Okay, I posted this at the Google Chrome Extensions page on June 1st.
Above VTT is functionally average. The issue with it is that the dice are completely broken. I'm pretty sure I've rolled more 2's on a D20 to hit roll than all other numbers combined. Just before this, to prove my point, started rolling and just kept rerolling until I got a result that was 11+. That took 7 rolls. So I keep rolling. Now I'm seeing how long until I get a 19 or a 20. The answer is 37 rolls. So it takes 37 times to get a result that is 1 in 10. Okay fine, so how about getting that magical 1 in 20 roll of 20?? That took 57 tries. How many 1's and 2's along the way? LOTS OF THEM. Consistently rolling this bad suck all the joy out of playing D&D. And it's not like this was just me saying, "Gee I wonder how fair the VTT/Beyond Dice are??" I came into this review KNOWING it was broken after being forced to play on this hell-spawned extension for months and months. I knew exactly what my little test run would look like. Six 1's. Ten 2's. One 19. One 20. It's the fact that it's so consistent that's infuriating. As a sometime GM I will never ever ever subject my players to this hell. FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY FIX YOUR DAMN DICE ROLLER!!!
So I without cheating, I'm going to do another test run and post the results. How many 1's and 2's will I roll on my way to finally rolling a 19? How many more till I roll a 20?:
Rolls in order: 18, 16, 1, 18, 6, 4, 16, 1, 16, 11, 1, 17, 6, 4, 17, 20. So I rolled 3 natural 1's before finally getting to a 20. I wish it actually mattered. Granted that's an improvement from the prior test, and it didn't take 57 rolls to get a 20. Just for this random test, the numbers seem to no longer be clustering in the 10 and under category. Regardless, in the current campaign I have rolled a NAT 1 in every combat round for the last 3 rounds, but I have not rolled a NAT 20 to hit in over 3 months. The dice rolls have been overwhelmingly landing under 10. 1's and 2's are astoundingly commonplace.
Other issues: My avatar/token says I have Inspiration and am under 1/2 hit points. It's been stuck there for 3 weeks. My Beyond Character Sheet has been updated and changed several times since. The D&D branded VTT is not the only VTT in town. There are lots of other options. I suggest you fix the tokens and the insanely broken Beyond dice roller. The trouble with the dice: Bad luck sticks to one player and never lets go. Good luck sticks to other players and never lets go. But in the current campaign I'm playing in, very low rolls are extremely common. 20's are vanishingly rare. This presents a HUGE problem because when designing 5th Edition, WOC took a whole crap-ton of effects that used to happen on every successful hit, and demoted them to "Only if you rolled a NAT 20." 5E is absolutely LOADED with instances of this. So if you're a high level character swinging around a Vorpal Sword, Hammer of Thunderbolts, Nine Lives Stealer, Blade of Medusa, Sword of Sharpness, Mace of Smiting, Staff of the Ivory Claw, Orcsplitter, Silver Sword, Wave ... and countless other things, that "really cool thing that only happens when you Crit/Roll 20" might as well not exist at all. Can somebody PLEASE fix the dice algorithm??? Current GM is hell bent on using Beyond and your VTT so while he's GM, I just have to put up with it. I've come to the conclusion that subjecting players to these things is just cruel and sucks all the joy out of D&D. Any D&D fans that I talk to about Beyond or VTT are likely to get an earful from me and the rest of us about how much we hate it.
EDIT: I was a bit shocked that I got to a NAT 20 so quickly in today's first test run, so just for fun I ran it again. This time I finally got a NAT 20 on the 66th roll, and rolled three NAT 1's and three 2's in the process of getting there. This matches my in-game experiences perfectly. NAT 20's happen so rarely they might as well not exist. Rolling a 1 or a 2 is VASTLY more common. And the VTT token still thinks I have 56/136 HP when that total hasn't been accurate in that past 3 weeks. Also, is it seriously that difficult to create a mobile version of VTT? I'm frequently unable to get onto my personal laptop. Real life happens and I'm busy. I'm not about to start logging into Beyond or installing extensions on a work laptop. So my personal laptop at home is the only place I can view/interact with the map.
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bonkers_the_almighty#5879 here. I can't do anything but Monday nights, but my wife and would likely both be interested. We have kids so it matters how signifcant the time commitment is.
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From my character sheet in D&D Beyond. Tried to get a screenshot for you but that appears to be pointlessly complicated for some reason. All I did is kept rolling and keeping track of the results in a Notepad text file. Super low complexity.
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Thanks for the response. I suppose we can wait and see if anyone has anything to say to the contrary, but I think Lilith is 100% correct.
I don't intend for this to be a "gotcha" moment with the GM. I just want to know if there really is some "by the book" rules issue that would prevent me from doing that series of attacks. If I'm wrong, then I'm wrong.
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Okay so I got to 150 rolls and here's what I'm seeing:
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And here's another test run. The dice roller seems to bestow consistently bad luck on the same character. Other characters on the same account have seen fairly average results. My bad luck seems to be "stuck" to my Fighter/Champion who just happens to have two weapons with that all-important "Roll a 20 and something awesome happens" characteristics. So rolling just till I get my first 20 (I'm just putting in a 1 for each roll), we see that I rolled three NAT 1's and two NAT 2's before rolling a single NAT 20.
It took 27 rolls to get there and the results cluster heavily in the "10 or below" area. But I'll keep going.
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The fact that I rolled 3 NAT 1's in the same combat on the same day about a week ago, but haven't rolled a NAT 20 in four months ... Seems pretty excessive and not explainable by just "you're having a run of bad luck there." In addition, it had been a couple months, but I just recently rolled my first 19 in a couple months. But hey, maybe I am just insanely unlucky. Still waiting to break the 4 month drought on NAT 20 in campaign. My test roll runs are one thing, but what are the odds that I can roll over 200 times with zero NAT 20's?? That seems to go well beyond "a run of bad luck." That's reality warping terrible luck!
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The dice roller is just plain broken. There are those special chosen ones that consistently roll awesome. Then there are those of us that are cursed to perpetually roll terribly. Never rolling 20 isn't the end of the world, but it SERIOUSLY sucks when you're a Champion wielding multiple weapons with a "really cool thing happens if you roll a NAT 20." When you can go 3 months without rolling a NAT 20, all while rolling up countless 1's and 2's, it just sucks all the fun out of the game. Most recently, we had a combat that lasted 3 rounds. As a level 11 Champion, I get three attacks per round. Well, I rolled a NAT 1 on every single round, but haven't rolled a NAT 20 to hit in about 4 months.
So just as a test run, I rolled to myself and here was the results. 1.) How many rolls does it take to get any result between 11-20 (so 50% chance.) The answer? 11 rolls. Okay so how many times do I have to roll to get either a 19 or a 20 (so a 10% chance.) The answer: 37 rolls, including the first 11 rolls. Okay, so how many more rolls for that magical 5% chance NAT 20? I finally rolled a 20 on my 57th try.
A few days later I figured I'd try it again, but feeling a tad lazy, I just kept track of the number of rolls before I got a NAT 20. The answer: It took 66 rolls.
And just for fun, I did it again right now. It took 33 rolls to get a NAT 20.
No test of this has resulted in what should be a 1 in 20 occurrence happening in fewer than 20 tries.
For some reason, bad luck sticks to the same characters and good luck likewise seems to stick to the same characters. But it says something that I can just randomly start rolling, knowing full-well that the results will be horrible and to my disadvantage. In other words, I am not imagining things. I can literally roll dozens and dozens of 1's and 2's before I roll a NAT 20. It's so consistent that I can just change the roll to self and always see well over 20 tries to get a NAT 20. Meanwhile, NAT 1 is extremely frequent.
I don't know what is wrong with the algorithm, but can somebody PLEASE FIX THIS?? GM wants to use Beyond, so I can't just use something else.
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To me, this seems obvious. Game Master disagrees and is looking for a reason to invalidate the following.
Level 11 Fighter Champion wielding an attuned Hammer of Thunderbolts. So per my class/build I have 3 attacks per action. GM seems to think that the following would be breaking some rule or another:
Like I said, it seems pretty obvious, but the GM thinks I am wrong. After some massive overuse of homebrew and creatively fudging the rules in past campaigns that he and I took turns running, his whole shtick for this campaign is "100% by the book." Is there anything in the rules that says something like "you can't do melee and ranged with the same weapon in the same round"??