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r/rpg•
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What to do for a player who doesn't roll any successes?

I play in four different games right now: Pathfinder, D&D 5th ed, Rift, and Shadowrun 5th ed. My partner also plays in these games, and been part of the gaming community for nearly thirty years. He can create characters for systems I've never ever heard of ("The Dark Eye"?), and loves talking tactics and feats. He's well-grounded in combat mechanics, but doesn't feel comfortable with heavy RP (which is entirely my bag, baby). We work well together: I'm the mouth, he's the mechanics, and we're both the brains.

His main problem is that his luck with dice is abysmal. It doesn't matter what kind of roll, or what kind of dice, or whether he needs to roll above or below the target number. In Rift, he's rolling in the 80-90% ranges. In Pathfinder and D&D, his d20 only goes to 5... or maybe 9, if the dice gods smile upon him. Hell, when we were in a FATE game, all we saw from him were minus signs. If he borrows other people's dice, it's the same result: failure after failure after failure. I know that it's everyone's turn in the bad luck bucket sometimes, but this is going on eight years of multi-session games, and it's been a constant source of hilarity and pain in equal measure. Now that he's running a weekly D&D game for our group, we're forcing reactions every round (what used to be called AoOs), just to watch his monsters miss us. The man cannot hit the broad side of a barn with these rolls. He accepts it with good grace, but every so often I'm starting to catch a snort of disgust or a look of disappointment when he looks at his rolls.

It's my turn in the GM seat when next we shift paradigms (aka we all get bored with the system and/or setting). I'm toying with the idea of changing the target number as a result of each attempt. Say he tries to hit a guy wearing armor:
Hapless: I swing at the bad guy with my sword! ...and roll a total of... seven.
GM: That doesn't get through his armor, but you ruffled his feathers. Something got bent or twisted with that strike. His armor is reduced by one point.
Hapless: At least it wasn't totally useless...

The idea is that the longer the fight goes on, the easier it gets to hit the other guy. As long as I apply it equally to both sides of the fight, this might be just what poor Hapless needs to not be so disappointed in his rolls. I can reduce armor, nick off damage bonuses ("You missed anything vital, but accidentally banged the thumb on his sword hand. It's not broken, but it hurts like hell and is starting to swell up. I'll take a point of damage off his next three strikes for this combat."), or negate dexterity bonuses as needed.

Is this reasonable, or am I mucking with a well-established system for no real gain? I just want to help him feel like he's contributing to the group's success with some successes of his own, instead of always watching everyone else use his tactics with better results. Thoughts?

TL/DR; player can't succeed at a roll. Ever. Would moving the goalposts be worth it?

Posted Jun 13, 2015, 6:46 AM UTC

1233
siebharinn•

Confirmation bias

44
Pixelnator•

Statistically it is improbable, but not impossible, that he is having a ridiculously long streak of bad luck.

Anyways, he could consider things where rolls are irrelevant if it makes him feel better. Magic Missile and Fireball both deal guaranteed damage (unless the target has evasion). Basically everything with save halves.

2
[deleted]•

[deleted]

19
Andvarinaut•

Many moons ago, I brought a new player to one of my games. We were playing something old-school, and his experience with games was solely this system for about 10 sessions. One night, my friend was rolling exceptionally poorly. He kept complaining about it, so we kept telling him it was just his confirmation bias at work, that he rolled better other nights and that 'luck is lucky and unlucky!' So when his character got knocked out, he got super fed up with us. He got up with scratch paper and went bonkers over in a corner for over an hour rolling his dice, recording results, rolling again...

When he came back to the table, he shoved the results in our faces. Proof! And we ate our words. It was true-- he really did have extremely poor dice luck... according to the system.

You see, this system had flip-flopped dice mechanics: 20s were automatic failures and 1s were critical successes... and out of 200 die rolls, his average die roll was an 18, with multiple consecutive nat 20s...

3
RadiantSolarWeasel•

Your friend needed new dice.

4
guybrush5ironin denial•

Them dice need Educatin' ! .. in the worst possible way, teach them a lesson they'll never forget.

i.e. place on sacrificial dice, usually the worst culprit in a tub of acetone ... place the others in a circle around the tub overnight to watch it melt.

1
SapientBeard•

Look into a dice less system like Amber or Lords of Gossamer and Shadow. My current GM is using a home brewed dice less star wars which is a ton of fun.

If you've got questions about it I can elaborate.

Edit -

I'm going to describe how we're doing the Star Wars diceless, as I like it a bit more than the LoGaS system, although it is based off of it.

Everyone starts off with 100 points. You can spend these points however you want on your stats and abilities. You have 3 stats that govern most of what happens.

  • Battle – How good you are at fighting and your resistance to battle based force powers.
  • Mind – How smart you are, how much you know, and your resistance to mind based force powers.
  • Life – How much damage you can take, how long you can keep fighting, how much general energy you have, and using the force also drains your life.

The abilities tie to these stats.

Ability focused on mind would be

Techie – 20pts You have a basic understand of technology and how it functions. You can do a few things with tech that the average user can’t, and are able to bypass basic security systems with enough time.

While a battle ability would be

Zero-G Combat – 10pts You know how to function and fight at peak efficiency in a zero gravity, or low gravity.

While it's not directly competitive, nobody knows each other stats. It makes character creation weird, because you don't know how you compare to everyone else. Was 10 points enough to put into mind? Is my 35 points in battle the best right now? The GM will look at everyones score before the first game and develop his own 'baseline' for opponents.

An example of part of a fight.

  • Adam, Bob and Charles are the players and their ship is being boarded. They all decide to set up an ambush.
  • The enemy cuts through a door and storm in. The players are all given a little bonus to their battle for preparing an ambush and quickly cut down the initial forces.
  • A sith is on board the enemy ship and uses his 'force fear' ability on them, but the GM doesn't tell the players. All he says is that Adam fears a incredible sense of impending doom. Something really, really bad is going to happen. As far as the players are concerned, maybe Adam is sensitive towards something and truly is detecting something bad, but really he's just the only character with a lower mind score.

So different situations will give you an advantage. Just because someone else has a higher Battle score than you, doesn't mean you will lose to him. In a straight fight you will, but maybe you have some abilities to give you an edge, like two weapon fighting or abnormal strength. Those abilities, combined with out thinking your opponent by ambushing him, distracting him (maybe relying on a mind stat) can push you into a winning position.

The key to all of this is you don't know anyone's stats besides your own starting stat. When you gain XP, you don't know how much, and you just tell the GM how you want to spread the XP out. "Priorities at level up are the mechanic skill, a new weapon specialization with blaster pistols, bring my mind up to 40 and the rest into battle." And the GM might let you know "Alright, you gained the mechanic skill and the blaster pistol skill, if there are remainders they will go as you asked."

It takes a really dedicated GM, which I am fortunate to have. The lack of numbers in the game is refreshing. There is no "well my armor is 20, and he didn't roll high enough to pierce that." Or "Even though I have the best fighter in the game, I botched 4 rolls in a row and the wizard is doing better melee damage than I am."

11
Sinstrider•

Please do I'm curious

4
SapientBeard•

I updated my post.

2
TyphoidLarry•

Also curious. Love to hear more.

3
SapientBeard•

I updated my post.

2
TyphoidLarry•

Thank you! This is really cool.

2
Thouny•

Yeah. Amber Diceless seems like the obvious solution.

2
QWOPTheRaven•

If he's rolling the same results every time, no matter which dice he uses, maybe he's not actually rolling? Check if he's just dropping them on the same number instead of really rolling them. Get everyone to bounce their dice off the DM screen or something, to make it more random.

11
cephalord•

'Luck' is not really a thing. Maybe he is not as good at using the mechanics as you think?

9
jedavThe Iron City - ACKS, MongTrav•

My thoughts as well. "If the dice can screw you over, your build isn't strong enough or your tactics are lousy." Speaking from a 3.x/PF perspective, OP should consider a bard or other buffmonkey (no need to make opposed rolls, stay in the back and try to avoid having to save) or an enchanter or other save-or-suck arcanist (crank your DCs, roll no dice, and rely on enemy saves conforming to a more uniform distribution than your own rolls).

7
sroske1•

Play Fiasco

8
SmellyTofuToronto•

Get a tower. He probably isn't actually rolling the die, a tower will probably help him.

5
Never_Poe•

Let him get some small amount of xp each time he fails ("You've missed the shot, but you notice why"). This may allow him to be better prepared for the upcoming challenges (by having better modifier than it should be). Since his situation is so bad, he will have his character maxed out in no time.

3
gradenko_2000•

  1. Use digital dice

  2. Use a different base dice mechanic. The d20 is very swingy and has a bunch of problems maintaining integrity with the fiction if you get a series of bad rolls, except its also so very revered. Consider games that use a bell-curved dice mechanic

  3. What you're describing as "moving the goalposts" is otherwise known as "failing forward": if the player rolls badly, they never enter a situation where "nothing happens". Yes, give them a partial success with a complication if they reach within 3 or 4 of the DC on a d20 roll.

  4. With regards to combat, consider implementing (partial-)damage-on-a-miss or an escalation die

3
Roboloutre•

*You completely fail your attack, landing a hit on his foot, both of you losing balance. You fumble and roll forward resulting in your enemy's fall, knocking him out."
But I guess you tried that already ?

2
seycyrus•

Maybe he needs new dice?

It his luck applies to ALL dice, you've got some psychic phenomenon going on, and might be able to make some money.

But, I think that his luck is normal, and you just feel his pain more. Or he acts on it more.

2
VonMansfeldPoland (Wolsung, TSoY, Iron Kingdoms)•

Play Dungeon World. A little bit curved rolls (2d6) and each time a PC achieve 6 or lower result, he/she gains 1 XP. So, in the long-term, that Bad Luck Player should advance further and gain some nice Moves and better Attributes with leveling up the PC.

2
curly123Sooke•

Try getting him new dice. His may not be evenly weighted and could be causing poor rolls.

2
iseir•

I'm in the same boat as your friend, but thankfully it was only the d20 that ended up being in the low number range. stopped playing d20 games and swapped to d100 and 2d6 games (some d10 games) and my luck was considered average.

so i guess your friend is really unlucky, and the only suggestion i got is to look at this system: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/100243/STALKER--The-SciFi-Roleplaying-Game?term=stalker (it doesnt use dice, but a mix between roleplaying and ideas)

1
gibbie420•

I agree with u/siebharinn but also think that each gaming group is very different. So, if your group agrees, then I would perhaps utilize degrees of failure for this.

DC-1 - DC-4 = 1 Degree of Failure

DC-5 - DC-8 = 2 Degrees of Failure

And so on...

Perhaps for 1 degree of failure, you chink their armor and perhaps lower their AC. Maybe some other mechanic to represent the lowering of their hit DC, varying by system. Perhaps on the 2nd degree of failure you lower their AC by 1, and maybe by 2 on the first degree. How you mechanically lay it out, is ultimately up to you and your gaming group. However: There needs to be failure.

Without failure, then how do people miss? Missing/Failing is the risk in playing the game. There needs to be risk of failure in order to keep tension, suspense, and respect. With a miss simply being a lowering of AC, it's not really a miss. You're rewarding players and characters for failing. That's why say only doing that for the First Degree of Failure instead of just "for a miss" would probably work out better - kind like rewarding them for coming close. Also, if your PCs chink away at AC like that, why wouldn't the enemies do the same against the PCs? Doing this to your PCs would be rather difficult, damaging their armor after all is like taking away their XP. Equipment is just as important to the character (sheet) as the character themselves.

All in all, at the end of my convoluted thinking on the topic, the takeaways and TL;DR are:

  1. Limit this type of DC reduction system to First/Second Degrees of Failure

  2. Keep the ability to fail and miss in your system or else PCs will quickly become disengaged and unmotivated

  3. This street goes both ways, if you allow PCs to lower NPCs Hit DCs, then it must work against PCs also

1
npgam-es•

5e has rules where the DM never rolls dice, maybe look into something similar?

1
MackTheMouse2•

You two should go to Vegas, play roulette, and you bet on red every time he bets on black, and vice versa.

1
cfcsvanberg•

Use decks of cards with all the possible results of each die he uses. Let him draw cards instead of rolling. Reshuffle the deck between "rolls". See if that works for him.

1
Haen_Enter location here.•

The answer to your question is as DM, adjust the target number based on what is fun. Is the player trying to do something cool or fun, don't tell them the number, have them roll and if the roll isn't terrible, let them succeed.

1
LazyGM•

You could use the escalation die mechanic from 13th age, just for him.

Maybe do something like this.

The first time your player fails a roll, put a D6 on the table and set it to one. Add this die to the player's next role. From here on out, whenever player fails twice in a row, increase the d6 by one. It's kind of a bullshit thing to do, but if it's keeping said player from having a good time, it's worth considering.

1