When the dice do their own thing

[Rapscallion]

I've gamed on many occasions. RPG, Tabletop Wargames, strategy/tactical boardgames.

Just thought it would be nice to have a thread where you put up your tales of when the dice either loved or hated you.

I had one occasion where I was taking part in an exhibition game of Battletech (boardgame, hex grid version) at a wargame convention called Sabre in Harrogate. I'd never played before, but some experienced players were obviously trying to get more members by giving introductory lessons in how to play it.

Up for a free game? Damn right.

I don't remember any of the specifics. We're talking two decades ago and so forthy. However, I was avidly asking questions and my side rolled and got initiative.

I did some movement without really thinking about it, and then I asked what weapon options I had. I ended up by saying something like, "Gauss cannon is long range? Can it hit that guy over there?"

""Er, yes, but you'd need a really good dice roll ..." *clatter clatter* *double six comes up* "as you have only six shots with that weapon."

"Only six shots? Oh well, I've rolled. Is that enough to hit?"

"Er, yes."

So far, so good, but then it got bizarre. Apparently there was some sort of chance to roll for critical hit in their rules, which I did, and scored one. The random roll took out one of the guy's gyroscopes, with a chance of a second critical hit.

That chance came up on the dice, and the resultant roll took out his other gyroscope.

I wasn't quite certain how good this was, but the stunned looks on the faces of the people running it were enough. The declared that the guy I'd hit with such a small chance was only able to have his mech laying on the ground and firing long range missiles with one arm.

Not sure if I'm proud of it or not, but it was bizarre.

Your tales?

Rapscallion

[Crossbow]

Heh, nicely done. As a longtime Battletech player, I'd say you did pretty well for yourself on that one.

Amusingly enough, my story also comes from a game of Battletech at a convention, just in the states. It was a fairly large game with 8 players each controlling 3 mechs on two sides. Several of the mechs on one side (not mine) were 100 ton experimental designs. We had to take them out, along with the rest of their company.

One of the players on my side apparently had pissed in the God of Luck's Cheerios that morning, because for the entire time he was there (roughly 10 hours), I think I saw him roll above a 7 on 2D6 a grand total of once. Seriously. I have never seen anyone with such bad dice karma as this kid. He ended up getting too close to one of the experimentals with his 100 ton mech and got hit in the head. According to the rules, there was a small chance of the pilot getting knocked unconscious and the mech shutting down. All he had to do to avoid it was roll better than 3 on 2D6.

Snake eyes.

Yep. He rolled double ones. Pilot gets knocked out, mech shuts down and falls over, tearing one of the arms off. That was the last straw for him and he storms off, bitching about how he can't do a damn thing. The rest of us on the team take over his 3 mechs (all of them in pretty bad shape) and keep going. I took the downed one.

Next turn, I roll to regain consciousness and succeed. Roll to stand up: success. I can't move anywhere because I had just stood back up, but I could fire, and there's this huge-ass experimental beast right in front of me. Ok. I fire the biggest gun I've got and hit. Time to roll for location.


Boxcars. Double six. Headshot.

At the time, no mech in the game could withstand a headshot with the gun I fired. Instant kill.

All three of the experimental mechs were destroyed in the next two turns. Most of the rest of the company fell in short order after that.

It was a fun time, but I hope I never end up in another game with this kid. I swear, he could manipulate the laws of probability in a way I've never seen before or since. Too bad he couldn't do so to his own (or his team's) advantage...

[Mytical]

I actually have a tale..about a pair of brothers I played once. I swear somehow my dice were loaded. For one, I had crazy luck. His name was Bart McGraw. I would roll critical successes on frequent occasions and couldn't seem to fail a roll at all. On the other hand was Mathew McGraw...and when I rolled for him it was always critical fails, and I couldn't seem to succeed in a roll for anything. Keep in mind that I was playing them both at the same time. Bart often was saving Mathew's life.

Now this was not a single meet..for two years..straight. Not one success for Mathew, not one fail for Bart. Nobody could explain it. I swear for Mathew he could try to hit a blind, lame, and tied up goblin..and not come within 10'. They earned the nicknames Lucky and Unlucky. Eventually they got magical items that took this to epic proportions, but that is another tale. The weird part is..I used the same dice for both of them. It was if the dice knew who they were being rolled for.

[lordlundar]

I've got a pair that still strike me funny to this day in AD&D. Both are from the same game.

In a dungeon, we were fighting some lyncanthropes (were creatures) and I had out my silver sword for the fight. Well, I went to go for a strike and made my roll.

Critical miss. Shit. Sword files out of my hand.

GM rolls for who gets hit, how the hit went, and how much damage. End result was on of the Lycanthropes got impaled to the wall by my sword.

I meant to do that, I swear!

The second one we were in the town and we needed to sneak into the home of the captain of the guard. Well I was planning to throw my dagger to distract the guard at the door and sneak in. So I made my roll.

Critical Miss. Shit. Dagger misses the mark by a significant margin.

GM rolls location, impact effect, and damage done (wait what?) End result is one dead guard with no noise due to a dagger in the leg.

I'm so good I don't even know my own skill.

[Sarlon]

couple of dice stories....

one I lovingly refer to as the Sucubus inncodent...

We're a group of level 9 players with a Fighter, wizard, bard, rogue, ranger, and a cleric (NPC).

We're going through a series of tunnels (NOT lost.....just taking the scenic route), and we pass by a curtained off area. Well the bard is bringing up the rear and deciedes to go check it out while we wait. DM says roll a will save....bard fails, and walks behind the curtain. Fighter doesn't like that, goes to look behind the curtain as well....DM says roll a will save....rolls a natural 1 (auto fail), and walks behind the curtain. well since I'm the stealthy rogue, the wizard castrs protection from evil on me and I sneak behind the curtain...no will save needed since I'm safe.

meanwhile the bard AND fighter have been seduced by the sucubi (plural?)....the bard had cast haste on himself and out of his clothes...and jumped into one of the 3 beds...the fighter on the other hand was in full plate and needed more time to get out. well....can't have that....so I say I wanna grapple the fighter and try and get him away....

Did I mention that the fighter was a 350 pound half orc? and me a measley 5'4" half elf rogue? stats say I should of failed miserably....

I roll, he rolls, we add EVERYTHING up....and I manage to beat his roll by ONE!

.............the bard was a lost cause...

------------------------

The other story, its a first level campaign, and I'm known by my players to give more experience for RP then just a hack and slash. Well they have to recover a stolen, almost ready to hatch Gold Dragon egg from a bunch of goblins that had the nerve to steal it.

The halfling rogue had put some decent points in diplomacy, bluff, and a few other nifty things....and they captured a goblin patrol, and after making it mess itself, convinced it that they just wanted to talk to the boss.

the goblin escorts them down through the complex of easily several hundred goblins, familys, kids, fighters, basically a settlement, right into the bosses lair....where a hobgoblin body guard, the boss goblin, and the dragon egg were.

they convince the boss to send his body guard out of the room, and open discussions.....claiming that the guy who hired the goblin to steal the egg had sent THEM to pick it up....we role playued this out....and the first time I put in a teaser question, the bard NAILED it (nat 20 on the dice), second time....JUST failed it, but I wasn't gonna let the player know that of course. Now this palces the boss on edge and after a few more moments, asks another question.....another bluff check....

NATURAL 1 (critaical fail).

Now I offer my players 5 hero points, which they can use at any time to make rerolls in cases like this, they have to reearn them, but can be used at anytime so long as I haven't told them the outcome yet.

guy rerolls 5 more times with these as his rolls....

1 2 1 4 15

if he hadn't rolled that 15 when he did things would of turned nasty....having to fight their way out of the complex.

[Andara Bledin]

My story involves a convention game of Call of Cthulhu.

The setting was that we were on an expedition in south America with a set of native guides, going to investigate an ancient temple. My character was a hemophobic medic... All of the characters had similar flaws. It made for quite an interesting group.

However, this story isn't about me, it's about the guy that got to play the leader of the expedition. For most of the game, he rolled in the standard range, from failure to success, as did the rest of us (although I did manage to drown the guy I was supposed to be rescuing from the quicksand... oops >_> ... at least I didn't completely flip out when the guide in front of me was reduced to a fine red mist by a dart trap), until it was down to just 4 of the original 7 players left.

Now, this was a convention game of CoC, and the person running it warned us that it would be deadly. And, when the medic hyperventilates at the sight of blood, that doesn't help.

So, our leader is being a good leader and we're creeping our way along this track. Our guides have abandoned us after losing half their number to traps as well, and it's just the 4 of us trying not to die. Our leader, unfortunately, triggers another trap. It hits and hits him good. There is no normal way our leader can possibly survive this. Except that the GM has a rule that if the death isn't too severe, the player can survive if they roll a 20. Due to the nature of the situation, our leader not only had to survive, but he had to get out of the trap, as well, which would require some fancy work. The GM determined that the only possible way that could happen is if he managed to roll three natural 20s in a row.

The player made his first roll. 20. He survived the trap. Next roll. 20. He was conscious. Final roll. 20. He escaped the trap.

The player then proceeded to roll several more 20s in several more sticky situations while I an another character weren't so lucky and ended up on the casualty list.

That was probably one of the least mystic CoC games I've ever participated in, but it was a hell of a lot of fun.

^-.-^

[PepperElf]

my fav group... we named ourselves the "off key centers" (as a joke cos the 3 main dwarves fighters were always singing, off key, and always in the center of the battle) ... I remember one of our DMs would make a point to roll, or have us roll, for a lot of things.

Random memorable events

My mage cooked dinner. Rolled a 20. Our assassin took a keen interest in it, looking for possible poisons to add to her collection

We had 2 sets of newlywed characters and their players had to roll percentile dice to see how well they performed (ahem) One of the dwarves lucked out - his "wife" rolled 100 and made him pass out!

Oh and - yes, determined by the dice - the gods were paying attention that night. So both wives ended up pregnant.

The DM had a Dwarf/Elf cleric ("If you call him a 'Dwelf he will kill you'.") and realized he'd never rolled to see how much he was of each. He'd always figured it was more dwarf than elf. ... By the dice - exactly half. Even he cracked up a bit at that.


And... Weird night of dice.
I don't remember all of what was happening, but we were fighting kobalds in some dungeon. I saw how well our Orc Ranger was doing just hitting things, so I decided my mage should try that too and pretty much sucked.

Until we decided to have a baseball game after the battle. The severed kobald heads were the balls. THEN I scored a critical hit? The head apparently turned to mush... and one of the clerics lost her lunch when she arrived and saw the mess. Even the guy playing her was like "um, shouldn't she be use to this by now?" as he was laughing.


And ... It was the same night but I don't remember if it was before or after but I think it was the same battle ... During one of the waves of attacks, we decided to fuck with the kobalds' heads. (no not another baseball game). The orc sat in one hallway pretending to munch on a dead kobald leg like it was a turkey leg and growled as the next wave of kobolds approached. They failed their constitution check and took off running in pure terror...

And they managed to trample over the Japanese assassin. Running over her back... "Um you realize she stores her poisons & bombs in the bun on her kimono right?..."

O fuck. The guy playing her had to roll to see how much survived. The DM would determine how much of the caves were blown up. ... 100? By some miracle, yeah... everything was fine. (whew!)



dunno if they even finished writing up some of the stories of our adventures. A couple of them had started up but i don't know if it ever got finished.

[Crossbow]

Heh. Remembered another one. We were playing a campaign of Cyberpunk. The system uses only d10, but a roll of 10 is open ended (if you roll a natural 10, you can roll again and add the rolls together.) This is the only way to succeed at some of the harder rolls.

Our techie decides that he's bored while waiting for the netrunner to finish her job and declares that he's going to invent time travel. Yeah, right. Sure, you go right ahead. The GM decides to humor him and assigns a difficulty to the task. He didn't tell anyone what it was, of course. So the player rolls.

10. Go again. 10 One more... 10. 10. 10. 10. 10. 10. 10. 8.
Yes, he rolled 98 on one d10. I kid you not.

GM took away the die to make sure it wasn't loaded. If it was, it only worked for the one player. GM ruled that he didn't manage to invent time travel, but did manage to theoretically prove that it MIGHT be possible, and got himself a Nobel Prize in physics for the trouble. Now he had to figure out howto fly to Europe to claim it (techie was wanted by pretty much every police force on the planet...)

[Chanlin]

Among my friends I'm known for having "charmed" dice. They will roll well for me when it counts. If it's a trivial roll then I fail miserably or just barely squeak by.

Examples:

In a first edition game of D&D at a convention I was playing a pre-generated fighter that the DM had handed me to play. We encountered some umberhulks which require a save roll to avoid a gaze attack or you end up confused. Every time the roll came up I rolled a 20. After the 5th time in a row the DM picked up my 20 and rolled it a few times to confirm that it wasn't weighted.

In a table-top game of Werewolf (world of darkness system) we were doing this off scene where my character was in a school because we had heard rumors that a Vampire had made its haven there. Since my character was the youngest physically speaking (looked 18 in Human form) I was picked to go. I spent the day pretending to be in classes and during a scene I got into a fight with the school Bully. He really wasn't any threat, and I was pulling my punches as to not kill the kid. I failed most of the attacks and my ST asked me to roll to see if I pulled a muscle after being knocked on my ass once. I had a 10 die pool for the roll. Guess how many came up as 1's. If you guess less than 10 you're wrong.

My two particularly favorite stories though are ones that didn't happen to me. The first was from a 3.5 D&D game I ran. My regular group are all fairly advanced players so we tend to ignore the CR system since CR's that should be even are actually very easy. So I threw a single level 20 Mind Flayer Psion at a group of 5 level 11 and 12 players. It's opening stunning attack caught the whole party. Being a willpower save the only member who passed was the Wizard/Necromancer. Fortunately for him he had a pair of wights as his undead servitors. They valiantly sacrificed their unlives, and lucky for the Wizard I rolled like crap for the save against the Wight's level draining attacks. By the time to two Wights were dead (two rounds) They had drained 4 levels out of the Mind Flayer thanks to having been hasted by their master. Of course this was not before one player had his brain sucked out. Everyone came to 4 rounds later to a dead Rogue, a dead Mind Flayer and their Necromancer patiently preserving the bodies and in the process of making himself a new pair of zombie servitors to replace his wights.

The other story comes from a Twilight 2000 game (we used to system to play a Rainbow Six style campaign.) So one of my friends is playing a special forces marine sniper. We were attempting to infiltrate an enemy airfield and cripple their radar tower so we could land a C130 for another leg of the mission. The airfield had watch towers with .50 caliber machine guns. So our sniper is crawling around the brush well outside of view and killing the two man teams in each tower starting with the machine gunner and then his spotter. The last tower he says "I'm gonna kill the spotter first" to which our GM asked several times are you sure that's what you want to do? Now the machine gunner had a 10% chance to spot the sniper's position. The aim in the game is to roll two 10 siders and get under the target number. The GM rolls a 5. Needless to say our sniper got turned into swiss cheese. We still tease him to this day with "shoot the gunner first"

[Kal]

I've got one from a Warhammer 40K game that still sticks in my mind. A good few years ago, 3rd edition, I was running a Dark Eldar (fast but easy to kill) force against entrenched Space Marines (strong, armoured but low numbers). The dice turned against me quickly and after four turns I was down to purely my force leader against an almost intact army.
He was designed purely for melee, leading a swift moving force against weaker targets, with a few grenades for heavy armour. He also had a shadow field on, giving him a 2+ save against any damane unless you rolled a 1 and overloaded it, but the sheer volume of fire directed against him meant that I was making about thirty rolls a turn. Didn't roll a single one all game long and managed to cut my way through about fifty marines and three tanks. Rather a pyrrhic victory, but a victory nonetheless.

[Kittish]

The Tale of the Fluffy Bunny

Gaming group I hang out with plays a lot of different games. This one was Dresden Files. The group consisted of a couple of wizards, a white court vamp, a were-coyote and a mortal. The mortal is a doctor.

We'd been tracking down a bad guy and run him down to his base. The bad guy had hired the services of a big, nasty uber ghoul. This thing was the next best thing to immortal, and strong as a whole herd of oxen.

The doctor had been given a small caliber pistol and told to shoot the bad guy if he moved. Bad guy moved, doc shot him (and hit him!), bad guy dives out a second story window. Cue the doc.... (having gotten over the shock of actually hitting what he shot at) "I can fix that!" and diving out the window after the guy.

Doc landed on top of the bad guy. Uber ghoul shows up to carry his boss out of the fray and away. Ghoul grabs doc and the baddie and tries to pull them apart.... keep in mind that this thing is FAR stronger than anything even remotely human.

Doc makes his roll... and between rolling 4 +'s (fudge dice, two blank sides, 2 with + and 2 with -) and spending fate points to boost the roll... the ghoul FAILS to yank him off the bad guy. Drops them both and runs away as by this time the cavalry has arrived.

Cue much hilarity around the gaming table and jokes about the fluffy bunny growing fangs. "I can fix that!" is still guaranteed to set off laughter.

[lordlundar]

Well they have to recover a stolen, almost ready to hatch Gold Dragon egg from a bunch of goblins that had the nerve to steal it.

If you've ever played the Council of Wyrms campaign setting, you would know the best approach would have been to sit back and let the newly hatched dragon have it's fun.

For those of you wondering, dragon eggs have a really long gestation period and during that time are tended to and taught by either their parent or attendants. They come out of the egg with the physical and mental capabilities equivalent to a mortal adult and have full use of their powers as appropriate for their age category.

My money's on the dragon.

[Mytical]

My money's on the dragon.

In my games, dragons are uber rare. You are lucky (or unlucky) to see one if you are an elf and live a full life (hundreds and hundreds of years, sometimes thousands). They are also the closest things to godlike that a mortal creature can get. Immune to most magic (and able to cast spells that most wizards would drool over), near impervious hide (no soft spot on the belly .. sorry), and intelligence that is beyond understanding. ALWAYS bet on the dragon..ALWAYS.

[Sarlon]

I had a half dragon monk...that beat a dragon from inside its mouth....

well it had JUST used its breath weapon, and I was trying to jump onto its back....well it caught me in mid air, it was a loosing (at the time) battle so I'm like screw it...I'm gonna punch the soft pallete (roof of the mouth).....


Which the DM determined had no AC....

I was a 15 level monk....

2 confirmed crits, and 4 normal hits at 2d8 damage each....plus my uber strength mod....

I got to crack its pallete, in 2 rounds into the brain...which is when the DM said...oh look the breath attack is "recharged".

I said "well I'm immune to fire not acid...I'm gonna try and leap out of its mouth as it opens it to spew its breath weapon and make for its head."

DM said, thats nearly impossible....but heres what you need to make it...

did I mention 15th level monk? with max ranks in tumble, jump and balance?

rolls were, 20, 18, 16.

I then started punching the dragon in the eye, till I shouted to the OTHER monk in the party "punch it in the nards!"

Monk rolls intelligence check, 18, and DM determines that he knows where the nards are.....in the tip of the tail....

Poor dragon never last past the next 2 rounds.

[ApolloSZ]

Lessee...

Warhammer 40k

I had a squad of Space Wolves dubbed the most tanned marines ever.
I was a fan of drop podding and wolf scouts. Drop pods allow me to land squads in middle of the table rather than walking/driving across it. The downside is the chance to deviate, and either land in terrain/crosshairs/off the table. Wolf Scouts were able (4th ed) to walk on from any table edge. Like behind my friends tanks, with vunerable rear armour (infact he changed his entire deployment purely to counter my wolfscouts)

1 squad of ten marines deviated a bit further than I wanted. Landed in the middle of two to three IG squads of guardsmen. I had 135 armour saves to roll. One marine died to a weapon that allowed no saves. I needed 3 or better for a marine to live.

So I needed to roll 3 or better, 135 times. Statistics would say this is impossible. Statistics took the day off. 4 marines, including the instakill (Meltagun) died. The rest had (we joke), no paint on their armour, no hair, and a killer tan.

2 - Had a dreadnought kill half an army in one shot. He shot, missed. Rerolled (twinlinked weapon) - Hit the DE Raider with a lascannon. Penetrated. Exploded. 6 inch radius. (So I rolled 4 consucutive 6's on single dice). Two squads gone, 3 took enough damage to panick, flee, and never regroup. a massive hole opened in that army.

3 - Lone wolf in Termi Armour (2+ armour, 3+ invunerable) with a storm sheild, and thunder hammer, and 2 wolves. Recieived a cavalry charge with lances of some kind. Laughed at them all. Then proceeded to smack them back for it. Yeah... they didn't like my Lone wolves.

4 - Lukas the trickster trapped a Bloodthirster with his last laugh ability. On a 2. (enemy and I have to roll a dice. If I equal or roll higher, I win.)

5 - Bjorn Fell Handed beat a Demon prince (aka, Demon Prince 'Airball'). Demon prince should have torn Bjorn apart with no worries. I hit, no wound. He missed entirely, lost combat, so then due to abilities/downsides, took more wounds as he couldn't flee and died. Cue BJorn sitting there going "what the hell just happened?"

Warmachine
1 - Fenris passed his tough roll (5 or 6 on a D6) 3 rounds in a row.

2 - More odd than broken - Yuri when attacking a fresh Retribution jack, will only ever roll exactly 10 damage, to take out their sheilds. In multiple games. every time.

3 - I have never killed an enemy unit exactly (i.e. exactly 5 points of damage to model with 5 health points). If I kill it, I kill it very dead. Like, minimum of 6 or more points overkill.
Widowmakers are the only exception, they have an ability to cause one point of damage regardless, so are good for picking off generic infrantry with high armour.