Your Luckiest Moments In Any RPG

[Bartmanhomer]

What were your luckiest moments in any RPG that you've played. If can be combat, non-combat or anything else in between.

[Jay R]

It was near the end of a timed D&D tournament, and our team had not yet found the quest item. (This was original D&D, in 1978.) We were hurrying, trying to gain a lot of xps (which included gold value).

The tourney designers had added a very basic critical kill rule. If you rolled a natural twenty, you then rolled a d8. If it came up 8, the blow was an instant kill.

We were hurrying, attempting to play with extreme precision and discipline.

A balrog appeared in the hall in front of us. (In original D&D, this wasn't a demon. It was a generic 10 HD monster.)

Don, running our fighter, said, "I slice through him, and we keep going, running between the two falling halves of balrog." He rolled a d20 and a d8 six feet down the table, where they stopped in front of the DM.

The DM stopped, looked at them, paused for a moment, and quietly said, "You keep going, running between the two falling halves of balrog."

We managed two or three encounters after that, in the last three or four minutes.

[Incidentally, my hobbit thief stopped to pick up the balrog's whip. The 2 copper pieces it was worth put us over the top in total experience points, so we won the tourney.]

[The Fury]

The best I can think of is when a boss used an AoE insta-death spell and managed to get most of the party in the effected area. He also got one of his stronger minions, (an ilithid that specialized in grappling,) in the area. Pretty clearly, the boss was banking on his ilithid being able to make the save and was sure that at least one of the player characters would fail. As it turned out, all of the player characters survived and the ilithid was the only one killed by the spell. This was only the first round as well, so the overall encounter ended up being a lot easier than planned.

Other than that, my luck tends to not be very good. There was a moment where I managed to outwit a player who is much smarter than me in a PvP scenario, but I'm not sure that I'd consider that luck.

[Quertus]

Ooh, I've answered this before! Let's see what my senile mind remembers, without trying to look it up. Hmmm…

Well, there was the time that my brother decided to take a brand new 1st level character and go dragon hunting. His character shops around for a (cross?)bow, ammo, poison, and rumors of a dragon, and heads out. Roll for chance that the dragon is asleep? It is. (Roll move silently? Success.) Roll to hit? Success. Roll save vs poison? Fail. The dragon dies in its sleep. IIRC, the XP let him level up to 7th level (house rules - no leveling cap). But he didn't stop there, oh no. He went shopping for more poison, and more rumors of dragons. He eventually found another rumor (living off the first dragon's treasure hoard, he had time, and ability to travel), and set out. Roll for chance that the dragon is asleep? It is. (Roll move silently? Success.) Roll to hit? Success. Roll save vs poison? Fail. The second dragon dies in its sleep, too. My brother retired the character.

Or the time that my brother tried to assassinate something that shouldn't have been a valid target, and I said, "fine. If you roll 3 natural 20s in a row, I'll let it work". Of course, my brother proceeded to do just that. So, 1-in-8,000 odds on that one.

There was the time that an NPC Wizard left a maggot-ridden corpse around to use a maggot as the initial target for their Chain-metamagic'd spell, and the maggot actually made its save, protecting the party from being hit by the chain spell effects.

There was the time that Raymond, my telepathic vampire (functionally, an Illithid Savant about a decade before such was published) decided to help out the party's (and especially his own) benefactor, an NPC godling. Raymond asked what it wanted, and was told that it wanted to succeed its "rite of passage" of connecting to the divine telepathic network; the side effects of failure were death. So, a) with an overly literal interpretation of the results of both failure and Raymond's undead state, Raymond considered himself an ideal candidate to investigate; b) Raymond had just picked up a special probability manipulation "power" (really just the result of boosting his intelligence in this system) that gave him a +1% to d100 rolls, which turned out to be important because c) he proceeded to roll a 99 - critical success - on attempting to probe the hypothetical divine telepathic network, to learn how it worked / what would be necessary to connect sometime to it. Evaluating what he saw, and believing himself technically theoretically capable, Raymond powered up, and attempted to make the connection. 100 - critical success! So, something that should have only had a 1-in-10,000 chance of success, with likely fatal results for failure, Raymond succeeded first try. Of course, this was, tactically, a bad thing, as we lost the aid of our super powerful NPC. No regrets, though.

There was this time when I rolled straight 1's for HP (for Lt. Daryl Fontaine, a Cleric of Ao (who does not grand spells)) something like 1-in-a-billion odds on that one.

Ikou, the Valiant Hero, was a generally able but lackluster character. However, whenever he faced a "boss" monster, he would invariably a) win initiative, and b) score critical hits, c) generally defeating the boss before it got a turn. Ikou was also lucky enough to survive drawing from a Deck of Many Things (getting the services of a 4th level knight, a valiant and beautiful elf girl whose name I have sadly forgotten, and some wishes), and surviving using multiple wishes (wishing to be instantly and accurately recognized by all sentient beings, and for said knight to be immortal).

In the "system of fail", WHFRPG, where your average stat was around 30, and that was your % chance to succeed a roll, Darian the Grey, Norseman mutant and cultist of Tzeentch (mechanically; technically, he was closer to "chaos united"), not only told a lengthy series of lies to an imperial investigator, he even started delivering beastman corpses to get in good with them. He also rolled on the d1000 Table of Doom™ mutation table, and got the 996-1000 "invent your own". After much deliberation about fun and game balance, I decided to go with Darian having the ability to sense and identify mutations, although he would turn "transparent rainbow" while the ability was active. He was also known for "teddy bear armor", because he bought… I forget the Warhammer term for "lucky tokens"… styled them as teddy bears, and used them to negate critical hits on himself.

So, offhand, nothing that fulfills all of a) something I rolled myself b) that one would call good luck, and c) that I can calculate the probability for.

[Guizonde]

two different times, both involving crits (natural 10's and 20's respectively).

so, we're in a tank in a totally-not-a-dark-heresy system, and we're driving pelle-mêle to get away from a horde of very angry velociraptors. we stumble upon what can only be described as a building-sized mound of meat and tentacles. not a cool place to be. i'm manning the machine gun, and i roll to hit. natural 1, meaning critical success. it equals to dishing out 9 damage dice. 8 of them are critical 10's, meaning i have to confirm my hit. i do. i reroll the 8, 8 tens. i reroll and stack the damage. 6 tens. i roll damage and add again. i keep doing that, ending up at i think 257 wounds on the monster. i basically drew a tank-sized hole in the thing in one salvo. the dm was too flabbergasted at my luck to be angry.

second time, playing pathfinder. our oracle gets kidnapped in what boils down to a cutscene. not knowing that, i roll acrobatics to catch up by wall-jumping (pretty much so i can keep up while keeping an eye on the kidnapper). i rolled 5 20's in a row, to the point where the dm just said "stop, she's getting kidnapped and that's it. you followed her to a port warehouse. now wait for the group and quit rolling so well!" our monk who's plagued by bad rolls was crying in the corner at my luck.

just to be clear, for the first, i had borrowed all but 2 dice since i don't own 9 d10's, and i rolled openly in the middle of a yahtzee board for the second. i still can't believe my luck. no weighted dice, just one in a zillion chance.

[farothel]

We were playing Vampire Dark Ages with the secondary party (we each have 2 characters of different XP levels, one group is the childes of the other (with nobody playing his own childe)). We were in Sevilla and there we had to stop a demon from being summoned into the body of a 4th generation Gangrel (giving said demon access to both his and the Gangrel's powers, not something you want). We managed to get some assistance from local groups, but the bad guys were running interference as well and it all came down to a mass battle.

While my coterie members were fighting the bad guys, my character (a true Brujah thief and absolutely not good in combat) couldn't do much to help. But in the middle of the square we were fighting in, the head bad guy was doing the ritual to summon said demon while holding a cup with blood in. This was quite important as we actually had been tracking the theft of this cup out of a cathedral (the cup had some magical powers of its own and was needed). So my thief went into Obfuscate, sneaked through the battle (succeeding only because people were fighting and not paying attention to others) to the head bad guy (who was pre-occupied with the ritual). There he snatched the cup out of the bad Guy's hands and with his potence power crushed it.

That interupted the ritual and won us the day (we still spend some time mopping up the bad guys). The fun part was the way we did it.

Me: I go into Obfuscate and sneak towards the summoner.
GM: OK, you can do that as they are not paying attention to you.
Me: I grab the cup (rolls legerdemain, which I have all but maxed).
GM: you grab the cup. The cult leader looks around and sees you.
Me: I crush the cup with potence
GM: (Looks at his notes). Well, that stops the ritual.
rest of the party: (characters all quite heavily wounded by then. Look at me and GM): That's it???
GM: basically, yes (goes in long explanation on how to stop this ritual, either by killing the head summoner or by disturbing them, of which removing the cup is one of the options).

[Quertus]

How about…

This one time, in WoD Mage, I tried to do something, and the storyteller responded, "diff 10". Now, for those of you who don't know, the rules (in that edition) say that that translates to "roll a number of d10s (usually a pool of somewhere between 1-10 of them) based on what ability you are using; results of the difficulty or higher on any given die add successes; results of 1 subtract successes". And we were using a variant rule that, if you roll a 10, you can not only count the success, but can also roll an additional die if you want. Next tidbit: this was a magick (sic) roll, where a starting character can get a max of 3 dice, and it's prohibitively expensive to increase that with XP. I thought for a moment, made some notes, grabbed my dice, and rolled. And rolled. "6 successes", I announced. And I couldn't tell you the exact odds of actually pulling that off (only that it's at least slightly better than "one in a million"), even before adding in the complications to the math specific to how he expended resources to make the roll easier (which is something that he's only done twice in his career).

Actually, the other time that he expended resources was also a bit of a probability fluke. So, an angel told him to kill his friend. His friend took off running. Shrug. Sounded like either his friend didn't trust him, or knew that he had just cause to fear divine punishment. So, he said a quick prayer, pulled out his Saturday night special (purely as a coincidence), spent resources to lower the difficulty down to (if I'm doing the math right) 3, and rolled his at that point mighty 5 dice for magick (sic). 0 successes. Very fortunate, as the angel then backpedaled, was all like, "you passed the test", quoted scripture, and was never heard from again. But I couldn't give you exact odds on that one, either (although, if you ignore the "reroll 10s" rule, I think it should be calculable, and better than one-in-100,000 odds).

[Telok]

I was running a DtD40K7e game, the players decided to try space piracy. On a molasses smuggler, at dock, in Sigil.

The party got on board and ran around slaughtering crew on their way to the bridge. That took several minutes. About half way through the captain fired up a data-slate and live streamed security camera footage and his last stand against the party, to the police and the dock owner. Then the party dickered long enough with the dock owner (who was keeping blast doors and the elevator locked down) for the police to arrive in force.

Later, for the court scenes, I had the players do opposing sides at each trial. Who ever was on trial got to roll for themselves and their lawyer, the other players got a lawyer stat block and a list of charges+evidence and played prosecution. It worked wonderfully. Rolling something like 6d10, keep best 3, 10s explode, the prosecution players would get 50 to 80 rolls for no good reason. Defense kept rolling in the 20s. They started throwing the guy who missed game under the bus to save themselves (he moved away two week later so it worked out ok).

I put them in a penal battalion with exploding collars and sent them on a deep rescue mission in Carceri.

[Ninjadeadbeard]

We were playing Orzhov tax collectors (this was back around early Pathfinder btw), using a 3.5 modified ruleset called Trailblazer. We got interrupted by Boros Legion attacking our tax base, and had to fight our way out through a thirty story apartment block. A highlight of the battle was when I summoned a swarm of zombies (ex-Boros members ) and had them grab hold of the attackers, then leap to their deaths out of the holes their swat teams were putting in the building.

We fought our way down to the street level, where... an Angel stopped us. Hoo boy. Bad times ahead. We fled back into the building, using smoke to cover our escape. The whole party, plus NPC allies, got ready to attack the Angel as it came back into the building. It was quite sure of victory, and with good reason. We were all level 8. It was an epic-level threat. This was supposed to be a wipeout.

But then, the fighter had an idea. Due to Boros firebombing the place, the bottom dozen or so stories had been gutted. Meaning, with a good climb check, he was able to crawl up to 40ft above the door. When the angel came in, he dropped down on her, swinging his magical flail. His player rolled...

Critical Hit! On the floor, so it didn't count. Rats.

Rolls again... ANOTHER CRIT!!! Off the table again.

So, he rolls again. And he rolls a crit, again. But, this time it's on the table. The DM calls for a confirmation.

And he rolls another crit. It was... beautiful.

The fighter then added all his little buffs and bonuses, and threw all of his "Hero Points" into the hit as bonus damage (Trailblazer was fun).

One Hit KO. The angel drops down to some ludicrous negative number. And just to make sure, my sorcerer dropped a magic missile on it as a double-tap. We beat an immortal, and caused the Boros legion to fall back in disarray. A good day's work, all things considered.

[Bartmanhomer]

We were playing Orzhov tax collectors (this was back around early Pathfinder btw), using a 3.5 modified ruleset called Trailblazer. We got interrupted by Boros Legion attacking our tax base, and had to fight our way out through a thirty story apartment block. A highlight of the battle was when I summoned a swarm of zombies (ex-Boros members ) and had them grab hold of the attackers, then leap to their deaths out of the holes their swat teams were putting in the building.

We fought our way down to the street level, where... an Angel stopped us. Hoo boy. Bad times ahead. We fled back into the building, using smoke to cover our escape. The whole party, plus NPC allies, got ready to attack the Angel as it came back into the building. It was quite sure of victory, and with good reason. We were all level 8. It was an epic-level threat. This was supposed to be a wipeout.

But then, the fighter had an idea. Due to Boros firebombing the place, the bottom dozen or so stories had been gutted. Meaning, with a good climb check, he was able to crawl up to 40ft above the door. When the angel came in, he dropped down on her, swinging his magical flail. His player rolled...

Critical Hit! On the floor, so it didn't count. Rats.

Rolls again... ANOTHER CRIT!!! Off the table again.

So, he rolls again. And he rolls a crit, again. But, this time it's on the table. The DM calls for a confirmation.

And he rolls another crit. It was... beautiful.

The fighter then added all his little buffs and bonuses, and threw all of his "Hero Points" into the hit as bonus damage (Trailblazer was fun).

One Hit KO. The angel drops down to some ludicrous negative number. And just to make sure, my sorcerer dropped a magic missile on it as a double-tap. We beat an immortal, and caused the Boros legion to fall back in disarray. A good day's work, all things considered.

Wow that's a lot of critical hits.

[Bulhakov]

It was one of my first Vampire the Masquerade games in which I was the GM.
I had a nifty plan of getting the party captured by an evil corporation that started hunting newbie vampires for research purposes.
Everything was going smoothly, almost all of the party was immobilized by a mercenary team with liquid nitrogen "freezethrowers". Until one character decides "you're not taking me alive!" and attempts to blow himself up with a grenade. Luckily he throws all 1s. I ruled the grenade rolled into a storm drain and the railroading proceeded as planned.

[Ninjadeadbeard]

Wow that's a lot of critical hits.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing. Never seen luck like that before or since. Just... crits, man...

[OnceIWasABard]

Mind Flayer had the barbarian grappled and was directly after me in initiative. Luckily I was hidden, and managed to roll a 20 on my one short bow attack. With the sneak attack damage on the crit, managed to just kill the Mindflayer by about 4hp before the barbarian lost his brain.

[teyileda]

I love RPG, but I have a family and not much free time now.
So the answer is Time ... I'm happy if I have time to study the ENT of the game, go through all the side quests, and so on.

[Avista]

We were running a oneshot with some crazy builds. Our ranger had a special cat familiar that could transform into a tiger at will.

During the dungeon we came across a series of traps we had to get through to escape. We needed to pick the person who had the highest DEX in our party, and we decided to let the cat try. Our DM refused. They said. "I don't care if it has the highest dex! It's a cat! It's not smart enough to diffuse the traps!" I suggested we let the cat roll an intelligence check to see if it was smart enough, and the DM agreed. If it rolled 10 or lower, it wouldn't understand the mechanisms of the trap.

The cat rolled an 11. We disarmed the trap and got through.

[EggKookoo]

Call of Cthulhu, back in the mid-90s. We were investigating lycanthropes in Michigan, and my investigator got bitten. When I asked if my character would survive the night, the GM shrugged and said there was a 5% chance. I don't know if there was ever an actual printed rule or if he just made it up on the spot. Regardless, I threw down my d% on the table in front of everyone -- 05. The GM was a real PC-killer type and couldn't believe I made the roll. I wouldn't go so far as to say he was upset, but I think he was looking forward to taking my PC and turning it into a monster for the rest of the party to kill.

We moved on to another GM shortly after (a former player) and I got to use that investigator for a while. We did the thing where he had to be locked up three nights a month. Eventually, to maintain the horror spirit of the game, he and I agreed the PC should eventually run off into the wilderness as a beast. Which I didn't mind, since I got some fun gameplay out of him.

Not long after this I started up an oWoD Werewolf: the Apocalypse campaign. I decided my PC had been a late-change Garou whose first change was prompted by the bite, and had been taken in by the Sept that the PCs were associated with (many of the same players). It was a bit of a fudge as that's not quite how Garou work, but it served to tie the two game universes together, with the werewolf game set decades later and the events of the Cthulhu game remembered as legend. We still play in that W:tA game world today.

[farothel]

We had another Lucky moment in the Warhammer first edition 'The Enemy Within' campaign.

Spoiler: see the lucky moment here

Show

At one point the group had to go up North in Kislev. There at one point we entered a temple and you are turned into a sort of undead by some chaos gods (not the big four, but some others). They agree to turn you back if you swear an oath never to reveal anything about them to anybody, on pain of death (and as gods, they can enforce this). We swore this oath (except one player who decided that his character would rather die) and went back to the capital of Kislev. There we had to find a way around that oath, but it would be difficult. Thinking that the only one who could remove an oath enforced by a god was another god, we decided upon Morr, who didn't like undead and was probably the most likely to help out.

There exists a rule in the first edition warhammer that if you pray to a god in a specific way, there is a 1% chance this god will hear your request and answers. You could improve that percentage by donating to the temple, by having a priest join you in praying and by length of prayer. All these had maximums of course and the maximum you could get was 15%. So we donated the maximum amount of money, got the local High priest to join and prayed through the night to get the maximum.

The two characters left both got a roll and an 11 and a 05 later, Morr broke the oath and we were allowed to tell the high priest about the undead and chaos infestation in the city we just came from.

When the third player made a new character, a priest of Morr, we were only too happy to escort her wherever she wanted to go.

[calam]

In a warhammer 40k ork one shot about a month ago I for fun decided to force recruit a gretchin (essentially a goblin but altogether far more pathetic). As a test I told him if he wanted to roll with a group like mine he had to prove himself by assassinating someone else's gretchin without them knowing, two low chance stealth rolls and an extremely good damage roll later he's in the squad. The plot itself is about storming a bigmek's (tech obsessed giant ork in power armor) base to win his favor enough to join our side. The gretchin is once again able to stealth his way across any battlefield and land grenade throws that meant that at the end of that map he probably had the more kills then the PCs including destroying a killa kan (buzzsaw equipped small mech) and a squad of kommandos (commandos).

Finally we get to the base and the most impressive part of this NPCs string of luck. The big mek says that he'll join us after a four wave battle royale, us against his guys. the first two go too well to mention but then the third has us facing a meganob (ork supersoldier in power armor). After a couple rounds of doing zero to chip damage against him the gretchin runs up and throws one of his at this point trademark grenades. The main weakness of the meganob is that his face is much less armored than the rest of the body so of course the gretchin happens to roll to hit exactly that. Still he probably loss at most a quarter of his hp and the grenade has to get multiple criticals in a row to kill him (every time you roll a 10 for damage in warhammer you get to roll another d10, this can go on forever) and the gretchin rolls probably 5 10s in a row blowing the meganob's head right off.

sadly he was killed in the last wave by a looted mechanicus deathbot.

[PintoTown]

This reads a bit like Rimmer describing a game of Risk, but here goes...
Back in the 1st ed days of old, my buddy played a monk is this long, epic campaign. We were finally squaring off against an evil party that had been dogging us for months. This was back when at higher levels, a monk had to defeat a more powerful opponent to progress, and my buddy’s rival was one level higher.
They were both crazy fast and rolled the same initiative (which was unlikely). With their crazy movement and leaping, they dove over all the pits and catwalks separating us and struck each other simultaneously as they passed in the air. They both rolled high enough to stun (which was pretty bloody unlikely). That meant there was a very small chance of a straight up unarmed kill (which was VERY bloody unlikely - I think it was AC% back when low meant good). My buddy rolled 02% and the other guy didn’t. Both monks landed on their faces. One stunned (and strangely a level higher). The other dead.
I think the battle stopped while both sides just slowly clapped in awe.

[RNightstalker]

Back when we played 1st/2nd D&D, the DM was getting angry at the "power" characters we were all rolling up and so made me roll in front of her. Using a pink die (she allowed D10+8 to avoid the 3D6 method and rerolling 1's & 2's, something my dad came up with) for my fighter, I proceeded to roll 3 18's, 2 17's, and a 15. Exceptional strength score? You guessed it, 100! Right in front of the DM.

This eventually turned into my favorite character and about 4-5 levels in our magic-user was kidnapped and held hostage as a body shield by an ogre I think it was. It wanted us to put down our weapons, yadda yadda yadda. So my fighter goes ahead and lowers his two-handed sword to his side and then flips it up really quick. I was going for the end-scene of Dirty Harry where he lowers his gun only to quick-draw it up and shoot the bad guy. Only problem is I have a sword. So I'm allowed to throw it: NAT 20!

[Spore]

Thinking pretty hard on the subject, but oddly enough in 5 years TTRPG, and 5 years of PbP, I can only recall being lucky. Ever since I quit my very extremely unlucky rogue. So listen to the tale of Ferrin.

Ferrin should have been a very typical adventurer. Like Indiana Jones. Skilled, lucky beyond recognition, happy and jolly (so no edgelord rogue). But his story is one of loosing, of being defeated, of triggering traps, and being the likeable (?) loser. Ferrin started off in a small desert town. Our sorcerer's adoptive father had an illegal bar being raided by the townguard, led by our paladin. Against all odds, the heroes united to free the high judge's only son from his goblin captors. Right before departing though, my character try to flirt with the hot bard NPC in town. Rolled a 2 + 3 = 5. So I blurted out: "wanna ****?" The cleric's tracks ended in the sewer. I led the way. Perception roll failed, he stumbled head-first into an Otiyugh. Beaten unconscious, he was then healed up by a potion the paladin had. To make the story short. I did not find any of the traps. I was beaten unconscious in every battle. After being fed up by thankless dwarves we tried to rescue from a zombie + ghost apocalypse, he decided to rob a rich merchant, taking matters of payment into his own hands. The DM designed a pretty fun mini dungeon just for me. I did every difficult check. I won. Right until I failed to spot the mimic weapon rack. Running outside with my loot, I ran over the merchant's son, knocking him unconscious.

My rogue lost three fingers that night. I lost the will to play him anymore. In sum, he was a rogue that never successfully disabled a trap (in 9 months of play). A womanizer that shouted for coitus to the first women he met, and could not get anyone beyond that. An adventurer, that was regularly beaten close to death by monsters. At least half a dozen times. Also almost died being drained by shadows. Ferrin was the very fiber of what is wrong with 3.PF. Skill challenges having hard cutoffs (I regularly rolled 1 or 2 below DC). Usefulness being tilted towards the magic users. Combat being stupidly dangerous once you are in melee and have low to middling AC and not a simple trick to hide yourselves in plain sight.

[KorvinStarmast]

What were your luckiest moments in any RPG that you've played. If can be combat, non-combat or anything else in between.

The time I rolled an 18(98) strength in AD&D 1e. I ended up making a ranger. My dice were insanely hot that day, since it took rather hight stats to make a Ranger in those days. Luckiest day ever.

A balrog appeared in the hall in front of us. (In original D&D, this wasn't a demon. It was a generic 10 HD monster.)

Yeah, Balrog came from Chainmail, and IIRC was in the table in Greyhawk (not Monsters and Treasures) and didn't have a great description. The first time we were high enough level to fight one, Eldritch Wizardry had come out and it was a type VI Demon.

Love what you all did with that. Cool! *Slice*

Heh, the original "alignment" (Chainmail) table had Balrogs on the side of Chaos

GENERAL LINE-UP:
It is impossible to draw a distanct line between "good" and "evil" fantastic figures. Three categories are listed below as a general guide for the wargamer designing orders of battle involving fantastic creatures:
CHAOS
Goblins
Kobolds
Orcs
Anti-heroes
Wizards *
Wraiths
Wights
Lycanthropes*
Ogres
True Trolls
Balrogs
Giants *
Dragons
Basilisks
* Indicates the figure appears in two lists.

[vasilidor]

actually rolling the stats required for a paladin on 3d6 in order. DM killed it, never played with that guy again.

[Spore]

actually rolling the stats required for a paladin on 3d6 in order. DM killed it, never played with that guy again.

This makes me curious. How did players back in the day deal with the inequality brought on by rolled attributes? Because feasibly one could end out with a meh Dex Thief, meh Str Fighter. Did you make ends meet or let the player reroll? Or is this some kind of rogue dungeon experience, where you play until you die?

[moonfly7]

Not me personally but I have a player whose been in every game I've DMed and played in who is the luckiest man I've ever seen in my life. The dice never fail him. If he decides to do something awesome, stupid, or impossible, the Nat 20's flow like wine at a wedding. And it's not weighted dice, we've checked and substituted. Highest Nat 20 count in a row was like 5, in which his halfing wizard used a surprise round to pitch 6 javelins of lightning at a mechanical cracked. He had a -1 to hit modifier and he spent 0 luck points or portents and made no rerolls. He dealt 5 Nat 20's and 1 18 while screaming "I'm the god of lightning mother@$!#÷×! Zeus! Zeus! Zeus! Zeus! Zeus! Zeus!"
He one shotted that sessions big boss.
In my current mutants and masterminds game he averages around at least 8 nat 20's a session and routinely one hit kills PL14s at while he's at PL10 with his standard Rank 4 damage glocks and his fists.
He likes to play characters who's power is being "the luckiest man alive" but he doesn't need the rerolls, he IS the luckiest man I have ever met. Beyond even dice.

[Quertus]

This makes me curious. How did players back in the day deal with the inequality brought on by rolled attributes? Because feasibly one could end out with a meh Dex Thief, meh Str Fighter. Did you make ends meet or let the player reroll? Or is this some kind of rogue dungeon experience, where you play until you die?

Deal with? It was awesome!

Tharvolis would use his meh Wisdom, and get into trouble that would make Jack Sparrow look positively thoughtful, and then desperately try to get out of it.

Armus would pull out his swords / dagger / frying pan, use his meh strength, and desperately try to contribute meaningfully with surgical strikes to key pieces.

Ji would use his meh Intelligence, and desperately hope that he learned the important spells, while doing the best he could with what he had.

Meanwhile, Quertus used his massive intellect to invent more custom senses than there are spells in core; Rage used his massive Strength to lead a jailbreak from Drow prison with nothing but his beggar's bowl; Sasha used her massive Agility to dance naked on the heads of angry crocodiles.

It was a built-in way to help make the characters' stories different.

It also meant you didn't exactly sit down to play a Thief or a Paladin; you rolled your stats, then looked at what your options were. Making the game much more dynamic.

[Jay R]

This makes me curious. How did players back in the day deal with the inequality brought on by rolled attributes? Because feasibly one could end out with a meh Dex Thief, meh Str Fighter. Did you make ends meet or let the player reroll? Or is this some kind of rogue dungeon experience, where you play until you die?

The stats didn't have as much effect on the game as they do now. In original D&D, here is the complete table of adjustments (not counting charisma adjustments for numbr of hirelings and loyalty base).

Bonuses and Penalties to Advancement due to Abilities:
(Low score is 3-8; Average is 9-12; High is 13-18)

Prime requisite 15 or more: Add 10% to earned experience
Prime requisite 13 or 14: Add 5% to earned experience Average
Prime requisite of 9 - 12: Average, no bonus or penalty
Prime requisite 8 or 7: Minus 10% from earned experience
Prime requisite 6 or less: Minus 20% from earned experience
Constitution 15 or more: Add +1 to each hit die
Constitution 13 or 14: Will withstand adversity
Constitution of 9 - 12: 60% to 90% chance of surviving
Constitution 8 or 7: 40% to 50% chance of survival
Constitution 6 or Less: Minus 1 from each hit die*
Dexterity above 12: Fire any missile at +1
* minimum score of 1 on any die

So the difference between a STR 18, CON 18, DEX 18 Fighting Man and a STR 9, DEX 9, CON 9 Fighting Man was:
+10% experience bonus
+1 to each hit die
+1 for a missile weapon attack.

The difference between a INT 18 Magic-user and an INT 9 Magic-user was +10% experience bonus.

And that's all. The only thing that could make your player above average was above average play.

The first supplement, Greyhawk, added other bonuses. But they were nowhere near as important as they became later.

I remember one player who complained that my average-INT thief was routinely cleverer than his INT-18 wizard. He didn’t realize that the INT score didn’t include all of intelligence – it indicated how many spells you can learn, how many xps a magic-user earned, and not much else. But the word “intelligence" made him, and many others, believe that it could substitute for actual player intelligence – learning the rules and playing with good tactics. One of the big shifts in the culture was the desire to make the stats more all-inclusive.

[Illogictree]

Well... I think the luckiest thing that's happened to me in an RPG had to be my first self-built D&D 5E character being the sole survivor of a TPK with 1 or 2 HP.

I believe the group was at either 1st or 2nd level, and this was on the second major quest we'd picked up. I'd built a Tabaxi dex fighter and was having fun playing up her cat-like attributes and trying to think like someone who can climb as easily as she can walk. The other members of the group were a dwarf barbarian and a human wild magic sorcerer.

Surprisingly, the TPK didn't happen due to a wild magic mishap, which is probably what some of you were expecting. In fact, we made the mistake of getting in melee range with a group of Troglodytes, which each have three attacks. We tried to play it smart at first, but the dice turned against us. We managed to take out all but one Troglodyte, but one by one we fell and started making death saves. My Tabaxi made her death saves by one save, reviving with 1 HP. The other two weren't so lucky.

To escape, my Tabaxi would have to get past the last Troglodyte. Fortunately, the Troglodyte hadn't looted the group yet, so she was able to find a healing potion on one of the other characters. She tried to sneak past, but the Troglodyte spotted her and she ended up literally fighting tooth and nail with him.

The DM and I were rolling out in the open in front of everyone. The Trog got her down to her last few HP, but flubbed the last round of attacks and the cat came out on top, gutting the lizard with her bare claws. The other players were cheering that I'd made it, one of them remarking that "This cat has 9 lives!" Personally I felt like she'd used up a couple of them.

It was kind of a bittersweet moment, both in character and out of character. She'd lost two of her friends in one night and been forced to retreat empty-handed. And out of character, that was the last time I played with one of the players; his health took a turn for the worse soon after and he wasn't able to continue with us.

That character has gone on to become the more-or-less leader of the party (totally contrary to my original conception of her) and adventured all over the world of Eberron on her quest to become rich enough to own an airship of her own, and has become a favorite character of mine. But it could have ended right there almost before it began.

[LordCdrMilitant]

Well, uh...

I don't know for me. Here's one for my parties, though:

The Deathwatch are riding along on their bikes towards the next objective after a tough fight, all at 0 wounds, when a Canoptek Tomb Stalker phases though the ground to attack! Oh No! It swings, and swings, and swings, and swings, and swings, and.... never rolls less than a 96 in 6 rounds of combat, during which the party beats it down.

[Kelb_Panthera]

It's not necessarily the biggest stroke of luck I've ever had but it's the biggest I can easily remember.

We were playing a Red Hand of Doom run adapted to Eberron in a 3e game.

We were headed up the road for the first encounter, right? My DM decided it'd be more fun for him if he replaced the gobbos with one of his favorite creatures of roughly the same CR; red caps.

Don't get ahead of me now.

Our group is only 3; a goliath barbarian/ warblade, a factotum whose race I don't remember, and my athasian human mish-mash of a character with prominent monk features.

The barbarian scurries up the ridge to start cleaving through the small-fries. The factotum starts taking pot-shots with his gun (imported from PF) and I decide to rush the one that looks like the leader. I flurry, whack the guy a couple times for moderate damage and then it's his turn. Now up to this point, I've only taken a piddly little 4 or 5 hp damage hit from one of the small fries on the ridge. The GM rolls for the advanced redcap's scythe attack; nat 20. Rolls confirmation; success.

I went from near full health to dead almost twice over on the very first melee attack ever directed at that character.

I checked the numbers later and found that the chance of that happening was only 2.97% or thereabouts. I was, as you can imagine, a bit miffed. Fortunately, there was enough time to get to a large enough nearby city that I could be raised and continue the adventure in-spite of that somewhat inauspicious start.

Hey, bad luck is still luck.