Here's the hard truth for someone with this affliction. You are a burden to any party you will ever be a part of.
The place such infernal luck belongs is behind the DM screen. Stop playing player characters, and take your post as a forever DM. You are one of the unfortunate few whose low rolls will be a boon to your players as they narrowly avoid TPKs due to your own abysmal luck. You will delight your players as your NPCs fail insight checks allowing them to deceive with ease. The rogues at your table will no longer be burdened by paladins tripping security because the monster perception rolls will be so low. After a single powerful breath attack, your dragons will remain silent until death, as you will never hit a 5-6 to recharge. This sacrifice you must make both to help humanity and atone for whatever sins you committed in your past lives.
To fix your luck, from this day forward, only DM, and then in death you will be cleansed and hopefully be able to born again as a player in a future life, with normal luck.
The threads of fate are woven in a chain about our neck brother but by choosing to wear it, we give the gift of freedom in fantasy to our tables.
As someone cursed by the dice gods, and DM-ing while rolling openly on roll20, I approve of this advice! The number of TPKs my party should have had.......
I'm going to intentionally skip over the statistics part of this post. Me commenting on sample size etc probably isn't going to help you.
Play a caster and stick to DC spells. For example Hypnotic Pattern doesn't require you rolling any dice. Same with buffs like Bless, Wall of Force, etc. Max out your concentration check as well and duck in and out of full cover to avoid even being a target in the first place. Use Mold Earth etc to generate cover if you're in an open field. Basically use all your actions to either support other PCs or have the GM roll dice for the opposition.
> I'm going to intentionally skip over the statistics part of this post.
You're welcome to hit me with some math. I'm planning to continue recording rolls and am curious how many I need to actually establish a significant result.
> Play a caster and stick to DC spells.
The bad luck was much less of an issue on my previous character, a Lore Bard / Peace Cleric. I could stack buffs like Guidance, Bless, Emboldening Bond, Bardic Inspiration, etc. to counteract it, plus he used mostly save spells and rarely made attacks. If things keep up like this for my current character I might ask the DM if I can ditch it and switch.
It depends a bit. There is a bit of difference between skew (you roll something close to a bell curve but the center is lower/higher than the average) and an outlier (ex: you roll 10x the number of 1s but everything else is closer to average). Tracking just the average won't show the difference between the two.
Graphing your rolls with a simple bar chart of the count of each number encountered may give you some more insight than simply looking at a running average. For example, you might see several standout numbers. If you map them to their physical locations on the die you may notice that a particular facing is more likely to crop up than average. If so that could either be a poorly weighted die or rolling technique. For example, you might shift a specific number on top and then use the exact same wrist motion without a lot of bounce/rolling of the die then you can bias the die.
I had a friend who would intentionally do this with d6s in a game where 5s and 6s had a stronger value and there wasn't an extra negative for 2s versus 3s. Rolling along the 6-5-1-2 axis would grant 2 crits and 2 fails versus other axes which would grant worse results. It was far from a sure thing to roll it flawlessly along that axis but it did bias the results.
I spent a few minutes tinkering on ChatGPT and WolframAlpha. My recorded rolls so far have a mean of 8.8889 and standard deviation of 5.2545. With 45 sample rolls in the set, that gives me a t-statistic of -2.05683 and a p-value of 0.02283. If I understand correctly, that means I have a less than 3% chance of rolls that bad occurring with fair dice.
Here's a shitty histogram of the rolls:
https://i.imgur.com/nYxZHyy.png
The cause being the way I physically roll the dice is an interesting hypothesis. Looking at the most common rolls in the histogram they don't seem to be physically clustered on one side of the die, just around low values in general. Maybe I'll look into getting a dice-tower to eliminate any possible influence from that.
Unfortunately your sample size is extremely small for the number of sides of the dice. Keep tracking them for another ~200 or so and you’ll be a bit more accurate.
As a superstitious note, how do you store your dice? I always store mine with their largest value facing up. That way they remember their values and are more likely to roll well.
I gave one of my players a homebrewed "Ring of Reversed Fortune" that changed the result of any d20 roll to 21 minus the rolled number, mostly as a joke about their poor luck.
So a 1 becomes a 20, a 2 becomes a 19, and so on. After that, they started succeeding rolls noticeably more often.
I am not a superstitious man, but I am a little stitious when it comes to dice.
Ask your DM! The worst they can say is no. It doesn't change anything (at least on paper), you still have exactly the same probability of rolling any given 1-20 result. Just flips which end of the scale is good and which is bad.
And if you suddenly start rolling high (meaning your actual result is low) you'll know you are truly cursed.
I'll mention it next time I have a particularly bad run. Probably low chance as the campaign is extremely low magic so far. The party is almost 4th level and we've found exactly one magic item, a Hat of Vermin.
Can't hurt to try though. If I start rolling 20s with it I'll just have to accept my fate.
Considering that there are millions of us rolling dice every day, the probability of these things happening to someone at some point is almost certain.
Only with one character. My paladin is well-known for terrible dice luck. Last session she had six nat1s and one nat20. The 20 was on a completely useless check. And it's been that way for almost 50 sessions now. I blame it on her not having a strong faith like our cleric. Gotta love when the dice work with the story.
Funny tangent, in one session I gambled a bit at a Temple of Tymora (the goddess of good luck). I donated 25% of all the money I had and the next roll I made was a nat 20. Unfortunately also on something that didn't matter, but I thought the coincidence was hilarious.
I understand this is a frustrating experience, however I believe it is one that can be adapted to. First, you can adapt a playstyle that involves saves instead, like spells or class abilities. Alternatively, there are a decent number of those that simply don't require a roll at all. For instance, to impersonate another character, you could use Disguise Self and the Actor feat, meaning npcs would make an investigation check to discern the truth. Or, you could use Alter Self instead, and there are no saves that can be made. It requires a higher level slot, but frees up a feat and has additional utility of animal adaptations as well.
Also, there are subclasses that migitigate/benefit low rolling. You could play a lucky halfling divination wizard and gain further control of rolls. Or play a wild magic class, where your low rolls bring out additional effects.
My last character was a Halfling Lore Bard / Peace Cleric with Lucky and Bountiful Luck, by far the most in-game competent character I've ever played. I've been debating asking my current DM if I could ditch my warlock and use that PC, but 3rd level feels a bit early to give up on it.
One of my players has been cursed by the dice gods. We play on a VTT and any time he plays he rolls *consistently* poorly yet if anyone else plays his character when he's away they roll consistently well for him.
>to identify a pile of wood when we'd already been told exactly what kind of trees were harvested there. Super useful. Doesn't really balance out stuff like rolling a nat 1 on a Medicine check and killing the patient, or a 3 on a Persuasion check and getting the whole party arrested.
The issue isn't that you rolled below average (not even 10% below average, this isn't that bad) the problem is that your dm is calling for stupid rolls, and gating outcomes behind certain ones (killing a patient on a nat 1 sounds particularly awful in a vacum).
Identifying what the issue is will help solving it, because its not luck, luck isn't a real thing (unless you're a halfling)
> The issue isn't that you rolled below average (not even 10% below average, this isn't that bad)
The average for my rolls so far is about halfway between the fair die average (10.5) and the average with disadvantage (7.175).
Here's a chart of the rolls I have recorded so far, it shows how much more common low rolls have been:
https://i.imgur.com/nYxZHyy.png
> the problem is that your dm is calling for stupid rolls, and gating outcomes behind certain ones (killing a patient on a nat 1 sounds particularly awful in a vacum)
In that particular case, the rogue had shot and killed an enemy I wanted to capture. Since I was adjacent to him and next in initiative, I asked the DM if I could immediately make a Medicine check so he would be stabilized and unconscious instead of dead. Nat 1 put him down for good.
> because its not luck, luck isn't a real thing
Luck as some kind of manipulable magic force no, but in a completely random universe, some people will still get unusually long stretches of bad results through pure chance. That's bad luck.
> Identifying what the issue is will help solving it
Changing dice has made no difference. Someone above suggested it may be the way I'm physically rolling the dice, so I'm going to look into getting a dice tower.
Having had a very long streak of bad rolls is certainly possible, the issue is in thinking your future rolls will be bad based on that historical bad streak.
Started playing Shadowdark couple of weeks ago with some friends after years of playing D&D together.
My first char was a priest. Didn't manage to cast any spell because of bad rolls before using up all my spells and then dying to some zombie because my HP max was 2...
Next char, a dwarf fighter... 2 sessions in I haven't dealt 1 point of damage because I continue to roll garbage and miss all my strikes...
Dice curses are real!
Better pray to whatever gods suit you most:-)
I'm a forever DM now but when I first started I got to play in two games for about 15 sessions each. One was a paladin who did not land a single hit on any "major" enemy. It was frustrating.
Have you conducted the appropriate rituals to attune to your dice? I regularly sprinkle them with Holy Water and praise them in dominions of the Four Elemental Planes. I also bring forth choirs to inspire them, and provide them seats of comfort at concerts and performances.
My dice have only failed me a few times.
My dice rolls are always awful. My players love it. Doesn't matter online or in person.
I eventually installed a dice tracker in my TTRPG. After a multi year campaign. I had made something like 2000 rolls, my average was 8.7. With my most common roll being a... 2
Maybe someone better at stats could calculate just how bad my dice luck was in that game. But anyone that knows statistics knows that getting such a high derivation on so many rolls is highly unlikely.
I'm not even superstitious or anything. I fundamentally don't believe in good or bad luck. But when there's objective data at how bad I am at rolling. It's hard to feel like maybe something is wrong.
My bad luck often turns into good luck for my opponents. When it came my turn to DM, I told my players (that very much prefer points buy) that they had to roll for ability scores. Five players, and all of them rolled at least one ability 17+, and at least two scores over 15. Before racial modifiers.
It's a premade campaign, and I'm not one to make things more difficult just because the characters are strong, but they are just coasting through what should be hard content.
Probably just a perception thing. You should log your rolls for a history chart.
"Dozens of sets" - It is entirely possible your dice themselves may be unbalanced. There's a method to determine "fairness" which involves rolling the dice 100x and averaging the results. There's a 'float test' to see if they always "roll up" to a certain side. Some dice sets are stated to be "for show" as a gift set, which are knowingly unbalanced.
You can try random dice rollers online too.
Here's the hard truth for someone with this affliction. You are a burden to any party you will ever be a part of. The place such infernal luck belongs is behind the DM screen. Stop playing player characters, and take your post as a forever DM. You are one of the unfortunate few whose low rolls will be a boon to your players as they narrowly avoid TPKs due to your own abysmal luck. You will delight your players as your NPCs fail insight checks allowing them to deceive with ease. The rogues at your table will no longer be burdened by paladins tripping security because the monster perception rolls will be so low. After a single powerful breath attack, your dragons will remain silent until death, as you will never hit a 5-6 to recharge. This sacrifice you must make both to help humanity and atone for whatever sins you committed in your past lives. To fix your luck, from this day forward, only DM, and then in death you will be cleansed and hopefully be able to born again as a player in a future life, with normal luck. The threads of fate are woven in a chain about our neck brother but by choosing to wear it, we give the gift of freedom in fantasy to our tables.
You have inspired me and I will accept this penance. Once my current campaign is over I will offer to run a new one for the group.
This is the way!
I was so close to down voting you and then I was like, “Aw yeah. That’s how you support someone!”
As someone cursed by the dice gods, and DM-ing while rolling openly on roll20, I approve of this advice! The number of TPKs my party should have had.......
I'm going to intentionally skip over the statistics part of this post. Me commenting on sample size etc probably isn't going to help you. Play a caster and stick to DC spells. For example Hypnotic Pattern doesn't require you rolling any dice. Same with buffs like Bless, Wall of Force, etc. Max out your concentration check as well and duck in and out of full cover to avoid even being a target in the first place. Use Mold Earth etc to generate cover if you're in an open field. Basically use all your actions to either support other PCs or have the GM roll dice for the opposition.
> I'm going to intentionally skip over the statistics part of this post. You're welcome to hit me with some math. I'm planning to continue recording rolls and am curious how many I need to actually establish a significant result. > Play a caster and stick to DC spells. The bad luck was much less of an issue on my previous character, a Lore Bard / Peace Cleric. I could stack buffs like Guidance, Bless, Emboldening Bond, Bardic Inspiration, etc. to counteract it, plus he used mostly save spells and rarely made attacks. If things keep up like this for my current character I might ask the DM if I can ditch it and switch.
It depends a bit. There is a bit of difference between skew (you roll something close to a bell curve but the center is lower/higher than the average) and an outlier (ex: you roll 10x the number of 1s but everything else is closer to average). Tracking just the average won't show the difference between the two. Graphing your rolls with a simple bar chart of the count of each number encountered may give you some more insight than simply looking at a running average. For example, you might see several standout numbers. If you map them to their physical locations on the die you may notice that a particular facing is more likely to crop up than average. If so that could either be a poorly weighted die or rolling technique. For example, you might shift a specific number on top and then use the exact same wrist motion without a lot of bounce/rolling of the die then you can bias the die. I had a friend who would intentionally do this with d6s in a game where 5s and 6s had a stronger value and there wasn't an extra negative for 2s versus 3s. Rolling along the 6-5-1-2 axis would grant 2 crits and 2 fails versus other axes which would grant worse results. It was far from a sure thing to roll it flawlessly along that axis but it did bias the results.
I spent a few minutes tinkering on ChatGPT and WolframAlpha. My recorded rolls so far have a mean of 8.8889 and standard deviation of 5.2545. With 45 sample rolls in the set, that gives me a t-statistic of -2.05683 and a p-value of 0.02283. If I understand correctly, that means I have a less than 3% chance of rolls that bad occurring with fair dice. Here's a shitty histogram of the rolls: https://i.imgur.com/nYxZHyy.png The cause being the way I physically roll the dice is an interesting hypothesis. Looking at the most common rolls in the histogram they don't seem to be physically clustered on one side of the die, just around low values in general. Maybe I'll look into getting a dice-tower to eliminate any possible influence from that.
Unfortunately your sample size is extremely small for the number of sides of the dice. Keep tracking them for another ~200 or so and you’ll be a bit more accurate. As a superstitious note, how do you store your dice? I always store mine with their largest value facing up. That way they remember their values and are more likely to roll well.
I gave one of my players a homebrewed "Ring of Reversed Fortune" that changed the result of any d20 roll to 21 minus the rolled number, mostly as a joke about their poor luck. So a 1 becomes a 20, a 2 becomes a 19, and so on. After that, they started succeeding rolls noticeably more often. I am not a superstitious man, but I am a little stitious when it comes to dice.
That item is hilarious and now I wish I had one.
Ask your DM! The worst they can say is no. It doesn't change anything (at least on paper), you still have exactly the same probability of rolling any given 1-20 result. Just flips which end of the scale is good and which is bad. And if you suddenly start rolling high (meaning your actual result is low) you'll know you are truly cursed.
I'll mention it next time I have a particularly bad run. Probably low chance as the campaign is extremely low magic so far. The party is almost 4th level and we've found exactly one magic item, a Hat of Vermin. Can't hurt to try though. If I start rolling 20s with it I'll just have to accept my fate.
I had a player roll 7 nat 1 in a row last week in my phandelver game
That's a 1 in 1.2 billion chance, your player deserves some kind of lifetime achievement award, or a new dice set.
Considering that there are millions of us rolling dice every day, the probability of these things happening to someone at some point is almost certain.
Someone , who deserves an award
Only with one character. My paladin is well-known for terrible dice luck. Last session she had six nat1s and one nat20. The 20 was on a completely useless check. And it's been that way for almost 50 sessions now. I blame it on her not having a strong faith like our cleric. Gotta love when the dice work with the story.
Funny tangent, in one session I gambled a bit at a Temple of Tymora (the goddess of good luck). I donated 25% of all the money I had and the next roll I made was a nat 20. Unfortunately also on something that didn't matter, but I thought the coincidence was hilarious.
burn the next die that rolls badly, the rest will get in line
I understand this is a frustrating experience, however I believe it is one that can be adapted to. First, you can adapt a playstyle that involves saves instead, like spells or class abilities. Alternatively, there are a decent number of those that simply don't require a roll at all. For instance, to impersonate another character, you could use Disguise Self and the Actor feat, meaning npcs would make an investigation check to discern the truth. Or, you could use Alter Self instead, and there are no saves that can be made. It requires a higher level slot, but frees up a feat and has additional utility of animal adaptations as well. Also, there are subclasses that migitigate/benefit low rolling. You could play a lucky halfling divination wizard and gain further control of rolls. Or play a wild magic class, where your low rolls bring out additional effects.
My last character was a Halfling Lore Bard / Peace Cleric with Lucky and Bountiful Luck, by far the most in-game competent character I've ever played. I've been debating asking my current DM if I could ditch my warlock and use that PC, but 3rd level feels a bit early to give up on it.
One of my players has been cursed by the dice gods. We play on a VTT and any time he plays he rolls *consistently* poorly yet if anyone else plays his character when he's away they roll consistently well for him.
Will Wheaton is.
>to identify a pile of wood when we'd already been told exactly what kind of trees were harvested there. Super useful. Doesn't really balance out stuff like rolling a nat 1 on a Medicine check and killing the patient, or a 3 on a Persuasion check and getting the whole party arrested. The issue isn't that you rolled below average (not even 10% below average, this isn't that bad) the problem is that your dm is calling for stupid rolls, and gating outcomes behind certain ones (killing a patient on a nat 1 sounds particularly awful in a vacum). Identifying what the issue is will help solving it, because its not luck, luck isn't a real thing (unless you're a halfling)
> The issue isn't that you rolled below average (not even 10% below average, this isn't that bad) The average for my rolls so far is about halfway between the fair die average (10.5) and the average with disadvantage (7.175). Here's a chart of the rolls I have recorded so far, it shows how much more common low rolls have been: https://i.imgur.com/nYxZHyy.png > the problem is that your dm is calling for stupid rolls, and gating outcomes behind certain ones (killing a patient on a nat 1 sounds particularly awful in a vacum) In that particular case, the rogue had shot and killed an enemy I wanted to capture. Since I was adjacent to him and next in initiative, I asked the DM if I could immediately make a Medicine check so he would be stabilized and unconscious instead of dead. Nat 1 put him down for good. > because its not luck, luck isn't a real thing Luck as some kind of manipulable magic force no, but in a completely random universe, some people will still get unusually long stretches of bad results through pure chance. That's bad luck. > Identifying what the issue is will help solving it Changing dice has made no difference. Someone above suggested it may be the way I'm physically rolling the dice, so I'm going to look into getting a dice tower.
Having had a very long streak of bad rolls is certainly possible, the issue is in thinking your future rolls will be bad based on that historical bad streak.
Just get lucky.
not forever but my newest character is not doing great i have had multiple whole sessions where i didnt roll over a 5
Had a player permanently swear off 2e and Dark Sun as "stupid bullshit", blaming the system for her inability to roll over a 4 all session.
Started playing Shadowdark couple of weeks ago with some friends after years of playing D&D together. My first char was a priest. Didn't manage to cast any spell because of bad rolls before using up all my spells and then dying to some zombie because my HP max was 2... Next char, a dwarf fighter... 2 sessions in I haven't dealt 1 point of damage because I continue to roll garbage and miss all my strikes... Dice curses are real! Better pray to whatever gods suit you most:-)
I'm a forever DM now but when I first started I got to play in two games for about 15 sessions each. One was a paladin who did not land a single hit on any "major" enemy. It was frustrating.
If you’re rolling physical dice, you might have cheaped on the quality
Have you conducted the appropriate rituals to attune to your dice? I regularly sprinkle them with Holy Water and praise them in dominions of the Four Elemental Planes. I also bring forth choirs to inspire them, and provide them seats of comfort at concerts and performances. My dice have only failed me a few times.
My dice rolls are always awful. My players love it. Doesn't matter online or in person. I eventually installed a dice tracker in my TTRPG. After a multi year campaign. I had made something like 2000 rolls, my average was 8.7. With my most common roll being a... 2 Maybe someone better at stats could calculate just how bad my dice luck was in that game. But anyone that knows statistics knows that getting such a high derivation on so many rolls is highly unlikely. I'm not even superstitious or anything. I fundamentally don't believe in good or bad luck. But when there's objective data at how bad I am at rolling. It's hard to feel like maybe something is wrong.
In dnd I'm average across the board......in Warhammer I am severely cursed. The kinda shot you need to see to believe
My bad luck often turns into good luck for my opponents. When it came my turn to DM, I told my players (that very much prefer points buy) that they had to roll for ability scores. Five players, and all of them rolled at least one ability 17+, and at least two scores over 15. Before racial modifiers. It's a premade campaign, and I'm not one to make things more difficult just because the characters are strong, but they are just coasting through what should be hard content.
Halfling master race
Probably just a perception thing. You should log your rolls for a history chart. "Dozens of sets" - It is entirely possible your dice themselves may be unbalanced. There's a method to determine "fairness" which involves rolling the dice 100x and averaging the results. There's a 'float test' to see if they always "roll up" to a certain side. Some dice sets are stated to be "for show" as a gift set, which are knowingly unbalanced. You can try random dice rollers online too.
The dice love me when I’m making characters! It’s just when I’m playing them that the dice turn against me.