. It's always the opposite of what would benefit me.
I once lost 32 coin flips in a row. And this wasn't flip, catch, cover, reveal flips. This was flip, let it hit the floor and roll to a stop...
The same has been true for coin flips in games, even virtual coin flips. I *almost* never win.
Switch it do dice rolls - real or virtual - and I tend to win more than I lose.
It's just my weird kind of luck. I refuse to flip a coin if there is anything of even remote importance riding on the matter. Even for something as simple as 'Who's paying for dinner?'.
Ever seen Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead?
|
|
I lose coin flips. 99.99% of the time.
There are several offers out there of lots of money for people who can prove paranormal powers. James Randi is the best known one. I think his offer is over $1,000,000
If you lose coin flips 99.99% of the time you're an absolute certainty to win (I suspect losing consistently 51% of the time would be sufficient).
So, congratulations on your new fortune.
Some of the anecdotes above are just people not really understanding probability (3 20's in a row isn't at all surprising. One in 8,000. Which is really 1 in 400 since the first 20 doesn't really count (its only after the 1st 20 that the second 20 becomes interesting).
Others are selective memory. We remember the strange runs but strange runs are absolutely expected when you play long enough.
And others are people consciously or subconsciously rolling dice in a very non random fashion or even uaing non random dice.
The only other options left are out and out fabrications or paranormal powers. I think that I've made it pretty obvious which of those alternatives I prefer :-)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Hey, I understand probability. I also think it's cool when I roll critical fumbles, massive (see what I did there?).
I once rolled a d6... It landed on the table, did a few hops and... And it landed on a CORNER!!! In perfect balance!!! Mind you, it was on a tablecloth, but not a lumpy one. We (all the players and I) were speechless for about 30 seconds, with our jaws dropped. I've never seen that before OR after this one event.
Ultradan
Once, with a dire rat (a very minor enemy, keep in mind), I rolled a 'one'. Since I have a fumble house rule, I rolled again to confirm, and I rolled a second 'one'.
Curious, I rolled again...and I got a third 'one'. I rolled again and got a 'two'.
There was a moment of silence.
ME: "The rat explodes."
Similarly, our DM in RotRL rolled 1, 1, 1 for a Sinspawn. It lunged towards a player, tripped, slammed into the staircase nearby, and snapped its own neck.
I remember one time when I was playing a 4E bard in a ridiculously easy skill challenge -- Basically, I had to roll 5+ on a d20 five times before I rolled a 4- four times. Almost impossible to fail, right?
My rolls in order were: 4, 3, 2, and 1!
Everybody at the table was rather amused by that. I agreed that it really fit the situation -- I was playing a sophisticated eladrin attempting to entertain a bunch of redneck hicks. I would have had a tough time picturing how I would have succeeded in this challenge, despite the fact that statistically it should have been a near certainty that I did.
I am notorious for failing hit rolls and saves but nearly getting max damage when I do hit.
Never had more than one 18 during character creation though.
Once, with a dire rat (a very minor enemy, keep in mind), I rolled a 'one'. Since I have a fumble house rule, I rolled again to confirm, and I rolled a second 'one'.
Curious, I rolled again...and I got a third 'one'. I rolled again and got a 'two'.
There was a moment of silence.
ME: "The rat explodes."
This happens to me on a weekly basis, as both player and DM. I have to min/max and optimize just to attempt to counteract my terrible die rolls. I min/max just to play normally. :)
With how often people report 18s down the line, you'd think that it was significantly more likely than, say, winning the lottery.
I've never been witness to all 18s rolled for stats. The closest I've come has occurred on 2 seperate occassions, once back in the early 90s with 2E and the second occurred this time last year - 18, 18, 18, 12, 10, 4. One player threw the 4 into Wisdom and played up that the low Wisdom was a complete lack of forthought. The second time the 4 was dropped into Constitution. The guy played him as a sickly cripple (think Samuel Jackson from Unbreakable) - a crippled Mage...so it wasn't that much of a detriment.
|
Three nat 20's and followed by an 18 during a knowledge check for the BBEG that my PC was the only one to pierce its invisibility and Identify. The others in the group were overjoyed/shocked/disbelief. The DM ruled that during a previous scavenger hunt in a library, I just happened to rip out the appropriate pages of the bestiary, memorized and kept it wadded up in his helmet. DM then handed me the bestiary, whereupon we legally metaplayed the BBEG.
I've seen something similar. Saw a guy roll 5 18s and a 17, using the 3d6 method. Damnedest thing.
My first character rolled an 18/00 STR. The random height chart also made him 7' tall. My DM made me choose which one I wanted, muscles or height. I chose the former.