How Do I Make It Less Frustrating?

[Lord Lemming]

Long story short, our Rogue's dice are cursed.

We're a newbie group of new players playing a new Pathfinder campaign. We're all using the core rulebook for our characters, and party is a wizard, cleric, bard, fighter(me), a homebrewed mess that's basically another fighter, and the aforementioned rogue, all level 1. Today we played a game where we faced off against nine goblins, a goblin dog and a bugbear over the course of the afternoon. Our rogue, armed with a shortbow and 19 dexterity, took shots at pretty much every enemy in every fight, and missed every time. And when I say 'every time,' I mean EVERY TIME.

I was the substitute DM that night and was also handling my fighter. And while our wizard put a bunch of charging goblins to sleep with a simple spell, and my fighter critted the goblin leader for 26 damage, our rogue missed on her sneak attacks. She missed on her regular attacks. She was on the bottom of the initiative count in every fight and every skill check she made went awry. We like to make jokes that her dice are cursed, but today it seemed to be true; NOTHING she did worked.

I could tell that it was frustrating her. I mean, even the bard who doesn't know how to play bard managed to take down the bugbear, and here our rogue is failing miserably because her dice refuse to come up with anything higher than a 5. I count myself as being moderately superstitious, so I fully expect this state of affairs to continue. How do we make the game more enjoyable for her when everything her character does is hamstrung by a little orange-white twenty-sides piece of ceramic?

[Anlashok]

when everything her character does is hamstrung by a little orange-white twenty-sides piece of ceramic?
That could be part of your problem.

Orange-white is not exactly a color scheme fit for a rogue. The energies she's putting forth to channel her inner roguishness while RPing the character could be rejected by the safety-vest anti-rogue color scheme of your dice.

Try getting her black dice, even dark blue or green dice work well.


A yahtzee cup roller is nice too, both for enhancing the air of mystery and maybe dispersing some of that bad juju.


What to do within the game without having extra time is much harder though.

The catch-22 here is that anything you do to help them comes off as patronizing or giving them a crutch... and not doing anything leaves them useless.

[Larkas]

I once played a first level rogue and missed every single attack on the first session. It comes with the +0 BAB, I guess. It was kind of ridiculous. Only my character and the party's wizard were conscious, and we were fighting the boss. The wizard would daze the boss every round, and every round I would try and attack him, just to miss. After some 20-such attacks, I finally hit and kill the goddamn thing.

What I'm saying is: **** happens. If you think the dice are bad, use some electronic dice roller, or just change the dice!

[Inevitability]

D&D is a game where success and failure depend heavily on the dice.
The laws of possibility tell us that one time, 20 dice rolls in succession will be low.

So yes, sometimes things like this happen.

You could reward the Rogue for roleplaying well, or for clever thinking. Or allow her to take 10 if all her previous rolls weren't successful (missed attack, failed save).

[Psyren]

Sounds like bad luck/rolls to me. You can still end up at the bottom of initiative and missing all your shots with 19 Dex, it's just unlikely.

Make sure she's not forgetting any bonuses/messing up any calculations, and beyond that, just say "better luck next time."

And for the record I'm inclined to agree on the dice color thing, but only because that scheme sounds atrocious :smalltongue:

[ryu]

Okay first what you need to do is find a good old-fashioned metal vice like from shop class. After that you place the offending dice snugly inside said vice. Careful about getting your fingers caught in the process naturally. Finally allow the player to crush the dice themselves and hand them a new set. For something like this? I recommend dark blue with white numbering, or alternatively black with red numbering.

[Lord Lemming]

Okay first what you need to do is find a good old-fashioned metal vice like from shop class. After that you place the offending dice snugly inside said vice. Careful about getting your fingers caught in the process naturally. Finally allow the player to crush the dice themselves and hand them a new set. For something like this? I recommend dark blue with white numbering, or alternatively black with red numbering.

We might have to do just that.

[Madwand99]

If you truly are concerned with "cursed dice", you can mitigate bad luck by pre-rolling d20's in a spreadsheet program like Excel or LibreOffice. Create a big list of d20 rolls and use the AVERAGE function to ensure a mean of about 10.5. Then have your rogue cross off results from this list as they are used. Optionally, to prevent the player from knowing the result of a potential roll, have the DM keep the list. Or, have the rogue roll a d6 to see which of the next available 6 numbers to use, and cross that off.

[Crake]

You know, if you turn the last 4 words of this thread title into an acronym, it says "How Do I MILF?" :smalltongue:

[jaydubs]

Everyone gets bad dice rolls every once in awhile. What makes me feel better as a player, is to narrate how my character fails in an amusing manner. I can usually get some laughs, which means the bit of spotlight time is still a pleasant experience.

Doesn't work for everyone though. :smalltongue:

[BWR]

Ah, dice superstition. Lovely thing. Mostly it's merely a matter of probability and selective memory. It could be that the dice are cursed, in the sense that they are poorly made and weighted wrong to mostly roll low numbers.

You should see one of our players. It's not that he always rolls poorly - he generally rolls pretty decent stats - but he has a hard time hitting anything no matter how well built his character is and always seems to roll poorly at exactly the worst moment. Save or suck STs, skill checks to avoid dying or getting into a dangerous situation, attack and damage rolls against him, etc. It's not that his characters are less powerful than the others, or that he lacks any tactical sense in combat, but he can easily go through a character a session if the game is a bit dangerous. It doesn't matter whose dice he uses, he almost always manages to die. My gf leant him a set of her good rollers, he died, and next time she used the dice her character died too (couldn't hit anything, rolled minimal damage, failed saves, etc.) . You can see how superstitions start.

Sometimes probabilities are weird. I've gone through sessions where I had a way better than 50% chance of hitting enemies and failing every single time in hours of combat. I went through a period of a couple months where 70% of my attack rolls were 5 or under. After a couple of weeks of not hitting much I decided to keep track of my exact rolls. Sometimes you get those situations where the BBEG nat 20s and crits on 6 of his 7 attacks.

If you really want to see if the dice are the problem, make a couple hundred rolls and look at the distribution. Chances are, it's pretty even. Still, destroying dice can be very satisfactory: I recommend setting them on fire and watching the bastards burn. (cermaic dice? not plastic?)
Sometimes just getting new dice helps mentally if not so much in game.

[weckar]

Little story: My collection counts about 180 d20s. Before every new game I try to roll the 1s out. I roll each of them, and keep them in a pile if they roll low enough (in effect if they roll 1, but I also keep the ones that roll 2 or 3 in separate piles in case the first ends up too small). I eliminate the ones that roll too high. Then I repeat it with the leftover pile again and again (doesn't take that long, actually) until I am left with only one to three dice which I take to the game. Gambler's fallacy does the rest.

[Xerlith]

Okay, with the gamer dice superstitions sorted out, I propose an actual solution - swap your d20s for 3d6. Table-wide.
Here are the exact rules (www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/bellCurveRolls.htm) for doing so.

We actually use those at our table and they help us quicken the encounter (And greatly help me in balancing encounters my players face).

[ryu]

Oh I wasn't trying to prevent future bad rolls. The thread title told me to make it less frustrating. That's what I put forward. I don't destroy dice because I think it will prevent ill fortune. I destroy dice when something unspeakable happens in-game and SOMETHING has to punished for it.

[Deophaun]

Throwing onto the dice superstition, remember that dice roll differently depending on if you are currently a player or DM. I remember a consecutive sessions where, as a player, I couldn't roll above a six to save my life, and then next week, when DMing, I was routinely critting on attacks where I'd roll 6d6 and come up with max damage... and did this all in front of the players, to their great dismay. Of course, midway through, a player offered his D20 which did nothing but fail him all day for me to use when a monster charged him. I warned him. I told him it would come up 20. He didn't believe me.

Crit. Confirm. Max. Dead.

[Andezzar]

It comes with the +0 BAB, I guess.Most likely it's bad luck. The sneak attack rogue should have a DEX modifier around +4 just like the fighter should have a STR modifier around +4. So their ABs are only one point apart. Since small races are much more appealing for the rogue than the fighter even that point can vanish. You didn't roll the stats, did you?

[Larkas]

Most likely it's bad luck. The sneak attack rogue should have a DEX modifier around +4 just like the fighter should have a STR modifier around +4. So their ABs are only one point apart. Since small races are much more appealing for the rogue than the fighter even that point can vanish. You didn't roll the stats, did you?

I wasn't actually being serious in that bit :smallsmile:

[Aergoth]

As a DM one of the ways you can rock a more interesting combat without steamrolling your players or leaving someone short is to mix stat sets.
You'll need to know what your players are capable of. My group's fighter has an unholy reputation for crits and we're running with six people so big stompy monsters don't always work out great but there's not always a good substitute. So you fudge some numbers to get a creature that your players can still kill, but isn't going to be a slog to deal with.
Find something that will auto apply templates to a monster (The PFSRD has one of these hidden under Bestiary>Tools). Either rock the monster's stats up or down a template (advanced and young are a good go-to). Compare the stats for the monsters. I was using a large creature with DR, Energy Resist and SR recently. None of these numbers really changed inbetween applying the young template to it. What did change was that it lost hitpoints (to the tune of about 20 points dropped) and dropped a size category while still remaining a viable threat because of its specials and the encounter I was setting up. I wound up treating it as a larger creature for the purposes of its damage (Since medium claw attacks are kind of lousy) but using most of the other stats from its medium sized form and threw two of them at the party.

[pwykersotz]

I have two unlucky players. We've tried everything. New dice, same thing. 3d6, the first two real rolls were 3 1's followed by 3 1's. Inverting the die numbers so a 20 is a 1 and a 1 is a 20, you've never seen so many 20's.

I kept a log one game, and his dice were always perfectly balanced, it's just that his good rolls were always for unimportant things like craft checks or a knowledge check about an animal I mentioned that was only tangentially related to plot.

If it seriously has a negative impact on gameplay, use a system that forces an even spread like drawing cards. Otherwise, just laugh it off and roll with it. It happens to everyone at some point after all.

[Anachronity]

For low levels, attributes really matter. I was lucky enough to get a 20 dexterity halfling rogue by rolling 4d6 drop lowest once, giving me a net +7 to attacks with my thrown daggers.

That being said, low levels are very swingy. Sometimes you kick ass and take names, sometimes you die instantly from a crit with an axe. AC and attack bonus are very important at those levels.

[cricricri13]

like someone else said before: just use a program: There are a lot of programs that use ecuations to simulate aleatoriety but maintain the proportion of fails/wins as it should in a perfect distribution (that is, when the number of rolls tends to infinite... maths stuff... let's leave it in maths stuff) so if the dice's a b*tch use programs

[nyjastul69]

Okay first what you need to do is find a good old-fashioned metal vice like from shop class. After that you place the offending dice snugly inside said vice. Careful about getting your fingers caught in the process naturally. Finally allow the player to crush the dice themselves and hand them a new set. For something like this? I recommend dark blue with white numbering, or alternatively black with red numbering.

Do this, but make sure that the new dice see this happen so that they will know what faces them for such insolence.