Agh! The rolls, the terrible, terrible rolls...
Posted: Fri Jul 23, 2010 10:43 pm
This is an off topic post about another game, but I needed to share the pain, the pain, oh the pain... 
So the group I play Bash with is also doing a D&D game, run by one of the others. We started a new group last weekend running through Keep on the Shadowfell, and as of tonight we've had four combat encounters. We have had some of the worst rolling I've ever seen, and tonight was the lowest of the low.
We ended up deciding that half the party was hung over for this battle. It was first thing in the morning, and yesterday we'd convinced our patron in town to pay for our tab at the inn, and several of us mentioned how much the bar tab was going to be costing him... Then bright and early this morning, in the first round in fact, our only two successful attacks were the barbarian's Howl of Fury, and the Bard's Shout of Triumph, and everything went south after that. So clearly all the yelling triggered massive hangover headaches that impeded our performance for the rest of the fight...
It was supposed to be an easy encounter, with 7 kobolds vs. 6 player characters, intended to be a simple warm up for the real encounters soon to come. In the first two rounds, the GM landed 4 crits, maybe 6 hits, and missed once. In contrast, the players hit twice and missed maybe 14 rolls (some of them were areas). That pattern continued for at least 6+ rounds. We had entire rounds where none of the 6 players hit anything (I think there was one where we never even got above a 12 after bonuses!)
By the end of the evening the GM had 8 or 9 crits, 8 misses, and everything else was a hit (so around 40 hits maybe). In contrast, the party rolled totally pathetic - area attacks against the weak defense of the kobolds would hit with maybe 1 in 6, if that. Some area attacks were total whiffs. For three rounds straight, the only player character who hit was the ranged controller who was boxed into a corner in melee and was stuck using her basic melee attack...
Between us, we used 4 action points for extra attacks, including some area attacks, so we had 10 attack opportunities on the 4 action points, and we landed only 2 hits. Talk about a waste... We used all the healing in the party, including second winds and potions, and the only thing that kept us going was a group buff that gave most of us some damage resistance which blunted some of the effect of the GM almost never missing.
Now, while this was the worst of the bunch, our prior encounters involved a fair bit of bad rolling too, leading us to wonder if the party was cursed. We had some fun quotes tonight, like "What does that power actually do, you've never hit with it before", followed a little later in the same round "That's okay, we've never seen that power hit before either..." And this is talking about at-will attacks that have been thrown a lot, but just never hit.
It got a bit frustrating early on, but by the end of the night we couldn't stop laughing - it really ended up being a lot of fun.
So the group I play Bash with is also doing a D&D game, run by one of the others. We started a new group last weekend running through Keep on the Shadowfell, and as of tonight we've had four combat encounters. We have had some of the worst rolling I've ever seen, and tonight was the lowest of the low.
We ended up deciding that half the party was hung over for this battle. It was first thing in the morning, and yesterday we'd convinced our patron in town to pay for our tab at the inn, and several of us mentioned how much the bar tab was going to be costing him... Then bright and early this morning, in the first round in fact, our only two successful attacks were the barbarian's Howl of Fury, and the Bard's Shout of Triumph, and everything went south after that. So clearly all the yelling triggered massive hangover headaches that impeded our performance for the rest of the fight...
It was supposed to be an easy encounter, with 7 kobolds vs. 6 player characters, intended to be a simple warm up for the real encounters soon to come. In the first two rounds, the GM landed 4 crits, maybe 6 hits, and missed once. In contrast, the players hit twice and missed maybe 14 rolls (some of them were areas). That pattern continued for at least 6+ rounds. We had entire rounds where none of the 6 players hit anything (I think there was one where we never even got above a 12 after bonuses!)
By the end of the evening the GM had 8 or 9 crits, 8 misses, and everything else was a hit (so around 40 hits maybe). In contrast, the party rolled totally pathetic - area attacks against the weak defense of the kobolds would hit with maybe 1 in 6, if that. Some area attacks were total whiffs. For three rounds straight, the only player character who hit was the ranged controller who was boxed into a corner in melee and was stuck using her basic melee attack...
Between us, we used 4 action points for extra attacks, including some area attacks, so we had 10 attack opportunities on the 4 action points, and we landed only 2 hits. Talk about a waste... We used all the healing in the party, including second winds and potions, and the only thing that kept us going was a group buff that gave most of us some damage resistance which blunted some of the effect of the GM almost never missing.
Now, while this was the worst of the bunch, our prior encounters involved a fair bit of bad rolling too, leading us to wonder if the party was cursed. We had some fun quotes tonight, like "What does that power actually do, you've never hit with it before", followed a little later in the same round "That's okay, we've never seen that power hit before either..." And this is talking about at-will attacks that have been thrown a lot, but just never hit.
It got a bit frustrating early on, but by the end of the night we couldn't stop laughing - it really ended up being a lot of fun.