Be in final battle of months-long campaign with dozens of sessions

Your player should have played it through to the end. You make your bed, you gotta lie in it. No need to console them, it's their problem to deal with.

I have been trying to push the players towards diceless systems, actually, but this unfortunate player had been insisting on keeping the dice. Apparently, they dislike deterministic, randomizerless systems.

That is why I had been playing along and using a diced system regardless.

This player is the type of person to want the thrill of rolling dice, but be saddened when random chance turns against them.

Eh, I usually just fudge the numbers in my head to make it so that the PC hits if a unlucky streak this bad happens.
For example, he had to roll a 10 but rolls a 5. I'll just nod and say it hits. Players usually don't know each others' to-hit, and even if they do question you about it, just make up some reason like the enemy being weakened in that round because X happened, etc.

Is Marisa in any way related?

>Eh, I usually just fudge the numbers in my head to make it so that the PC hits if a unlucky streak this bad happens.

This has been a very "knowledge and research"-centric campaign all throughout its run. The PCs have been using their knowledge and information gathering abilities to know exactly what they are fighting.

The final battle was no different, and the PCs had spent hours performing research to glean the enemies' precise statistics.

This usually fits with my GMing style of very heavy transparency during combats anyway. Challenge comes from the raw power and tactical flexibility of enemies, rather than any uncertainty over opponents' abilities. The entire campaign has been thriving on this, and it has made for many a chillingly close victory.

That is why the PCs had full access to the enemies' statistics in this battle. I kept to my principles of no fudging and no deus ex machina. It resulted in a victory nevertheless, although it did manage to make one player feel quite ill over the affair.

Ohh I see, well there's really nothing to be done in that case. I do pretty much the opposite and virtually never divulge stats. Especially since most of my bosses rely on one or two gimmicks that allows them to survive round after round of fighting alone against the party. Once they figure out what it is, resolving the fight gets almost trivial.
All's well that ends well though, glad it worked out.

so, I guess the answer to the question is you get real angry?

I do not think this ultimately worked out, because the player was in high spirits right before the final battle, only for their morale to come crashing down.

Because it's the literal only medium in which you can run unconstrained by a system in whatever way is convenient to you.
That's the entire advantage of tabletop gaming. You have a GM, not a rigid set of rules. You're playing with a person who can imagine and create, not a computer running entirely off of the script.

the sad part is, some of the best gamist tabletop I've ever played was kingdom death.
You know, that game that is effectively a video game but on tabletop, AI for enemies included?
There's certainly a place for following the rules 100% and dealing strictly by the book, and it produces fun games, but it is inherently tending towards a more "can be run entirely by computers" outlook. Which means it's going to get more and more rare as more and more of this type of thing gets published for the compy.

If you're fudging dice, you shouldn't have rolled them in the first place.

>people legitimately believe fucking with the dice and rerolls are bullshit
Man, how the hell do you deal with something as basic as advantage in 5e?
Goddamn, any system with a luck stat would just break you. In some games, your character's ENTIRE POWERSET could revolve around getting as many rerolls as possible.

That's built into the game, tho. Advantage is just a weird kind of bonus. I have nothing against re-rolls as necessitated by the mechanics, but when outside sources call for them, like stupid lenient DMs who shouldn't have called for the check if they didn't want the possibility of failure, that's when I get buttmad.

We've got people in this very thread shitting on reroll systems built into the game, though.
And honestly, I see no reason to classify adding rerolls to a game without rerolls outside the bounds of other acceptable houserules, which GMs are within their right to do.

Again, you're missing the point. There's a rule there. It might be a shitty rule you made up for bad reasons, but a rule nonetheless. Just fudging the dice whenever you want is what I hate.

but that's still a system. It's in the control of a guy who is running the game.
I'm not going to begrudge someone who wants to play a game with alternative difficulty settings, be it easy mode or "assrape me until I bleed but make sure I never die" mode.
Fudging can cause all sorts of different gameplay flavors, and I see no reason to restrict myself from those if I feel like.

>Real life doesn't have reroll points.
Real life also doesn't have 5% chance crit fails, you short bus retard.
>kids are starving in other countries you spoiled piece of shit.
Kek, what the fuck? That's some bullshit there user, you could say that about literally any complaint by anyone.
>I am so sick of this entitled millennial mentality
>reeee millenials

>that "the story" is more important than the integrity of the game, because it's all about "fun" and "fun" is the priority, except by "fun," these faggots want the most brain-dead fan-service-tier railroading bullshit
Yeah yeah, fun is a buzzword, we get it.
>They just want the dice to back up the anime-faggot-superhero powerwank they have set up in their heads
>people playing a make believe game want to do make believe things
Wow, what a fucking novel idea, user.

If I had to make an ideal fudge array for games I play, I'd have to do it this way.
Dungeon crawling game with short character creation: No dice rerolling
Dungeon crawling game with long character creation: Dice rerolling game system.
Open world story based game with short character creation: On DM desire fudging
Open world story based game with long character creation: Dice rerolling game system

>fudging during final battle

>Just fudging the dice whenever you want is what I hate.

What if you don't know dice - or anything, really - in the game is being fudged? It just strikes me as really odd thinking, could just be because I get paranoid about shit, but if you haven't looked at the DM's notes, or if the DM is rolling behind a screen, what if everything they're doing is fudged?

Seems simpler to me to go "I'll trust my DM to run the game and not worry about that, because most of the time, there's no fucking way of knowing one way or another".

If the players lose, and its your fault, then guess what: thats still a genuine end to a story. Sometimes the good guys lose.

It's a genuine end, but that doesn't make it NOT a shitty end.

GM, could you say something like “the spirit of (god/goddess) flowed into your body pushes ng out your soul for this fight or something like that? That when they left it was because something took over?

In this case, it was because the other player's character took over, since their own character had been taken out of the battle (though not killed).

I am not entirely sure what your suggestion would accomplish. The player is well-aware that they had been suffering completely rotten luck with attack rolls throughout that combat (3 hits out of 13 attacks across 13 rounds is horrendous), and that immediately after they quit and the other player took over, their character hit six times in a row, including landing a critical hit.

I get the player killed if they don't understand to run away and regroup.

>running away from final battle

THF threads are the reason i still come to Veeky Forums

Shoo shoo.

>There's a rule there
Just like rule 0?

It just fucking sucks and there's really no way around it at the end of the day.

I once played a session where my character made maybe 20 rolls and failed every single one of them. They weren't even very high DCs!

I feel for your player, I really do.

At least in a "regular" session, there will always be another day with which to redeem oneself, even if such an ideal is diminished by the fact that having failed so spectacularly one day in no way increases one's odds of performing more fortuitously the next day.

The final battle of the campaign, however, is the character's last chance to shine as a combat-capable hero. If the character falters there, then there is no way to salvage that without making it look like the GM is taking pity.

As I have mentioned in , I have been trying to push the players towards diceless systems, but this unfortunate player had been insisting on keeping the dice. They dislike deterministic, randomizerless systems.

>Real life also doesn't have 5% chance crit fails, you short bus retard

Ah, I see why you are stupid faggot, silly millenial. Have you tried not playing D&D?

who is that angry looking anime girl?

Lol what the fuck, dude. That went from 0 to d100 real fast

had a similar problem last week as a player in a campaign, we were getting to the end of a dungeon crawl and our resources were low and we couldn't run from a vrock because it had cornered our grievously injured ranger, so i dumped all my remaining debuffs onto it the resulting debuffs saved the ranger and the party because they had to reroll EVERY roll(balanced by its incredibly low DC roughly a 14 or 16) we gained 2 levels from that fight becuase we were meant to run from it and we still won(we are level 5 and there's 3 pcs and one support NPC, the vrock CR9)

I use reckless attack

>This is the final battle of a dozens-sessions long campaign.
That's it? My friends campaign has been going over 4 years every single week almost without fail, I think their roll 20 log alone is over a million words or something.

I'll just be patient if it's just bad luck and not the DM dicking me over. Hell, might crack some jokes about it in and out character if it's happening all the damn time.

>some people enjoy heroic power trips and don't like the idea of getting shit on by pure random effects
Stop the presses

Depends on the setting. If you're doing escapism with a mutants and mastermind super hero and it's set up to where the good guys are supposed to win but get totally shit on, that feels like it goes against the themes and overall reason you were playing that system in the first place

Shared setting =/= single campaign

Should've min-maxed their characters.
Then again this may depend on the system they're using.

> Especially since most of my bosses rely on one or two gimmicks that allows them to survive round after round of fighting alone against the party.

Good job running shitty encounters.

It's a shoebill stork.

Either the GM is willing to throw me another kind of bone by providing some item interaction across the battlefield (some stuff to push onto the enemy, pressure plates to activate in strategic moments, etc), or I simply try to use whatever mechanic I can abuse to either act as human shield, help allied attacks or simply support the party when in danger with any magic item I have.
By now the final spotlight is not on you; I'd better help like the supporting character I am if I were you. Worst case, you die a heroic death trying to stop the villain, get some great legacy and some songs celebrating you for all time. Best case you help deal the final blow. The hands on the blade won't be yours, but the bonuses that drove it through that heart will.
Remember, rpgs are a collaborative effort after all and we can't all be protagonists.

Shit. Thanks for reminding me that only a couple thousand are left, and they'll all be dead when I'm old and grey. Same with elephants, rhinoceros, hippos, most whales....god damn.