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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by Zonetrooper@lemmy.world to c/dnd@lemmy.world

Everyone has bad dice days. Everyone has that one time you get a Nat 1 at a critical moment.

But guys, my party is in trouble.

They're consistently rolling terribly in combat across multiple sessions, classes, and dice types. And I mean terribly. Over time, you'd think their d20 rolls would average out to about unmodified 10, right? Plus or minus a bit. Hah. No. They're averaging about 7. Other rolls (damage, healing, etc) also often suffer from this. It's turning combat into a slog; anything with an AC of above 12-14 or so is proving awful to fight, and when attacks do hit they often do little damage.

We're all experienced players, and it's a digital platform - so I can both know they're not missing modifications to the raw d20 roll, and know it's not "bad dice". Unfortunately, they're also experienced enough to figure out ACs from misses/hits, so it's not like I can even give them "free passes" on attacks as anti-frustration measures.

It's at the point where I'm thinking the honest only way to "fix" this is to artificially nerf NPCs or vastly reduce the CR I'm used to them being able to handle. Is that really it, folks?

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[-] resting_parrot@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 months ago

You could borrow hero points from Pathfinder. Basically, each player gets one or two hero points at the beginning of the session and can spend it to reroll a d20 at any point in the night. You take the rerolled result. Note that these expire at the end of the session and cannot be stacked up for next time.

[-] Horta@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 months ago

Give them custom weapons or spells that are most effective when you roll low.

[-] Zonetrooper@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Out of all the ideas here, this is one that interest me the most. I've seen a lot of things, but not something that does better when you're low...

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

You might consider adding a puzzle element to encounters that can lower the effective difficulty with clever maneuvers or strategies.

As an example, fighting in a room with a big chandelier overhead. A player can cut the chandelier at the opportune moment to pin a major adversary, allowing them to coup de grace or simply flaunt their victory to the villain's face.

Or perhaps fighting in a room full of mirrors that allow a clever player to reflect a gaze attack. Or doing Battleship style combat, where you have to pick the square of a hidden enemy, but you guarantee a hit if you guess correctly.

In general, try introducing non-dice resolutions to the scene - guessing a magic word that disables a key piece of enemy tech, baiting enemies into an area or formation before springing a trap, completing a ritual that can summon a powerful ally by solving a rubric cube.

If all else fails, you can drop some nice loot them. Awand of fireballs or Staff of the Sun or similar high powered magic item, for instance. Doesn't matter how you roll with these, you're going to have some fun.

[-] Zonetrooper@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Tactical gameplay is already something I very much encourage. One nice thing about playing with the same group for a long time is that I know they'll respond when I put things on the map - opportunities to flank, drop or collapse things, and so on.

[-] Canconda@lemmy.ca 0 points 2 months ago

Use digital dice?

Narrative solution would be to reveal the party has been cursed somehow this entire time. You can then give them a trinket/spell that mitigates low rolls. They get the best of 2 rolls once per combat or something like that.

[-] Davel23@fedia.io 2 points 2 months ago

We're all experienced players, and it's a digital platform

[-] Zonetrooper@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Don't know if you caught it in the OP, but this is already a digital platform. I will look into the idea of a "trinket of luck" or something (non-attuned, because punishing them for their bad luck seems like a bad move).

[-] Test_Tickles@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Computers can't do random. They usually approximate random by truncating seconds since epoc and throwing them into an algorithm the hashes them up into something that's sort of random. Problem is that time is not really random. You ever notice that your random music shuffle seems to play the same shit all the time? Unless of course somebody else is there to listen, then it plays crazy shit you've never heard before. It probably has less to do with luck and more to do with you having regular listening habits, and the times that it plays crazy shit is those times that you are listening outside of your normal habits. And then there's the algorithm that they use. There's been a number of digital games that I have stopped playing because the "randomizer" was so shit that I could begin to "predict" future rolls.

[-] Antagnostic@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The luck system might be something to look into. It can help mitigate consecutive failures while maintaining balance.

[-] Zonetrooper@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Thanks for that link! I'll toss that at my group and see what they think.

this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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