So i've had a few games where one or more players (or the DM) just has stupid levels of luck. Sometimes that luck is good, sometimes it's bad. But how do you balance a campaign where one or more persons can't seem to roll below a 15 (before modifiers). Like i could just throw a mass of enemies at them, but then if their luck runs out they are ****ed. The issue is, it's super boring when your players are just steamrolling what should be moderate to high difficulty. Or on the inverse, your players haven't rolled above a 10 (after modifiers) for more then a session. Like i can only "story" them through so much, before they get super pissed that they haven't had a chance to roll in the last 2+ hours..... But where is the fun if you're just walking through "babies first maze" while being level 5+
> it's super boring when your players are just steamrolling what should be moderate to high difficulty
Why is that boring? That should be exciting, as long as it's not the norm! It's an opportunity for the player(s) to feel totally badass.
I guess you have to put in a bit of work to make it badass though. The players shouldn't remember that string of good rolls, they should remember how they sliced the dragon's head off before it could use its breath even once.
Regarding the opposite situation, why can't failure be almost as fun? Seems like it could be, as long as it leads to fun and interesting situations. Maybe it should be part of our encounter design to consider what fun things will happen if the players fail.
By definition, long good or bad streaks are very unlikely. You can't predict them. And when you're in one you won't know if it's over or just beginning. So it doesn't seem like you could do anything about it, other than make sure fun will be had regardless.
Caveat: I'm a new DM, so take it with a grain of salt.
Luck happens. You don't normally have to deal with it, just make sure that you're not using luck as an excuse to screw your players too much and it should work out. Usually players get frustrated with luck, not the DM or game itself.
Things generally work out on average. And when they don't, it can just be a fun and unusual session.
I do not account for luck. I assume "average rolls." Even in Champions, when I used to pre-test every single battle (easier to do in Champions because there are usually fewer battles per adventure compared to D&D), I learned very early on not to "roll" for anything in the battle, but only to assume average rolls for to-hit and damage (because rolling very lucky for one side or the other would skew my results). In the actual battle, sometimes players got lucky or unlucky (like the one guy who rolled 3 natural 18s on 3D6, i.e. equivalent to a D&D nat 1 but much less likely, during one session). But if you have balanced for average, the luck should even out over time.
I had a battle against specters for a level 5 party a few months ago that, based on the # of specters, should have been a non-trivial challenge (not super hard, but not super easy either). I couldn't roll double digits on the d20 for the specters, and not one single blow landed. To this day, the party, despite having fought something like 10 specters, has no idea what happens to you when a specter hits you.
Yes the battle was super easy, but it was still fun (each time the specters moved in and tried to attack, the players worried -- and I think they became MORE worried as the battle went on because nothing had landed yet, and in a player's mind, luck is going to run out and when the blow DOES land you are going to take all that more damage -- even though no such thing can happen in reality).
And then the next battle was against two powerful Yuan-Ti who were able to mind-manipulate half the party (one went to sleep, one was tricked by illusions, one fled in fear, at various stages of the battle) and the players were the ones who got unlucky with those saving throws. So it all balances out in the end.
So... yeah I don't really account for or try to fudge rolls when it comes to real-world luck. I just let it happen.
Now, accounting for the Lucky feat, you might have to do if one or more PCs have it in your party (one does in mine). But not for die-rolling luck.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Mmm... Be wary - triumphant pride precipitates a dizzying fall...
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
“It cannot be seen, cannot be felt, Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt, It lies behind stars and under hills, And empty holes it fills, It comes first and follows after, Ends life, kills laughter.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
You don't balance for luck, you balance luck. Most dungeons should have a small chance of the players absolutely steamrolling the enemies like Marvel heroes. Most dungeons should also have an equally small chance of the enemies killing a character or two and forcing a retreat to avoid TPK. That's what balance is. It's not ensuring that the result of a fight will always be close: it's ensuring that it will usually be close, and when it's not, it's just as likely to swing one way as the other (or slightly more likely to swing one way, depending on your group's style).
As long as the dice are fair (there are ways of checking using salt water) then over the course of a campaign it all evens out. You may remember the sessions full of ones or 20s but ultimately if you recorded every single (not advantage/disadvantage) dice roll then over time each number on a dice will come up approx 5% of the time. Now obv if you throw in advantage, the lucky feat, re rolls etc then the positive dice rolls start to become more prevalent but even then you will be surprised at how even the spread actually is. If a player is rolling a high percentage of high rolls then I would suggest you either, check the dice are fair (not suggesting they cheat they might have been made unbalanced) or just keep a closer eye they are not fudging dice rolls. But over time the dice roll long will all even out.
No gripes when the DM can't roll above 10. Everyone gripes when they can't roll above 14. Don't worry about balancing for luck. OR buy 100 d20 and dice tower. And everyone rotates through the d20s. Also the salt water trick only works on some plastic dice. I have some dice I bought in early 80s which sink.
Make sure that the fun stuff of the game isn't dependent on good rolls. You can have entire sessions of roleplaying with needing a single roll. Or you make sure that the players always can fail forward. WebDM ahs a recent episode on that which is really good.
For example, if the players fail to disarm the trap of the dungeon entrance high up in the mountain they might cave in that entrance but the landslide reveals a second entrance. The only problem is that there is a monster who was slepping there. Or, to use the same principle in a social encounter. Take the fancy part scene from the episode "Shindig. Mal completes botches the social encounters, especially in regards to Atherton Wing. However, in doing so he opens up a new avenue of approach, the only problem is that he has to survive a duel first.
I agree with Lost; it's important as a DM to include multiple fail states when running a game, to ensure it is able to progress. The idea isn't that you should just hand stuff unearned to your players for the sake of keeping things moving, but rather failures should have a cost, successes should have a reward, and the continuation of the game shouldn't be necessarily considered either the reward or the cost.
I always like to use a murder mystery as an example. You give the players a room and maybe say that if the skill DC to find the murderer's abandoned glove that got swept under the carpet is 14. The single fail state here is, if nobody rolls over 14 investigating, then adventure over, they cannot progress. The "door" to the next area is barred. If you were to have multiple fail states in this situation, maybe you still find the clue after a day's searching of the crime scene but now you've lost all kinds of time and the killer may have struck again. Maybe you find the clue, but instead of a half-burned letter in the fireplace you find a fully burned letter with only the barest scrap ofv text still readable, maybe you find planted evidence that sends you after the wrong person for a bit before the killer strikes and they get back on their true trail.
As far as it goes with combat, sometimes the luck of the die is inevitable and just going to dictate what it dictates (hey, just like life sometimes), but you do still have a little wiggle-room there. Are the people they're fighting intelligent? Maybe if the party goes down due to the dice gods ire, they all go unconscious and wake up some time later in cages, all their gear gone, and the spellcasters bound and gagged, and now it's a prison escape to try and find a way out before the cultists/bandits sacrifice/ransom you, etc.
Even if you're not fighting intelligent creatures, hell, even animals want something. Are they fighting a territorial beast? Maybe once the party is battered and nearly down, the beast stops attacking and starts chasing them out of its territory. Is it defending itself? Then maybe it tries to escape when it seems the party no longer a threat? Is it hungry? Maybe it takes down and kills one of the party members and spends the rest of the fight guarding its kill, giving the other players space to retreat while it drags the player's carcass back to its lair to devour it. This is often times how actual animals will fight, not always taking it to the death.
Not all combat *needs* to be a flat out fight to the death. Maybe an evil npc with a beef against a particular PC will challenge them to single combat, setting conditions. Maybe they challenge the party to a battle of wits, or maybe once the party are at their mercy they'll give them an ultimatum like "you will bring the Orb of Plot to *me*, and you have until tomorrow before I attack the village and slaughter all you hold dear". I get that this type of interaction requires a particular type of bad guy, but I'm sure you get the gist.
P.s. I'd be remiss if I didn't link Matt Coville's video on multiple fail states, surprised nobody beat me to it: https://youtu.be/l1zaNJrXi5Y
There was a saying we had in HS when we played the daylights out of Axis and Allies:
"Brilliant strategist; lousy F'ing dice roller".
Sometimes the best laid plans simply fall prey to the RNGods and you're just plain humped. You can't account for random weather patterns, lucky communication interceptions, random wild animals or all the other things that interfere in war and at the game table you can't really account for a streak of bad luck. A level 5 fighter should drop a CR1 creature long before it can land a hit. On the other hand, sometimes it doesn't work that way and that Level 5 rolls nothing but 2's while the CR is rolling nothing but 17s.
Question: What is the style of your game?
If you're running a semi-to-strict combat game, then you have less meta-tools and have to think about encounter design and such. Thing is you and your players likely value the "we figured out the odds, found ways to manage them, and this is the result". A part of the fun of Min/Maxing a character is to actually break some of the mechanics of the game so that you can, indeed, steamroller through "level appropriate" dungeons because you optimized your build to do just that. And more than likely in a group like that, everyone should be able to take their lumps when the dice don't go their way and they lose. Just like when you can have the perfect plan for Monopoly (which is by the way a horrible game), if you never land on the railroads to execute said plan, that's that.
On the other hand if you're running a game that's more story driven, you have tools such as fudging a few stats here or there, bringing in NPC back up, etc. This kind of group tends to expect to win, the question is "by how much?" So if they're getting beat down by bad rolls, having an NPC charge in to save the day is more acceptable as it's still a "loss" but one that keeps the game and story going. Ideally the players want to be the heroes and for this kind of group, being one upped by the NPC is almost as bad as having a character die. Only.. they don't die.
I tend to run story-centric games where the heroes, generally, make it to see the last chapter so I'm far more likely to create narrow wins or allow some "logical supportive intervention" than other people would care for. But I'm also the sort to talk to someone who seems to be "missing the point" of these things if I have to so that all of the table keeps having fun.
So i've had a few games where one or more players (or the DM) just has stupid levels of luck. Sometimes that luck is good, sometimes it's bad. But how do you balance a campaign where one or more persons can't seem to roll below a 15 (before modifiers). Like i could just throw a mass of enemies at them, but then if their luck runs out they are ****ed. The issue is, it's super boring when your players are just steamrolling what should be moderate to high difficulty. Or on the inverse, your players haven't rolled above a 10 (after modifiers) for more then a session. Like i can only "story" them through so much, before they get super pissed that they haven't had a chance to roll in the last 2+ hours..... But where is the fun if you're just walking through "babies first maze" while being level 5+
> it's super boring when your players are just steamrolling what should be moderate to high difficulty
Why is that boring? That should be exciting, as long as it's not the norm! It's an opportunity for the player(s) to feel totally badass.
I guess you have to put in a bit of work to make it badass though. The players shouldn't remember that string of good rolls, they should remember how they sliced the dragon's head off before it could use its breath even once.
Regarding the opposite situation, why can't failure be almost as fun? Seems like it could be, as long as it leads to fun and interesting situations. Maybe it should be part of our encounter design to consider what fun things will happen if the players fail.
By definition, long good or bad streaks are very unlikely. You can't predict them. And when you're in one you won't know if it's over or just beginning. So it doesn't seem like you could do anything about it, other than make sure fun will be had regardless.
Caveat: I'm a new DM, so take it with a grain of salt.
Luck happens. You don't normally have to deal with it, just make sure that you're not using luck as an excuse to screw your players too much and it should work out. Usually players get frustrated with luck, not the DM or game itself.
Things generally work out on average. And when they don't, it can just be a fun and unusual session.
I do not account for luck. I assume "average rolls." Even in Champions, when I used to pre-test every single battle (easier to do in Champions because there are usually fewer battles per adventure compared to D&D), I learned very early on not to "roll" for anything in the battle, but only to assume average rolls for to-hit and damage (because rolling very lucky for one side or the other would skew my results). In the actual battle, sometimes players got lucky or unlucky (like the one guy who rolled 3 natural 18s on 3D6, i.e. equivalent to a D&D nat 1 but much less likely, during one session). But if you have balanced for average, the luck should even out over time.
I had a battle against specters for a level 5 party a few months ago that, based on the # of specters, should have been a non-trivial challenge (not super hard, but not super easy either). I couldn't roll double digits on the d20 for the specters, and not one single blow landed. To this day, the party, despite having fought something like 10 specters, has no idea what happens to you when a specter hits you.
Yes the battle was super easy, but it was still fun (each time the specters moved in and tried to attack, the players worried -- and I think they became MORE worried as the battle went on because nothing had landed yet, and in a player's mind, luck is going to run out and when the blow DOES land you are going to take all that more damage -- even though no such thing can happen in reality).
And then the next battle was against two powerful Yuan-Ti who were able to mind-manipulate half the party (one went to sleep, one was tricked by illusions, one fled in fear, at various stages of the battle) and the players were the ones who got unlucky with those saving throws. So it all balances out in the end.
So... yeah I don't really account for or try to fudge rolls when it comes to real-world luck. I just let it happen.
Now, accounting for the Lucky feat, you might have to do if one or more PCs have it in your party (one does in mine). But not for die-rolling luck.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Mmm... Be wary - triumphant pride precipitates a dizzying fall...
“It cannot be seen, cannot be felt, Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt, It lies behind stars and under hills, And empty holes it fills, It comes first and follows after, Ends life, kills laughter.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
You don't balance for luck, you balance luck. Most dungeons should have a small chance of the players absolutely steamrolling the enemies like Marvel heroes. Most dungeons should also have an equally small chance of the enemies killing a character or two and forcing a retreat to avoid TPK. That's what balance is. It's not ensuring that the result of a fight will always be close: it's ensuring that it will usually be close, and when it's not, it's just as likely to swing one way as the other (or slightly more likely to swing one way, depending on your group's style).
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
As long as the dice are fair (there are ways of checking using salt water) then over the course of a campaign it all evens out. You may remember the sessions full of ones or 20s but ultimately if you recorded every single (not advantage/disadvantage) dice roll then over time each number on a dice will come up approx 5% of the time. Now obv if you throw in advantage, the lucky feat, re rolls etc then the positive dice rolls start to become more prevalent but even then you will be surprised at how even the spread actually is. If a player is rolling a high percentage of high rolls then I would suggest you either, check the dice are fair (not suggesting they cheat they might have been made unbalanced) or just keep a closer eye they are not fudging dice rolls. But over time the dice roll long will all even out.
No gripes when the DM can't roll above 10. Everyone gripes when they can't roll above 14. Don't worry about balancing for luck. OR buy 100 d20 and dice tower. And everyone rotates through the d20s. Also the salt water trick only works on some plastic dice. I have some dice I bought in early 80s which sink.
No Gaming is Better than Bad Gaming.
Make sure that the fun stuff of the game isn't dependent on good rolls. You can have entire sessions of roleplaying with needing a single roll. Or you make sure that the players always can fail forward. WebDM ahs a recent episode on that which is really good.
For example, if the players fail to disarm the trap of the dungeon entrance high up in the mountain they might cave in that entrance but the landslide reveals a second entrance. The only problem is that there is a monster who was slepping there. Or, to use the same principle in a social encounter. Take the fancy part scene from the episode "Shindig. Mal completes botches the social encounters, especially in regards to Atherton Wing. However, in doing so he opens up a new avenue of approach, the only problem is that he has to survive a duel first.
I agree with Lost; it's important as a DM to include multiple fail states when running a game, to ensure it is able to progress. The idea isn't that you should just hand stuff unearned to your players for the sake of keeping things moving, but rather failures should have a cost, successes should have a reward, and the continuation of the game shouldn't be necessarily considered either the reward or the cost.
I always like to use a murder mystery as an example. You give the players a room and maybe say that if the skill DC to find the murderer's abandoned glove that got swept under the carpet is 14. The single fail state here is, if nobody rolls over 14 investigating, then adventure over, they cannot progress. The "door" to the next area is barred. If you were to have multiple fail states in this situation, maybe you still find the clue after a day's searching of the crime scene but now you've lost all kinds of time and the killer may have struck again. Maybe you find the clue, but instead of a half-burned letter in the fireplace you find a fully burned letter with only the barest scrap ofv text still readable, maybe you find planted evidence that sends you after the wrong person for a bit before the killer strikes and they get back on their true trail.
As far as it goes with combat, sometimes the luck of the die is inevitable and just going to dictate what it dictates (hey, just like life sometimes), but you do still have a little wiggle-room there. Are the people they're fighting intelligent? Maybe if the party goes down due to the dice gods ire, they all go unconscious and wake up some time later in cages, all their gear gone, and the spellcasters bound and gagged, and now it's a prison escape to try and find a way out before the cultists/bandits sacrifice/ransom you, etc.
Even if you're not fighting intelligent creatures, hell, even animals want something. Are they fighting a territorial beast? Maybe once the party is battered and nearly down, the beast stops attacking and starts chasing them out of its territory. Is it defending itself? Then maybe it tries to escape when it seems the party no longer a threat? Is it hungry? Maybe it takes down and kills one of the party members and spends the rest of the fight guarding its kill, giving the other players space to retreat while it drags the player's carcass back to its lair to devour it. This is often times how actual animals will fight, not always taking it to the death.
Not all combat *needs* to be a flat out fight to the death. Maybe an evil npc with a beef against a particular PC will challenge them to single combat, setting conditions. Maybe they challenge the party to a battle of wits, or maybe once the party are at their mercy they'll give them an ultimatum like "you will bring the Orb of Plot to *me*, and you have until tomorrow before I attack the village and slaughter all you hold dear". I get that this type of interaction requires a particular type of bad guy, but I'm sure you get the gist.
P.s. I'd be remiss if I didn't link Matt Coville's video on multiple fail states, surprised nobody beat me to it: https://youtu.be/l1zaNJrXi5Y
There was a saying we had in HS when we played the daylights out of Axis and Allies:
"Brilliant strategist; lousy F'ing dice roller".
Sometimes the best laid plans simply fall prey to the RNGods and you're just plain humped. You can't account for random weather patterns, lucky communication interceptions, random wild animals or all the other things that interfere in war and at the game table you can't really account for a streak of bad luck. A level 5 fighter should drop a CR1 creature long before it can land a hit. On the other hand, sometimes it doesn't work that way and that Level 5 rolls nothing but 2's while the CR is rolling nothing but 17s.
Question: What is the style of your game?
If you're running a semi-to-strict combat game, then you have less meta-tools and have to think about encounter design and such. Thing is you and your players likely value the "we figured out the odds, found ways to manage them, and this is the result". A part of the fun of Min/Maxing a character is to actually break some of the mechanics of the game so that you can, indeed, steamroller through "level appropriate" dungeons because you optimized your build to do just that. And more than likely in a group like that, everyone should be able to take their lumps when the dice don't go their way and they lose. Just like when you can have the perfect plan for Monopoly (which is by the way a horrible game), if you never land on the railroads to execute said plan, that's that.
On the other hand if you're running a game that's more story driven, you have tools such as fudging a few stats here or there, bringing in NPC back up, etc. This kind of group tends to expect to win, the question is "by how much?" So if they're getting beat down by bad rolls, having an NPC charge in to save the day is more acceptable as it's still a "loss" but one that keeps the game and story going. Ideally the players want to be the heroes and for this kind of group, being one upped by the NPC is almost as bad as having a character die. Only.. they don't die.
I tend to run story-centric games where the heroes, generally, make it to see the last chapter so I'm far more likely to create narrow wins or allow some "logical supportive intervention" than other people would care for. But I'm also the sort to talk to someone who seems to be "missing the point" of these things if I have to so that all of the table keeps having fun.
"Teller of tales, dreamer of dreams"
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