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Yeah, one indie RPG designer called this "The Whiff Factor"

You are playing Ninja Man, master of the night, and greatest assassin on earth. He jumps down from his hiding place, swings and "whiff" his sword hits thin air.
Your great assassin character now looks like a chump.
And it works both ways. If you roll well, your non-combat socialite can defeat Ninja Man. It goes against that character, too.
If you are really one of those people who love realism in their characters and storylines, seeing your socialite acting inexplicably combat trained can be just as upsetting. It goes against your character concept, and that is important to a lot of people.

Brian

well ... into everyone's game a little rain .. or deluge must happen.

the latter for me when i'm involved in a fight. somehow the baddies always seem to get that one higher number to dodge the blow. its even funnier IF you roll a Nat 1 and type up a response to an action and post it before the gm can recover from his fit of laughter.

nat 1 vs HF .. i think lmy eyes bugged out about 6 inches .. then the lips flapped like a fish out of water .. then the eyes crossed and rolled back in the head as the char in question became like a puddle of goo and slumped bonelessly to the ground.

not sure who laughed harder .. me typing it out .. or the others reading the reaction ... gm vanished for about 5 minutes, he laughed too hard ... and needed to cool off ...

but hey .. its about Role playing as well as rolling the dice. just gotta hope that the fighting style improves enough to actually DO something worthwhile ... like a crit on an nat 18+ ... but you get the idea ...

Yea gods.. the ammount of times my dice have gone into "Three Stooges mode".
I just laugh and shake my head and role-with it

uhh ... like ... flinching Hounds ... ?

I'd use one of two solutions:

1) Failing a roll in circumstances where this would be bummer is instead success with a complication. e.g. I messed up my demolitions roll, GM: ok well you manage to set the explosives but the timing mechanism was off and it's going to blow in 30 seconds. Or I missed my swing at the Orc about to kill Bob's character, GM: You slice the orc causing him to grunt in pain and drop his weapon but you overswung and have lost your balance you pitch face first at the orcs feet your blade skittering away out of reach.

2) Give each player chits, markers or cards, representing numbers between 1 and 20. Players don't roll dice they play a chit and lose it from their hand (for skills you'd want 20 to represent a roll of 05% and 1 to represent a roll of 100%). Players only get all their chits / cards back in their hand once it is completely exhausted. When will they chose to fail and when will they chose to succeed?

gadrin wrote:on a Cyberpunk 2020 site, I saw some gaming cards, that allow players to collect them a play them to add to their gaming experience.

things like "re-roll bad die roll" or "no death" means they can play the card and get another chance or the opponent thinks they're dead and moves to another target.

make up a deck of them and let them draw when you hand out XP if they played good enough.

That sounds like a great idea.

Personally, I like all rolls to be done in plain view, saves all arguements then. As for programs that do it for you...nothing beats the hands on feel of real dice and everyone has their own lucky favorites...all part of the fun.

Krytykyll Hytt wrote: How did you remedy it?

Re-roll for dramatic effect!

That's how I justify it in my games.

Dice can have a big effect on games, and that's part of the point. Palladium games are often worse for it than some other systems, because of the way bonuses are handed out. The chit idea is a good one that has been used in various forms for all kinds of games.

How dice have effected my life:

First is the tale of my best friend, who I've been gaming with for almost a decade now, and just two years ago he rolled his first natural 20. We all stood and clapped. I took a picture, it's on my phone. The guy can play strategy games no problem, can build a character and play a character without trouble, but he'll be damned if he can ever get dice to go his way. His characters very often have one exceptional stat...and never one that is remotely combat relevent. He's had man very beautiful characters though.

Second, my own tale with dice. I, as you might have guessed from my name on these boards, generally take the roll of GM. I play far less often than I GM. My rolls are generally as random as dice are supposed to be whenever I am running a game. When I take part as a player though... lets just say that I have a tendency to play bumbling characters for a reason. If I make a confident character, it's not that he/she has bad rolls, it's just that they get terrible rolls WHENEVER IT IS LEAST CONVENIENT. If it will make my confident character look like a buffoon, then THAT'S when the 1 comes up. If the roll doesn't mean much, then I'm fine.

Third, the tale of Sonic. I have run for the last four years a game originally based in the world of a famed Hedgehog, as portrayed in a cartoon series in the early 90's on ABC. Over four years the players have written/affected 75 years of history in the world, toppled three tyrants and subdued an invading alien race. We've even changed systems at one point. But one thing has remained consistent in the game, every single session, whether the characters were growing older, or they had moved on to the next generation of heroes, in the world of Sonic there has always been a RIDICULOUS number of natural 20s. In this game I have seen more Natural 20 attacks blocked by natural 20 dodges and parries than I've seen lone natural 20s in any other game. And no, it's not because we've been playing the game so long, I'm talking about on average per session.

Well those are my stories. It's not how I game, it's just how I roll.

Each time you roll a Nat 1, you get a "bonus die" that you can use any time in the future to reroll any roll (d20).

You can only have 3 bonus dice at maximum. Each time you roll a Nat 20, you lose 1 bonus die if you have any, if you you don't have any, you don't lose any.

Reaper wrote:our gms dice hate us. he (warwolf) has an entire set of black and red dice. here is an example, typical game, one roll to strike, you get a nat 20, he rolls in plain sight, nat 20. next player 19 + 11 30 to strike, gm: nat 20 AGAIN!

I'm a skeptic on the idea of 'killer dice' because people have atendency to try to find pattenrs where there aren't any. What happens is that dice are rolled literally hundreds of times in a session, but people only notice when 1's or '20's come up (no one ever posts a 'My GM's d20's are strange, they always seem to roll a '12'). So our pattern finding brains try to say the dice come up 20 or 1 a lot. When, the reality is, if you roll a d20 several hundred times (as you will do over a campaign), the idea of getting two '20's in a row is very high, and even the chances of getting 3 '20's in a row, at least once, isn't so bad.

However, what occurrs more often is players not 100% understanding the probabilities involved. I learned this the hard way with a juicer. I had +13 to dodge, I thought +13 was enough to keep myself out of trouble. However, I kept getting hit, light armor wasn't that good, so I felt bad but wore the heavy armor anyway and grumbled how the GM's dice hated me.

Then I sat down with a pen and paper, and calculated, if he has a +3 to strike with a gun, and I have +13 to dodge, exactly *what* are my odds of dodging him. And the answer came out to about 80% (seriously, +13 only gives a 4/5 chance of dodging a +3 to strike). Seeing as how light armor only blocked two or three hits, wearing it was suicide, even with the +13 to dodge. The GM's dice didn't hate me, I had just misunderstood the stats involved.

Don't do a single thing about the dice until you've kept track of say, 100-200 rolls of the dice to make absolute sure they're funky. IF the dice fail that test, then make the GM get new dice, and ask him where he got the old ones.

I started using something that my old Star Wars GM called the Story Complication. If we rolled a 1, he would let us re-roll but he got to interject some type of complication into the story at any point he saw fit. It made for some great, funny and frustrating moments.

Step 1. Decide with your GM what a failing roll actually means, BEFORE you roll.

The big trick, decide it means something cool - if you miss, it hits a barrel of fuel behind the bad guy and fuel spills across the ground. Or it blasts open a method of escape that you could use. Then roll - hitting will mean missing out on this. PS, if you miss out on it, you can still use the same thing for a latter roll.

Step 2. If your GM isn't interested in this, it's not the rules, it's your GM. He wants you to look like chumps - quit blaming the rules.

Krytykyll Hytt wrote:We have had some of the worst rolls in the history of role playing. My friend once rolled five "1's" in a row trying to strike in a D&D adventure. There was also that session when it seemed no one could pass a skill check. And then the "can't roll above single-digits" session. Unfortunately, these incredibly bad die rolls have detracted from our games. They occur on a somewhat regular basis.

Has anyone here had similar problems? I am sick of every game being ruined by die rolls that make our characters look like bungling idiots. Have any GMs here ever dealt with this problem before? How did you remedy it?

I was in a group where we were rifted back in time to '98, imprisoned when we attempted to steal the Hope diamond to get back to our own time, then placed on a plane to go to an undisclosed location that ended up being taken over by a few true atlanteans who wanted to bring the Coming of the Rifts a few decades early so they could repopulate Atlantis before Splynncryth. They ended up loading the plane with an anti-matter version of a nuclear bomb, and rigged the whole plane to blow either once it reached its target, or if someone tried to change its course. Naturally the one player with a disposal skill of 98% rolls 100%.

It is important that players and GM have a sense of what's at stake with any roll. I like playing games where projectiles that miss their targets still go somewhere...usually where they're not supposed to go.

If you think back on your gaming stories, you will find that many of your favorite and most memorable stories involve a truly terrible roll at the worst of times.

A nifty idea I read on RPG net is to keep previous rolls, adding them to the next, until you hit. So even if you miss, you've made progress toward a hit!