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Krow
2009-11-18, 05:23 PM
Sometimes there are people who are blessed and cursed in this world. The roll of the dice isn't all that random for everybody. This is a thread regarding that...

Taking our gaming group as an example, we roll dice for ability scores. So as luck would have it, my character's "random" ability scores actually DEPEND on my alignment. The farther away from the "Good" axis my character's alignment is, the crappier his stats tends to be.

Another thing I notice in my group would be the "Taunt the Dice Gods Irony". It occurs whenever a player through sheer overconfidence, taunts/belittles the situation, often finalizing into disastrous results...

D&D 3.5:
<Opponent casts ray of enfeeblement on fighter>
Fighter: I can easily resist that with a 3 or higher!
<Rolls a 2>

Call of Cthulhu D20:
Me: With my PC and the blinding effect of a flashbang, that creature can only hit me on a roll of 20.
Monster <Rolls a 20, confirms with a 20...>
(To this day, I still thank my luck stars for concealment - I only had 12 HP in that game...)

Anyway, you guys suffer / experience the same kind of phenomenon? Stories would be great :smallcool:

Mando Knight
2009-11-18, 05:27 PM
Rules of Dice Rolling:

1.) Never tempt fate.
2.) Always be prepared to roll a critical failure. Always.
3.) Treat your dice well, and they will reciprocate. Eventually.
4.) Be humble, lest probability knocks on your door with an invoice.

Krow
2009-11-18, 05:30 PM
Your sig is truth. :smallcool:

Sstoopidtallkid
2009-11-18, 05:30 PM
My DM rolls multiple crits per combat. Generally on 20/x3 weapons. Whereas I consider it a good session where I average 8 or better.

Fun fact, on one occasion, our 5 member party was entering a room with 3 oozes hiding. Spot DC 15, our party had just lost the members that had major ranks, but DC 15, any of us could make it. 15 Spot rolls. All failed. We still don't know how that happened.

Starbuck_II
2009-11-18, 05:40 PM
Sometimes there are people who are blessed and cursed in this world. The roll of the dice isn't all that random for everybody. This is a thread regarding that...

Another thing I notice in my group would be the "Taunt the Dice Gods Irony". It occurs whenever a player through sheer overconfidence, taunts/belittles the situation, often finalizing into disastrous results...

D&D 3.5:
<Opponent casts ray of enfeeblement on fighter>
Fighter: I can easily resist that with a 3 or higher!
<Rolls a 2>

Fighter has SR? RoE has no save...

But yeah, I've had times when great luck.
I was a level 7 wu jen trying out my Snake Darts.
I hit the fire giant (there was 4, tough battle) with one. Now as you can tell they have good Fort saves so he was only going to fail on a 6 or something.

The giant rolled a 1 twice (one for each dart). And I rolled max Fort damage. (12 con). While I didn't kill the Giant alone, the 36 damage from the darts also wounded it so the fight could kill it (he was a sword and board fight so nor a lot of damage).

Then we fight a Hydra (7 heads). It hurt the the Fighter bad, and then I decided it might have good Fort but I still do 2 x 3d6. Maybe it will fail 1 of the Fort saves.
It failed both again... That meant (I rolled 10 con damage) so he lost 35 from Con and 20 damage =56 damage.
The thing was down since they dealt 21 to it before.

Best part: like actual poison they hit again in 10 rounds. But nothing ever lives long enough for that to matter.

Since then when we found a pearl of power 4th, they wanted me to use the pearl for that spell. Everytime I cast it: things just die.

I kinda liked playing that campaign (well the torture wasn't that much fun that one time), but when I couldn't make it one time: the party TPK'ed and so they started a new adventure.

oxybe
2009-11-18, 06:04 PM
dunno much about dice gods and such but... spiders. ptuh *spits*

my last 5 characters have had bad to horrible experiences with spiders, which resulted from anything between traumatic experiences (my level 18 warlock still jumps at spiders... and he's ready and rearing to assault demogorgon), to simple massive pain (spent all most of a combat paralyzed and slowly being digested by the poison while the smaller spiders nibbled on his bits) to one-hit-kills (a spider the size of a malamut drops on you and *rolls hit, followed by damage* turns your insides outside).

drengnikrafe
2009-11-18, 07:42 PM
One of my PCs (I never can figure out how he does it) manages to get nothing less than a 12 when he rolls his stats. I've watched him do it before. It's amazing. Also, I somehow manage to get a natural 1 (as a DM) at least once per social encounter.

Andras
2009-11-18, 08:28 PM
One of my PCs (I never can figure out how he does it) manages to get nothing less than a 12 when he rolls his stats. I've watched him do it before. It's amazing.

Does he only use his own dice?

drengnikrafe
2009-11-18, 08:29 PM
No, he only uses mine.

Andras
2009-11-18, 08:30 PM
That's just strange then.

drengnikrafe
2009-11-18, 08:30 PM
That's why I posted it in this thread. Bizzare luck.

Foryn Gilnith
2009-11-18, 08:39 PM
I disbelieve luck.

UglyPanda
2009-11-18, 08:44 PM
I look at luck as a measurement, not an actual force of nature. It's simply a measure of how well you do relative to the number of chances you take.

Thinking you can manipulate your luck short of cheating is foolishness, however.

ocdscale
2009-11-18, 08:49 PM
I look at luck as a measurement, not an actual force of nature. It's simply a measure of how well you do relative to the number of chances you take.

Thinking you can manipulate your luck short of cheating is foolishness, however.

+1

Do people actually believe these things? Like alignment affecting your dice rolls or worrying about 'jinxing' the dice?
Or is this just a way to vent some steam?

lsfreak
2009-11-18, 09:02 PM
I know people who abuse their dice in an attempt to make them roll better. Yelling at them, sucking on them, sticking them in the microwave.

One guy in our group *always* gets crit. I went an entire session DM'ing pretty much missing the PC's... except I crit him 3 times. He goes up against 5 lower-level enemies (or rather, they charge him) and he's crit 4 out of the 5 times. Every crit I landed in a temple full of scythe-wielding Robilar's Gambit fighters? Yea, it's on him.

drengnikrafe
2009-11-18, 09:06 PM
Do I actually believe doing certain things to dice will somehow cause them to roll differently? Not particularly. In fact, statistics says that there is no difference at all. However, I feel obliged to notice when there is a considerable breech in the walls of the standard. I once rolled 4 18's in a row. Yes, there is a 1/8000 chance of it happening (assuming the first 18 doesn't count as a part of the phenomenon), I still treat it as a day of unusual luck. Not to mention, as long as the statistical phenomenon keeps up, it gives me something to believe in, even if it's not true.

Livor
2009-11-18, 09:18 PM
This (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion) seems to explain this thread's premise nicely.

Olo Demonsbane
2009-11-18, 10:04 PM
If I make a character for a group, I always get the second best stats in the group. If I make a character for no reason or as an NPC...I roll insane stats. I averaged my last 4 NPCs that I rolled for and got a point buy of ~50.

erikun
2009-11-18, 10:48 PM
Can't say that I've seen any "patterns" in my rolls, although there are some days when certain players (or even the DM) rolls phenomenonally well or phenomenonally poorly. My first 4e Warlord literally rolled nothing above 5 for several sessions, and our current DM will typically roll 2-3 natural 20's in a row during combat.

I have a set of precision dice for times when I feel like luck is giving me a kick in the sides.

Tyndmyr
2009-11-18, 10:55 PM
I know people who abuse their dice in an attempt to make them roll better. Yelling at them, sucking on them, sticking them in the microwave.

One guy in our group *always* gets crit. I went an entire session DM'ing pretty much missing the PC's... except I crit him 3 times. He goes up against 5 lower-level enemies (or rather, they charge him) and he's crit 4 out of the 5 times. Every crit I landed in a temple full of scythe-wielding Robilar's Gambit fighters? Yea, it's on him.

See, that doesn't work. Punishing a die will only make it roll worse.

What you need to do is line up the others so they can see, and make an example of the offending die. Place it with the one facing up, cover it with lighter fluid, and set that sucker on fire. Then, smash it with a hammer. Make your dice live in fear.

Sharkman1231
2009-11-18, 11:22 PM
I once had a cleric with a ~+16 will save. A drow cast a save-or-die spell.
"Ha!" I said, "I only need to roll around a 6"
*Roll*
a 2...

Tyndmyr
2009-11-18, 11:25 PM
My level 7 wizard has a +14 to will. Stupidly high modifier stacked via all sorts of fun stuff, right? So, when Im going through my buddies pack(he's dead, and Im looking through gear in case someone has a magical means of solving it), and I find his rubber ball with a Sepia Snake Sigil on it...I figure Im off the hook.

Oh no, I roll a 1. Yeah, no matter what I do, my dice hate me unless Im rolling loot as a DM. Then, they shower me with high rolls.

MCerberus
2009-11-18, 11:27 PM
I hardly ever get to play other than PbP, so I take notes of which die seem to skew high and low... for sadistic DM purposes. When someone forgets their dice, they have to use the set where the d20 I have "trained" by having it sitting on a table on '1', the d4 was stepped on, has a taste for human blood, and has spread its bloodlust to the rest of the set, and the d10s that their first random encounter decided "roll twice, combine".

2 months since the last person forgot to bring their own dice.
Oh, and the extra d6s were taken from a Parcheesi set after someone spent the whole game without having a pawn leave the start.

TheCountAlucard
2009-11-18, 11:34 PM
...the d4 was stepped on...Ouch! I did that last Friday. (shudders) Those things are mean. :smalleek:

MCerberus
2009-11-18, 11:39 PM
Ouch! I did that last Friday. (shudders) Those things are mean. :smalleek:

You did separate it from the rest of your dice, right? :smalleek:

sofawall
2009-11-18, 11:47 PM
My level 7 wizard has a +14 to will. Stupidly high modifier stacked via all sorts of fun stuff, right? So, when Im going through my buddies pack(he's dead, and Im looking through gear in case someone has a magical means of solving it), and I find his rubber ball with a Sepia Snake Sigil on it...I figure Im off the hook.

Oh no, I roll a 1. Yeah, no matter what I do, my dice hate me unless Im rolling loot as a DM. Then, they shower me with high rolls.

I managed to roll nothing about an 8 for an entire game as DM, except a Digester's 8d8 damage spit thing (boy was the party ever surprised to be hit with 30 damage on a successful save :P) and the party's secret perception rolls. Those were all near 20.

Oh, and of the two random encounters I rolled, both were digesters. There was a 4% chance of them, and I got them twice.

Friend Computer
2009-11-18, 11:49 PM
See, that doesn't work. Punishing a die will only make it roll worse.

What you need to do is line up the others so they can see, and make an example of the offending die. Place it with the one facing up, cover it with lighter fluid, and set that sucker on fire. Then, smash it with a hammer. Make your dice live in fear.Terrorism FTW.

I know I stopped playing Warhammer because I barely ever rolled above a 3. I recognise that every probability graph must have it's far edges, and I accept that thus far, at least, I happen to sit on the edge indicating abysmal dice rolls.

Doesn't make it any easier to accept losing though.

Barmacral
2009-11-18, 11:50 PM
I have a set of precision dice for times when I feel like luck is giving me a kick in the sides.

What are precision dice?

Friend Computer
2009-11-18, 11:56 PM
What are precision dice?They identify the target number and proceed to roll better than it, I presume.

Akal Saris
2009-11-19, 12:43 AM
Fighter has SR? RoE has no save...

I think it does in Pathfinder, actually.


I disbelieve luck.

Make a Will save!



One guy in our group *always* gets crit. I went an entire session DM'ing pretty much missing the PC's... except I crit him 3 times. He goes up against 5 lower-level enemies (or rather, they charge him) and he's crit 4 out of the 5 times. Every crit I landed in a temple full of scythe-wielding Robilar's Gambit fighters? Yea, it's on him.

I used to play an MMO called Asheron's Call, where some characters would almost always aggro the monsters in a dungeon, sometimes to the point of ridiculousness. My old sword+board character was one of those - he'd zone into a room, and every monster that spawned would make a beeline for him, ignoring my 3 friends completely. It worked out well, since I was a tank character, but it was still pretty ridiculous.

AC players called it the Wi Flag, after a player who was famous for his character, who was basically a magnet for monsters. The designers insisted it was just random variables aligning poorly for the characters, possibly a clustering illusion or over-exaggeration.

But, after about 4 years of denying it, the designers finally admitted (http://asheron.wikia.com/wiki/Wi_Flag)that there was a Wi Flag, and they had finally found and fixed it! So there - take that, random variables!

Jokes
2009-11-19, 01:24 AM
What are precision dice?

I'll let an expert (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR2fxoNHIuU&feature=related) answer that. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxmkWrDbn34&feature=related)

Tyndmyr
2009-11-19, 09:10 AM
I managed to roll nothing about an 8 for an entire game as DM, except a Digester's 8d8 damage spit thing (boy was the party ever surprised to be hit with 30 damage on a successful save :P) and the party's secret perception rolls. Those were all near 20.

Oh, and of the two random encounters I rolled, both were digesters. There was a 4% chance of them, and I got them twice.

Technically, that's not so improbable. The odds of getting the same monster twice in a row is = the odds of rolling that monster(assuming you roll twice). If you roll three times in a row, the odds of getting the same twice in a row is approx double the odds of rolling than monster.

My campaign is plagued with bears. If it's possible, a bear always gets rolled on the random encounter tables. Since it's round robin GMing, I cant just blame my luck. It happens to us all.

dsmiles
2009-11-19, 09:20 AM
I have seen a trend in players that cheat and luck:
Players that cheat while rolling their characters generally roll worse during the game than players who don't cheat while rolling their characters.

quicker_comment
2009-11-19, 09:57 AM
See, that doesn't work. Punishing a die will only make it roll worse.

What you need to do is line up the others so they can see, and make an example of the offending die. Place it with the one facing up, cover it with lighter fluid, and set that sucker on fire. Then, smash it with a hammer. Make your dice live in fear.
The worst thing is -- by my thinking, this should actually work.

Dice have slight inherent biases. If you remove from your collection dice that you observe to perform badly, you'll tend to remove more of the ones with unfavourable biases and fewer of the ones with favourable biases. Over time, you should be able to "train" your dice collection to roll better.

I think it'd be humourless to insist that this ritual would be cheating, though. I'm guessing you'd have to do it for an impractically long time before you could see any effect.

Tyndmyr
2009-11-19, 10:00 AM
Probably. We just did it out of frustration, boredom, and a desire to solve our problems with fire.

Dice have an oddly high melting point, btw. Ligher fluid and rubbing alcohol alone are not enough. You've gotta ramp up to higher temp stuff.

dsmiles
2009-11-19, 10:14 AM
Might I siggest a microwave?

FinalJustice
2009-11-19, 10:57 AM
My campaign is plagued with bears. If it's possible, a bear always gets rolled on the random encounter tables. Since it's round robin GMing, I cant just blame my luck. It happens to us all.

Not to be unsympathetic and all, but I found this genuinely funny.

Krow
2009-11-19, 01:03 PM
LOL. Those are some brilliant stories. :smallsmile:

Sliver
2009-11-19, 01:32 PM
When I roll and it matters, I have a high chance of failing and the modifier doesn't matter. The more my rolls become irrelevant, the higher my success chances.. In my first 4e battle I was playing a predator-striker focused druid and I missed all my attacks.. We were fighting a single opponent and it moved out of melee range so I shifted back to elf form and used some power I forgot it's name (did some damage and if opponent moved all enemies around him would fall) and I fluffed it as roaring in frustration.. I critted.

But sometimes the dice are nice to me.. Like this one time that I used my swift action before so I couldn't use Moment of Perfect Mind (concentration +6) and I needed to roll a will save vs color spray. With a +0 will, being level 1 in a solo dungeon.. So the dice were nice and told me "Don't worry, it doesn't matter anyway. Here, have a 3". This character died on it's second encounter after having a flawless victory in the first.

Cieyrin
2009-11-19, 03:45 PM
What you need to do is line up the others so they can see, and make an example of the offending die. Place it with the one facing up, cover it with lighter fluid, and set that sucker on fire. Then, smash it with a hammer. Make your dice live in fear.

A buddy of mine did this with a a perpetually failing die, though he went straight to the rock hammer and put the shards in his dice bag as a warning to the other dice. They've behaved since then, or at least more reasonably so.

dsmiles
2009-11-19, 03:49 PM
I still recommend the microwave...:smallbiggrin:

Psyborg
2009-11-19, 05:12 PM
My d6 and d8 love me. I consistently roll well on both of them (typically damage rolls). I also rolled great ability scores.

However, my d20 hates me and loves nat 1s. I have hit an ally on a missed ranged attack at least once in every battle except two since the start of the campaign a few months ago. Worse things have happened once or twice, as well, but apparently it only hates me with regard to attack rolls.

Dimers
2009-11-19, 05:35 PM
I once played in a group where someone had these big ol' foam dice, each about four inches across. Since they were physically safe (you couldn't hurt someone by throwing one at them) and were printed with big numbers, we called them the "retard dice". They rolled normal results, unless you posed like a person with severe mental retardation and grunted "Ehhn!" while rolling, in which case they rolled excellently.

Swear to gawd.

Shardan
2009-11-19, 06:40 PM
On the subject of luck, I have 2 stories.
1) We were playing a Dark Sun campaign. we all started with nothing but loin cloths and scraps after having been captured and then escaping from a slave caravan. while travelling accross the desert with scraps of wood and loin cloths, we beat the daylights out of everything we came accross. We finally make it to town and re-equip ourselves with good weapons and armor.. even a +1 item or two and went back out.. and narrowly avoid a TPK from the first low level random encounter we hit after leaving town.

2) Playing a Star Wars d20 game. I played a scoundrel who had the force forcibly awakened in him. he and the two Jedi's he was stuck with were attacked by three sith. The two Jedi's were handling their fights perfectly, but my character was flailing uselessly with his lightsaber, not able to hit anything. I was one good hit from dropping until I decide, 'If he's gonna die, he's gonna die like a scoundrel.' I drop the lightsaber, draw his blaster and fire point blank.. natural 20.. critical hit.. instant one shot kill

As far as dice in as a whole, I've never gotten the whole 'use this dice to roll this number' effect but I have noticied if my dice start rolling low, they will roll low for a while and I just have to change dice til they get over it :D (and yes, I always set my dice with the high number facing up to 'train' them. I know its silly but I don't care.)

Decoy Lockbox
2009-11-20, 03:11 AM
In the game I'm DMing, our barbarian can't seem to hit anything or pass saves to, well, to save her life. Our cleric on the other hand, had 2 crits in the last fight alone. Our sorceror|bard seems to make really crazy AC rolls as well (we use static numbers for monster attacks and the players roll AC).

Swordguy
2009-11-20, 12:03 PM
I know it's not the cool, mathematically-sound thing to say, but some people really are just lucky. We've got a guy in my current L5R group that, when we were playing AD&D, rolled out an 18, 18, 18, 18, 17, 15 stat line. Great, you say, improbable, but just a "spike". Not so. Over the course of a 6 month, weekly-played campaign, we tracked his rolls starting after the third session. He used multiple dice (sometimes other people's) so it wasn't edge-shaving or cheating, and we watched him roll, so it wasn't his rolling technique. Average die roll on a d6? 5.1. Average on a d10? 8.44. Average on a d20? 17 dead even.

Fortunately, there's other folks to balance out the end of the spectrum. In that same campaign, I had to roll seven stat lines before I got a "legal" character that qualified for any classes (needed a 9 or better on any stat).

I recall an experiment I did back in high school to "prove" my bad luck to my DM. 5000 die rolls, using 5 different sets of 10d6, from different companies. Each set got rolled 100 times. Dice were rolled against a hard surface so they bounced back (eliminating the "drop" technique). Average result? 2.14 - a number graven into my memory for all time. That's so far outside a standard deviation (3.25-3.75) as to be ludicrous.

So don't talk to me about luck being impossible. As far as I'm concerned, I've mathematically proved that my luck is indeed bad (and dude's is indeed good). Anybody can have an improbably "spike" of luck in either direction - it's being consistent that matters. :smallyuk: