Player breaks law of probability


Gamer Life General Discussion


Just finished a 5 hour session where we took on a lair of wererats. The trusty Dwarven dungeon rover ranger applied silver weapon blanch to his waraxe at the start and finished the game with it intact.

The player never rolled over a 10 on his D20 all night. The only thing he contributed to the game was some nice coffee.

The offending dice have been burned in full sight of his new replacement set to show what happens if they don't behave...

Anyone else break the laws of probability?


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In Strange Aeons, I'm playing a casting-focused druid, and yet I've failed more will saves than I've passed. My bloodrager in WotR had the same problem with fort. But that untrained knowledge check? Oh yeah, I'll absolutely roll a nat 20 on that.


In the Skulls and Shackles game that I'm in, our party's gunslinger is by far the deadliest character because of how often he crits with his musket. I'd even go as far as saying that he may have crit more times in this AP than my swashbuckler has.


In one game I didn't roll over 7 on attack rolls for a month.


Bjørn Røyrvik wrote:
In one game I didn't roll over 7 on attack rolls for a month.

Holy crap I thought I had bad luck.

In a Warhammer game I once played via skype the entire group went an entire combat not having hit a single foe until the last Round, in a 9 Round combat...


Storyteller Shadow wrote:
Bjørn Røyrvik wrote:
In one game I didn't roll over 7 on attack rolls for a month.

Holy crap I thought I had bad luck.

In a Warhammer game I once played via skype the entire group went an entire combat not having hit a single foe until the last Round, in a 9 Round combat...

Now that is insane.


In S&S the Swashbuckler had the worse luck ever. The Bard buffed him and debuffed enemies so he could only miss with a natural 1 and he critted on 15-20 with about 6-7 attacks each round thanks to haste and combat reflexes/increased reach. But he kept failing at least 1 attack each round, most times 2-3 of them and never critted more than once per round.

He also failed 90% of non reflex saves, which was kind of logic but he usually had only 25-30% chance of failing them but failed about 75% of the time. Then he would use Charmed Life and still fail. The Bard would use Saving Finale to give him a reroll and still fail.

He stayed alive for all the campaign because he was never targeted with SoD but I've lost the account on how many times he went confused or insane xD


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Kileanna wrote:

In S&S the Swashbuckler had the worse luck ever. The Bard buffed him and debuffed enemies so he could only miss with a natural 1 and he critted on 15-20 with about 6-7 attacks each round thanks to haste and combat reflexes/increased reach. But he kept failing at least 1 attack each round, most times 2-3 of them and never critted more than once per round.

He also failed 90% of non reflex saves, which was kind of logic but he usually had only 25-30% chance of failing them but failed about 75% of the time. Then he would use Charmed Life and still fail. The Bard would use Saving Finale to give him a reroll and still fail.

He stayed alive for all the campaign because he was never targeted with SoD but I've lost the account on how many times he went confused or insane xD

This is actually hysterical as it went throughout the entire campaign! :-)


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I usually have good dice luck. I've had aDM say I couldn't use my dice and gave me his dice. And I rolled even better. But I've seen time-travelling bad luck. In a Trinity game, we had someone roll 15d10. Seven ones, nothing over a five. It was a botch so bad that it resonated through time to affect the Aberrant game the same group was playing.


I had a game recently where I played a hunter. Over the course of an entire game session, my hunter never rolled over a five and my animal companion never rolled below a fifteen. I guess that technically averages out but it was certainly frustrating.


Storyteller Shadow wrote:
Kileanna wrote:

In S&S the Swashbuckler had the worse luck ever. The Bard buffed him and debuffed enemies so he could only miss with a natural 1 and he critted on 15-20 with about 6-7 attacks each round thanks to haste and combat reflexes/increased reach. But he kept failing at least 1 attack each round, most times 2-3 of them and never critted more than once per round.

He also failed 90% of non reflex saves, which was kind of logic but he usually had only 25-30% chance of failing them but failed about 75% of the time. Then he would use Charmed Life and still fail. The Bard would use Saving Finale to give him a reroll and still fail.

He stayed alive for all the campaign because he was never targeted with SoD but I've lost the account on how many times he went confused or insane xD

This is actually hysterical as it went throughout the entire campaign! :-)

And it was the character, not the player.

I usually allow to recruit some NPCs that are leveled at the same time as the PCs so they can get them as PCs if one of them dies or I can send them with the group if a player misses a session (I don't like roleplaying my players' PCs if they miss a session).

So this player got frustrated with the swashbuckler and asked me to quit playing him for a time and play the Magus Hexcrafter NPC who had just joined the crew. I was OK with it.

And the Magus kept critting at least once per turn, mostly with Vampiric Touch, and rolling awesome damage. With a lowest chance of hitting, he hardly ever missed a hit and he made even the most difficult saves.

After a few sessions he went back to the swashbuckler and bad luck came back.


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In RoW I had also some funny experiences with dice. Nothing too awesome, but it was pretty cool.

The first one was that I was playing a changeling who looked like an elf )and believed to be one). Even with my high Will save I NEVER made a single successful save against magic sleep. It's like dice were telling me: «you are not an elf»

Also, my character was very emotional and the whole AP was an emotional rollercoaster for her. Dice had the curious ability to reflect my PCs emotions. If she was depressed, I failed a lot of rolls and enemies made most of their saves against all odds. If she was angry or happy, I made great rolls and the enemies failed everything. In her worse moment she even died with a Phantasmal Killer spell (double save!). It was very interesting because the dice seemed to work to fit the story.

And before you ask, we played with open rolls so there was no fudging, just inteligent dice.


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Speaking of abberant I had a nova sneak into a guys apartment to steal some keys I believe so obligatory stealth check. He gets 22 successes on his stealth check. between mega dice 10's and etc. I think he rolled 15 dice. He needed one success. He hated to waste a roll like that so he decided to rob the guy of other things to including the couch he was sitting on and the tv he was currently watching and the nova even said by as he left while the guy is sitting their not quite sure whats going on. (I mean if 22 successes isn't reality breaking I don't know what is.)


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Just tell your players to stop worshiping me. Or start doing that. Starting is good, too.


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I once critically succeeded and critically failed on the same die roll. Until the GM saw the result...


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Waaaaay back in 2nd Ed AD&D, our GM had a house rule of making a Con check(roll d20, equal to or less than your Con to succeed for you youngsters who never played 2nd) to wake up if things were happening around you and no one was making a direct effort to wake you up. The first time he announced this was when a vampire attacked a party member in an inn we were staying at. At the time, I was playing a Rogue who had rolled a 17 Con.

So, after failing 2 rolls that night, I just chalked it up to bad luck.

The next four encounters that occured while I was sleeping, with multiple opportunities each, I never succeeded on my Con checks.

After that 4th encounter, my GM and I both came to an agreement. Unless someone was actively trying to wake him up, my character slept through anything and everything.


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Vidmaster7 wrote:
Speaking of abberant I had a nova sneak into a guys apartment to steal some keys I believe so obligatory stealth check. He gets 22 successes on his stealth check. between mega dice 10's and etc. I think he rolled 15 dice. He needed one success. He hated to waste a roll like that so he decided to rob the guy of other things to including the couch he was sitting on and the tv he was currently watching and the nova even said by as he left while the guy is sitting their not quite sure whats going on. (I mean if 22 successes isn't reality breaking I don't know what is.)

I ran table top Vampire the Masquerade in the late 90's. A PC attempted to stake an opponent and with a dice pool of 10 proceeded to roll 4 botches (4 1's, no successes). I had him roll damage upon which he rolled 4 10's amongst other successes. On a failed soak roll, I ruled that he accidentally staked himself!


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Schrodinger's Dice wrote:
I once critically succeeded and critically failed on the same die roll. Until the GM saw the result...

I knew this was a Quibblemuch's alias before I saw it. Does it mean this is not really a Schrodinger's alias?


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Kileanna wrote:
Schrodinger's Dice wrote:
I once critically succeeded and critically failed on the same die roll. Until the GM saw the result...
I knew this was a Quibblemuch's alias before I saw it. Does it mean this is not really a Schrodinger's alias?

HA! I'm predictably deterministic! Awesome! :)


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Pathfinder Maps Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

I played with a guy who rolled maybe a bit worse than average in general, but for extremely-high-stakes moments in the game, would always roll the result that was most dramatic or hilarious.

For example, we were running a Hero System game, in which skill rolls are 3d6, the lower the better as you are trying to roll UNDER your skill #. This player was playing a skill-based character (Batman-type). In one session, we had a vampire problem, and he was trying to figure out where the vampires were gathering and what they were up to. He followed one of them to a door in a shadowy alley, then had to make a Stealth roll. Despite a very high skill, he completely flubbed the roll, so the vampire girl guarding the door spotted him. Without hesitation, he swung his arm with superhero-costume-cape up over his face and said to her in his best Bela Lugosi style, "I'm a Vampire!" GM said roll for the bluff. He pulls out his 3d6, and drops them one at a time on the middle of the table. 1, 1, 1. Vampire girl says, "Yes, yes you are," and lets him right on in.

In another session, he was mind-controlled and ordered to set off the nuclear bomb in the middle of the city. But one of the other characters grabbed the key.

So this player announced he was going to try to pick the lock. And with his skill, I think he could only fail if he rolled 17 or 18. And none of us could stop him. So he rolls the dice - 6, 5, long pause before rolling the next one... 6!

Liberty's Edge

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Was DMing first session of a 3.5 game way back. Player playing the cleric of the god of battle didn't roll above a 7 time hit anything all session. Rest of the party thought he wasn't a real cleric of battle because they all figured he would know how to fight and he couldn't lol

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