What if you are a high roller DM?

I have a problem Veeky Forums.

I am good at throwing dice. I have a statistically improbable amount of my rolls fall in the upper 50%. Everyone I've played tabletop with has commented on this. This is perfectly okay as a player and part of why I enjoy playing tabletop but I have recently started DMing and it is a problem.

Even basic combat encounters with orcs was nearly a TPK. Three orcs landed hits two turns in a row and the lowest roll on a d8+2 for damage was a 4 and there were a couple 7s in there. For a party with two martials, a bard, a cleric and an evocation school wizard it should have been a warmup fight. Instead they almost got splatted by almost 40hp of collective damage by low CR monsters.

This happened to me in the last two sessions as well, running a published module that was meant to introduce a low level party to playing 3.5e and not kill them. Instead they had to rest because every other encounter nearly killed someone or took them to negative HP. The party was mostly made up of "template for fighter / ranger / wizard" from the players handbook characters and everyone rolled well on their stats.

However when every single enemy encounter has the level 1-2 party taking a cumulative 15+ hp in damage it is really hard to sustain. Everyone was already invested enough to fight through it but I am really worried I may lose players over this eventually. Moving up to creatures that can potentially one shot an unlucky character is going to be rough. Being a "killer DM" when you have a level 3 party fight some orcs without even being ambushed is not fun stuff.

I can't even hold it against the players if they start to get frustrated here. We all know that I roll high but nobody considered that I would be rolling for every enemy they fight. Everything has almost max HP, hits and throws boxcars on damage, burns you terribly with spells, etc etc

Fudge the dice

Stop playing shitty games where the GM rolls dice

Rolled 1 (1d20)

Rolling to steal OP's luck. We need to bleed it out of you.

Have you considered getting dice weighted against you? You know...Cheating against yourself?

lmao

Uh... Shit. OP, I'm sorry. There is nothing I can do for you.

Bad luck to you and all of your future games.

stop cheating

Play a game where you need to roll low.

How statistically improbable? Break out the science, bitch; start rolling dice and recording what comes up. Do this a bunch to give yourself a nice big dataset.

Then see if there's actually a statistical correlation. Chances are there's not and "user rolls high" is a self-reinforcing bias; it's quite a common one in tabletop groups. If there actually is some statistical anomaly, see if you can isolate it. Experiment with different dice. Throw them from different heights. Throw them onto different surfaces. Enlist some of your players to provide "control" samples.

Then come back and post this thread because then you'll actually have something to talk about.

I think we should 1d20 OP to make sure he's not a luck vampire.

>he thinks that's bad luck for OP
>he doesn't realize he's now cursed by the unholy spectre of the nat 1

RIP, I'm so sorry for you.

This.

Its mindblowing how fucking retarded people on this board are thay so many responded sincerely to OP. Unless you have loaded dice, there's no such thing as a high roller. Youre just cognitively biased and doing nothing to account for it.

Read "Thinking, Fast and Slow." It will help you be less retarded

Rolled 13 (1d20)

I was aiming for the opposite. I was well-wishing him bad luck.

Watch me get another 1. Seriously, cheat against yourself.

> d8+2 there were a couple 7s in there
6.5 is an average roll for 1d8+2 you stupid fucking nigger. you arent rolling high

Being fair, statistically anomalous things do occur, and we can say they do with a reasonable degree of certainty.

Although it is unlikely, there are enough people rolling dice that it is relatively likely that someone, somewhere in the world, consistently rolls above average when they are running games, particularly at moments when the dicerolls are significant.

This is not any indication that the pattern will continue, or any trait about the person, but upon perceiving it I don't think it would be too much of a stretch to call it 'luck'.

>Being fair, statistically anomalous things do occur, and we can say they do with a reasonable degree of certainty.
Yes, but statistically anomalous things occur so infrequently on average that we can safely discount them.

BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT STATISTICS FUCKING MEANS YOU THUNDERING DUNDERHEAD

Mostly agree.

Where I diverge with you is that, if you concede that all rolls are independent (which you do), you must necessarily realize that the "luck" you speak to is backward-facing. No one is lucky in the future. They have been lucky, but our expectation for future rolls is always reversion to the mean.

Hence it is dangerous, if not incorrect, to use luck here. We can agree that perhaps OP has had a history of "luck," but we have no good reason to assume he will continue to be a high roller from here on out. And therefore his post is a shitpost

We can discount it even though we can also say that it is probable that such things will happen?

Yes
>BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT STATISTICS FUCKING MEANS YOU THUNDERING DUNDERHEAD

pretty sure he means the dice result came up 7

As someone who has studied statistics, I don't quite understand what you mean.

That we can observe a phenomena and say that, yes, it is possible for it to occur, we should then ignore it when it does?

is correct, although I did say the same thing in my first post with >This is not any indication that the pattern will continue

>he thinks that knowing an event having a non-zero chance of occurring is exactly the same as having observed such an event

>erroneously taking credit for some random anomaly
i can't help but imagine how shitty op's life must be that this is the kind of silver lining that he focuses on

>I am good at throwing dice
No you're not. Except maybe in a way that means your dice rolls stay on the table and don't make lots of noise or knock shit over and stuff like that.

Maybe your rolls were good in the past but that's no prediction of future events unless you have unfair dice.

Give your dice the water test if you like. Otherwise it's just a delusion.

You either have faulty dice or you are rolling in some retarded way that games the rolls. Buy different dice, put them in the hand, roll them about in a cupped hand and then roll them on the table so that they actually roll a bit. Then there will not be any 'anomaly', I guarantee it.

A PC wanted to persuade a goblin to join the party to help find treasure and traps and the DM allowed it even though we killed 5 of his mates. Now the goblin won't shut up about healing, even if it was already healed because it "feels good", wants more and more food, and considers 25cp good treasure.

This is bullshit DMing, right?

Sit them down and explain the situation. Tell them you're worried about hurting fun with your Lucky rolls. Make it abundently clear that there will still be danger however- do Not under any circumstance let them get complainant and do not tolerate any hint of "roll fixing" bitching if something goes poorly for them
>"wtf GM I failed to convince the ogre to suck my dick! Guess you fix your rolls both ways"
Make your Players understand that you don't want them to constantly die.

If all else fails you could get some of those retarded sharp-edge dice.

This is basically me but only when I GM. My dice hate the rare occasion when I get to be a player and punish me accordingly.

>1

Oh thanks, I'm sure my party will love it when the ogre hits someone for 25 damage.

No, the lowest face number on the die was 7. Meaning that I rolled 4-7 the entire encounter and that totaled to 6-9. 9 damage would have been enough to put the wizard into "likely fucking dead" territory. For 6 rolls to have the LOWEST potential roll to still be in the upper 50% is unlikely. This never stops being potentially fatal for a party and the danger only gets greater as they level.

I have to point out that monsters in any tabletop game are not balanced around always hitting and hitting like a truck. A dragon's breath attack isn't supposed to hit upper 50% rolls on all of its damage die. If I had rolled 6d8 for an AOE damage and hit 4-7 on every roll it would have been fucking bad news brown for anyone who isn't a martial.

see

The second attempt, going out at 13, likely wouldn't have mattered weighted against the results of a 1. The advantage was already given right then and there.

I literally had to stop playing people at dice for money because I had to fucking fight people over this. When more than a dozen people, independent of one another, have all commented something to the tune of "damn you got good luck at dice" I am inclined to believe them. This isn't some talking shit at the bar thing, this is legitimately a problem I am having with trying to DM where my party gets raped by basic monsters because they have "computer is cheating" odds at harming the party.

To everyone saying "oh well this won't keep up" is misunderstanding what I'm saying. I've always had phenomenal luck at dice in any format. Monopoly, craps, dice, YGO, tabletop RPGs, you name it. This dosen't carry over to "rolling dice" in a digital format, only holds true when I am personally throwing a die at the table.

Start playing at casino then if you have such a good luck that it can be turned into a profit. I think that is going to teach you some hard truths about a little thing called cognitive bias.

>Start playing at casino then if you have such a good luck that it can be turned into a profit

Did you not see the part of my post where I said that I've already played people for money at dice?

I'm also no fool with my money. Going to a casino to play would either involve risking more than I would consider an acceptable loss or basically playing for chump change. If I wanted to play $50 or lower bets I can do that without travelling and I wouldn't risk $500 on a roll of the dice. I never said I can't roll low, just that I roll high.

What you are asking is like "oh you can make good 3-pointers? why dont you go play in the NBA? i bet you won't think you are hot shit then"

If your luck with dice is so predictable, then why are you worried about losing?

>I never said I can't roll low, just that I roll high. WHAT THE FUCK DOES THIS EVEN MEAN

I'am the opposite in general, the funny part, that everyone comments, is that i fail rolls that should be impossible to fail, i am in general unlucky, but when hits shit the fan. i always roll well. Criticals that change the fight, dices exploding and etc.I usually beat shit, be it hard or easy, but i do like Rocky would, after getting fucked.
Anyway, i also played with a similar "high roller dm" never had a problem with this, sometimes the DM will be unlucky too (Almost never, but sometimes). Keep playing and everything will be fine, help your players a bit if you are feeling bad for them.

Exactly what it sounds like.

Nothing always happens 100% of the time for anything. I generally roll in the upper 50% of possible numbers on a given die but its not as though I never roll lower than that. It isn't a japaense anime super power like you think you retard.

Also your implication that it would be advantageous in anything outside of basic craps is ludicrous. If I could throw dice and reliably manipulate the table in a casino game I wouldn't be lucky I would be a magician. Even if I could/did I would likely get my teeth knocked out in the back room if I cleared them out like that. People don't like it when they lose money in a game of chance and if they think someone can't be lucky they will think you are cheating.