How do you deal with unlucky players?
I don't mean rolling a 1 sometimes, I mean people who just can never get a break, when it comes to rolls you expect them to fail.
What is best? just shrug it off and tell them "better luck next time", or cut them some slack and give them another chance?
I remind them that confirmation bias is just one of the problems from inheriting an evolved intelligence.
Sometimes weird shit happens user
>have one player who consistently rolls absurdly well
>rolls aren't fudged
>dice aren't weighted
>due to medical reasons it's highly unlikely that they're rigging the throw itself
>pattern persists across multiple games, to the point where one of the GMs in our group could calculate an average handicap for them
Tavern Tales has 3d20-pick-average system. Maybe something like that could circumvent the curse.
Sometimes it's confirmation bias, sometimes... it's me.
I roll constantly well on search, profession and other non-life-threatening checks. However when it comes to any sort of action stuation, i start rolling terribly. One time i rolled seven nat1s in a row over the course of three rounds, and my average rolls aren't much better. This happens far too often to be just confirmation bias and my characters as a result are pretty much comic relief at this point.
is that even a curve anymore?
Yes, and a pretty nice one at that. Check it on anydice.
>This happens far too often to be just confirmation bias
Spoken like someone experiencing confirmation bias.
Seriously, what else do you think it is? Divine intervention? To put it this way, which of these scenarios seem more likely:
>a) A vengeful God looks down on user playing his TTRPGs with disdain, and decides to punish him with BAD COMBAT ROLLS for not driving Nan to church every Sunday
>b) user experiences some bad rolls in a row, which, while statistically rare, is far from impossible, and now seem to latch on and remember the bad rolls much more clearly
Which is it?
Based on the law of large numbers, and how randomization works, it is inevitable some people will just never roll well ever.
Had a campaign where I had the ability to toss a coin instead of rolling a dice. Heads crit success, tails crit fail.
Crit failed literally every single time I used it, (campaign was recorded so I went back and checked), aside from when I wondered if the coin was weighted and started using it on enemies, when suddenly it started giving them crit successes.
Was pretty funny actually.
I once rolled 3 ones in a row, was complaining.
Rolled another dice, got an one.
DM allowed me to reroll.
Another one.
AFAIK, the dice were clean.
How do you explain that?
Switch out their dice to make sure they aren't being screwed over by imbalances. Either that will solve the problem, or there is no problem, at least not going forward. If the issue really is merely happenstance, then past results will have no impact on future results. With that said, if somebody is really down because of their bad luck, I might toss them a bone. Not a big one though--just an easy check or two to boost their spirits, or otherwise arranging things so they can shine in the short term.
On a d20? That's very unlikely. Statistically, there's only a 1 in 3.2 million chance it would happen. But if you roll dice 3.2 million times, you'd expect to see something like this. And sure, you probably haven't made that many rolls, but statistically speaking, at least somebody on this board would "beat the odds" by a significant degree. And once you combine all the people on Veeky Forums, it's hardly surprising it's happened to somebody. And that's assuming that the rolls were truly random. As your dice give you increasingly improbable results, it's increasingly probable that either they are biased, or the way you're rolling them is.
I used 3 dice (one for the two first rows, another 2 dice for the other 2)
Yeah, d20.
I aways felt rater unluky with any gamble/luck based anything really (coins, dice, cards, any sort of bet, you name it). That was just the most ridiculous case that ever happened to me.
Will see into using one of those little cups for rolling dice, to see what happens.
Did the dice have the same manufacturer? The two Chessex d20s I tested show strikingly similar patterns, and almost all of them show the same bias in a salt water float test.
Yeah.
Same manufacturer, only the colors are different.
It's weird to think that a random normal dice is biased. I mean, they're often used as a examble of something random
Luck thread?
Ok, yesterday on my 5e game I castes a spell of Guiding bolt on an enemy dwarf
I rolled for damage first, forgetting that the spell is an attack spell. GM asks me to roll to hit, abide and say "calling a nat 20" and I get it.
I dealt 40 radiant damage to the dwarf, desintegrating him with pure light
I just wanted the paladin to have advantage on his next attack I swear...
Assuming a pretty significant bias towards 1s might reduce the 1 in 3,200,000 odds to as little as 1 in 100,000. That's assuming that you're twice as likely to roll 1s on those dice. I'm guessing that any bias probably isn't quite that severe (though you can see that 20s on the speckled die I tested only came up at about half the expected rate, which climbs to only 60% when you average in the opaque die, so it wouldn't be that far off), but couple that with a fluke of happenstance and you're off to the races.
Should also be worth noting that dice biased in favor of a side are biased against its opposite. So those dice which tend to roll many 1s also tend to roll few 20s.
>if somebody is really down because of their bad luck, I might toss them a bone. Not a big one though--just an easy check or two
This
That's what I would've figured, but the results in actually paint a different picture. For both of those dice, 20s seem to be strongly disfavored, but 1s are also somewhat disfavored. Though obviously, when any number gets more results than normal, the sum totality of the other numbers is proportionally reduced.
I have such a player.
Someone TRULY unlucky.
After playing with him for about two months I decided to track the stats of his rolls in my games. It's been Six months now. Twelwe games of about six hours each.
>162 rolls
>140 failed rolls
>65 critical failures (1-5 on the D100)
Everybody in the group see how jinxed this guy is, but I did not told them I was tracking his rolls. I am convinced I should not.
But this guy is a statistic improbability like I've never seen before, but he never seem to mind.
I really don't know what to do with him.
And 10 critical succes.
I have a house rule that if you fail 4 rolls in a row, the next is an auto crit. You're heroes for goodness sake you were just finding the right spot.
In Descent 2e, I've kept track of over 261 rolls (around there) and exactly 1/3 of them have been the X which is a full miss. My group has started allowing me to re-roll since everyone else is inline with the 1/6 probability that it should be. But I consistently roll an X (a single face on a d6) at 33.3~% Everyone knows I can just cheat the die but I don't because I have OCD and have to roll it legit. Which makes it even more of a nightmare since I also study statistics.
Oh I'd like to point out that I'm not going anywhere with this. Someone, somewhere is going to be an outlier at something. I just happen to be the critical fail outlier on the Descent 2e blue die specifically. Pretty much nothing else in my life is this way.
I have had nights where I literally can't roll above a 5 on a d20. Switch dice, use a die tower, even ask someone else to roll for me. Then, I'll have a night where 5-6 20s will pop up.
The reality is, while some people are unlucky, the best idea to mitigate that is try to find things that require little to no rolling.