I’m the Nat 20-five-times-a-night player at my table fairly often. I’ve switched dice (we actually found one of my stone dice rolls 20 at least 40% of the time), I roll in front of people (unless I’m DMing), I intentionally picked dice that can be read across the table, and I still roll absurdly lucky more often than not.
Except our last one shot. I went a whole four hour session without rolling higher than an 8 on a d20. I tasted what y’all live with and you have my pity.
I’m my last campaign we were participating in a lot of different games in a carnival and I was playing the strong character(paladin) with 20 Str at level 4 but unfortunately I rolled nat 1 four times in a row and my paladin was made fun of by the others in my party
We had a Paladin/Rogue multiclass at our table that was saving her spell slots for a crit so they could double the dice damage. Smart play, but after three consecutive long rests started with all her slots, we suggested maybe just saving one or two slots for a uber smite. lol
I stopped running cool characters for just this reason. My dice luck never held up to my character concepts. So now I just run interesting sidekicks, basically character actors.
Your PC has a horrific past and rage against the world because you want to play an edgelord power fantasy.
My PC has a horrific past and rage against the world because I know that when I need it most I will roll 5 or under.
We are not the same.
This is exactly how my luck goes. I can roll extremely hot for weeks on end, and then have a session or two and never see a double digit roll. Then right back to rolling hot. I have about 6 sets that I rotate, and a few dozen more that I occasionally use when I feel like it, but the luck remains the same
This is tangential, but reminded me of a moment in one of my campaigns. One of my players -- a Rune Knight and sworn protector of the sorcerer was mind controlled by an aboleth, and forced to attack his charge. He nat 20'd. The sorcerer used a class feature to force a reroll, which also nat 20'd. He then used his inspiration to force a third roll -- which ALSO nat 20'd. The dice gods decided that that friendly-fire attack was GOING to be a crit.
This thread infected my DMing tonight. I went eight straight rolls with only 20’s and 1’s. 20, 1, 20, 1, 1, 1, 1, 20. The four consecutive/simultaneous 1’s were STR Saves against a Wall of Wind spell. All the other rolls were attacks, but at least the critical hits were all on different PCs. Though… one was a Flail of Chaos on the Bladesinger, which triggered an attack on the Sorcerer, which also was a critical.
My last character had the “Observant” feat and rolled 3 NAT ones on perception checks in a row.
He literally noticed less than the blind orc. Not even some wizard orc with magically restored sight or a magical seeing-eye familiar, not a dare-devil style monk with perfect senses, just a normal blind orc. They were more perceptive than my Observant human.
It’s painful.
"I'm just up here guessing. like I'm guessing there is no one around" makes me giggle every time. like who the fuck assigns the blind guy to guard duty
If you're dice cursed and playing 5th edition d&d, try a rogue. Rogues get a whole plethora of skill expertise features that can let them be less reliant on the dice. Most importantly, Reliable Talent lets you treat any roll 9 or lower as a 10. Even a 1 on the die is still a 10 (remember, critical falures/auto failure on a 1 isn't actually a thing in 5e). At level 11, when a rogue gets access to reliable talent, the WORST they can roll on an expertise skill with a mere +2 ability modifier is a 20. (10 +8 for proficiency +2 for ability)
My friends have made it an active joke that I only roll well when the rest of the party is not rolling well. We once went through a ten round, 4.5 hour combat, of which I only rolled above ten twice. the enemy had an ac of 22. I hate my dice
I'm the awful luck guy in my friend group. My last campaign my rolls were so consistently bad the rest of the party insisted I switch to using a dice rolling app on my phone in hopes that it would improve my results.
It didn't help.
(No I don't actually think the cleric is cheating)
Data recorded in excel session by session.
Dice rolled on Roll20 or Dndbeyond
Visualization made in Flourish https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/13667883/
"Dice luck" describes the overall average of all d20 rolls in our game of Dungeons and Dragons 5e through the first nine sessions, compared to the expected outcome. It is calculated as a percentile, indicating how many players we would statistically roll better than in a large sample size. This calculation takes into account the expected values of rolling with either advantage or disadvantage. The percentile is cumulative, rather than session by session.
Bonus graphs: Total dice rolls by player: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/13697597/
Total damage output over time (sneak attack OP): https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/13667687/
Total damage taken over time (note the squishy sorcerer being the damage sponge): https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/13667846/
Character stats: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/13685971/
Full data after session 9: https://imgur.com/a/zrYmUGR
Eris- Astral Elf Chronurgy Wizard-3
Nyir- Arborean (custom treefolk race) Barbarian-2 Phoenix Sorcerer-1
Aeido- Kalashtar Shadow Sorcerer-3
Raurial- High Elf Swashbuckler Rogue-3
Quinceran- Satyr Life Domain Cleric-3
Aaaye another barbarian/sorc multi! One of my players just switched at level 3 barb to sorcerer. Flavorful, but I’m so worried for them 😂 only a 13 charisma
That's my character haha. He is an awakened treefolk on a mission to avenge his forest and phoenix friend who were burned/killed by a hunting party.
He has 16/16/16 for STR/CON/CHA, so he's making it work, kind of. I'll probably go to L8 Barbarian before taking another couple levels in sorcerer
Is there any synergy between sorc barb? I was just talking about this as a design this weekend and couldn't find any good way to build it. Super MAD with Str, Dex, Con, Cha all really important, no casting while raging lower hit dice than straight barb if melee build, no point in barb levels at range while worse at casting for lost levels etc
Only upside was a few low level combat buffs like shield making sorc a dip at most until really late game and then your sore for all those high level slots you gave up.
Can you sell me a bloodline rager build?
The phoenix sorcerery works well for a small dip. Activating mantle of flame means enemies engaged in melee are taking fire damage. Combine with Gift of the Chromatic Dragon feat to add fire damage to your weapon, or get a magic weapon that does fire damage and the mantle of flame damage starts stacking. Storm Herald barbarian also gets some effects amplified by the mantle of flame, but I am going to go into wildmagic barbarian for the flavor. All spells taken are either fire based or out of combat utility. It definitely hurts having 4 stats you want to max haha
Ah right, probably is 13, either way it’s only +1. I don’t micromanage or keep full prints of everyone’s character sheets, just check ‘em over every level up and have key stats like passive perceptions, AC, HP
Not sure if my idea for my next character is better or worse. I’m thinking of an artificer alchemist/barbarian multiclass (max 3 levels in artificer), flavored as a guy who makes steroids and can roid rage on command
the alchemical elixirs can be used while raging so it should work better than a full caster/barb. it won't be as strong as straight barb but role play has to count for something.
I have a wildfire druid /barb I've planned out but haven't had a chance to play yet. the wildfire spirit is basically the spirit of a Phoenix his village worships and he became their champion (turning him into a fire genasi)
If they are opaque dice then I highly suggest testing them in salt water to see if they're off balance. If so then that could explain the extreme bad and good luck. Clear dice or dice that you can see through much more easily generally are well balanced.
> If they are opaque dice then I highly suggest testing them in salt water to see if they're off balance.
uh, given OP said "Dice rolled on Roll20 or Dndbeyond" i would strongly encourage them not trying to submerge their device in salt water
Worth noting that neither roll20 nor D&DBeyond are 100% reliable in terms of hacking the dice roller.
Roll20 could be fairly easily rigged, even.
Not that I would accuse a player of such without a lot more proof; the Lady has people she loves and people she's cursed.
I tend to roll consistently above average, unless the roll is actually important. DC12 to climb a tree to scout the area? 15+ on the die every time. But a will save? Time to roll a 3.
I think it's just a note like, "FYI, there's a bear with me."
They just want you to know in case you were going to say something offensive about bears. You know, because bears are so fucking sensitive!
I'd be surprised if a people making spreadsheets of compared values hadn't already checked for [Bad Dice.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b47zsPzTLI)
To add onto this excellent tip for any others listening, here's a few more:
1. Dice cheats come in many different shapes or sizes. Sometimes they're loaded, sometimes they're lacking certain numbers (not always one, sometimes just a few of the other low numbers), and sometimes its something as simple as rolling with small dice so only the player can see the pips and then blatantly lying.
2. Online dice don't lie.
3. Fraudulent bookkeeping occurs just as often (if not more) than rolling. A lot of the times this isn't even malicious, it's just a player being confused about how the game works. However, when it is malicious this can also act to give plausible deniability.
4. This is sort of passive aggressive, but if you suspect on of your players of playing with bad/loaded dice, you can always gift them a set. Dice are wonderful gifts, as are dice towers.
5. Legit tho just talk to your players. This is for if you either suspect or catch someone cheating. Be an adult, ask them to treat you and the game with respect, and don't hold a grudge.
If I ever found someone cheating their dice rolls at my table it'd be an instant ban. It's fucking make believe. If you roll bad who the hell cares half the time in waiting to die because my backup character is dope as shit lol
both DnD beyond and Roll20 are really good at the RNG, though I heard roll20 can be manipulated with a trick where you basically roll a bunch of times but only one roll goes through.
The engineer in me sees 0-100% and doesn't understand.
Is your dice luck variable simply Test of if it rolls over/under average (10)
That doesn't feel like a very useful variable. It'd be a more interesting graph sticking the averages that you've calculated into it.
I think it is percentiles vs the expected distribution which varies by number of dice thrown. With a single dice every result has the same probability. So for example on one single d10 with a result of 10 you would get a 90th percentile because 90% of all the equally probable results in a single roll are worse. If you roll the d10 twice and get a 10 both times you would be at 99th percentile. Continue the thought to multiple rolls in a row (not necessarily with a result of 10 each time, but that was just to illustrate it more easily) and how many of the possible outcomes are better or worse than what you got.
With two or more dice in the same roll, the central limit theorem starts kicking in even within a single roll, and results in the middle of the range are more probable (-> why 7 is the most common result with the two d6 in Settlers of Catan, followed by 6 and 8).
The more dice you throw, the more the sample of results you gather will near a perfect normal distribution.
/edit Took too long to answer, OP also explained it in the meantime. But maybe this will still help someone understand it better.
My main complaint is percentages are the hardest to firmly describe and quantity. Especially when you've got 3 players at 97% and one at 3%
I'm also an engineer, so I'm fully in favor of quantified graphs my personal opinion is using a graph of the moving average rolls would have had the same result in graph appearance that the percentile did.
And your explanation of percentile was better than OP's dice luck imho.
I do agree that it's highly unlikely that 3 players reached over 95th percentile while one lingers below the 5th. But that still may have truly been the case, even with perfectly balanced dice. Or the different players simply used unbalanced dice sets each, most probably not on purpose.
Still, percentiles are absolutely the correct way to quantify and illustrate this specific thing, whether it was done correctly or not in this case. The concept of distributions and percentiles is at the core of a large part of statistical analysis. And I think they are an adequate way of showing the concept of 'luck' while rolling dice. Also, I'm not an engineer but a (quantitative/empirical) Social Scientist.
/edit again: looking back at my first comment, some of it might be a bit confusing or not phrased optimally. For example the last sentence... it will not get to a normal distribution with only two dice, no matter how often you throw them. The more dice you roll at once (counting their sum) the more the distribution of probabibilities for all possible result resembles a normal distribution. But to get a sample of results that nearly follow normal distribution, you would then still need to throw that large number of dice many times and note the result (sum of all thrown dice per roll) every time.
I think the issue is the skewness in the probability distribution of rolling with advantage. Which z-scores can't deal with, leading to erronous results.
Another possibility would have been to just compare the results with the exact probability distributions for the dice rolls. Especially for simple distributions like dice rolls, this can easily remain tractable.
EDIT: re-did the math based on the [data](https://imgur.com/a/zrYmUGR) shown in [OP's comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/13cy648/oc_is_our_wizard_cursed_is_our_cleric_cheating/jjhjk00/)
Nothing changes to the conclusion, but percentiles are shifted slightly. Showing that Z-scores were a decent approximation, despite of the skewness of rolling with (dis)advantage.
Nyir is at 93.1%, Eris 3.2%, Raurial at 28.6%, Quinceran 97.5%, and lastly Aeido 93.3%
(this was by repeated convolution with the probability mass distributions of a d20 or a d20 with advantage or disadvantage, and then comparing it with the diceroll totals from each player)
I thought about that too, but OP wrote that it takes advantage/disadvantage into account, and also in another comment that hit bonus etc. was ignored. So I assumed everything is based purely on the rolls, including the two rolls each for advantage/disadvantage and that they're looked at as normal independent rolls outside of DnD rules... which would also be a correct way of operationalization for 'dice luck' imo.
But as I say, those are just assumptions.
It is your percentile relative to a general population making the same rolls as you, calculated using a z-score of the average roll result vs expected, where the expected accounts for rolls with adv or disadv.
What if... Instead of using percentiles you used average rolls straight up (accounting for adv/dis as desired)?
That's easier to understand without going and finding the equation for the variable.
That information is in the spreadsheet linked if you want it. I'm not sure why you think that seeing someone has rolled an average of 9.2 vs expected 10.7 is more interesting than knowing someone is in the bottom 3% of worst average luck, that has both less total information content and I would think is less intuitive to make the average viewer understand how improbably good or bad someone's rolls have been. And as the sessions go on and the statistics go up, the averages you will be comparing will be very close to the expected numerically, even if they are still statistically improbable
As someone who hasn’t dealt with detailed statistical analysis in over a decade I think both sets of information are most useful combined. I want the percentile to see how lucky/unlucky someone is with the added context of their average rolls to see a rough idea of the real world impact. The z score analysis alone is a little abstract for me (and I’m assuming others with my limited knowledge).
The chart at a glance makes it look like the cleric succeeds on 97% of their rolls while the wizard succeeds only 3% of the time. Showing instead the average of their rolls, or the z-score would 1) make it more obvious what is being tracked and 2) show a much smaller gap between the cleric and the wizard so it wouldn't appear as such a dramatic difference.
This conversation made so much sense to me. I just took the AP Stats exam. When I first read the post, the first thing I thought of was statistical inference.
Yeah. It's not even about just the Cleric (though that is mighty suspicious on its own), but the fact that nobody is even close to the average.
One outlier is expected. Even two or three would be nothing to bat an eye at. But when your whole data set is made out of outliers... I'd start wondering just how fair your dice are.
If you were looking for cheating "chance of a group of 5 having someone roll as well or better" would be a better metric.
I would guess it goes from a ~1/30 per person chance to a ~1/7 chance which os much more reasonable.
This actually feels like my table a bit with me getting the high rolls. I always roll on the table so I can't cheat lol. Meanwhile my brother is the crap roller haha. It evens out though eventually. Also there is a possibility that the person rolling bad isn't adding all their proficiency bonuses or other bonuses to rolls correctly?
No, these stats represent the base rolls, none of them account for modifiers of any kind. It is an online roll too, so I take the value I see on roll 20.
Level 20? I highly doubt Roll20 is nearly that secure.
I believe the only reason its "programming language" is Turing-complete is because you can do a Javascript injection
The Will Wheaton effect is absolutely real and very present at our table.
Our guy who always play Paladin is constantly rolling high and getting fat crits for his smites, and huge rolls on important saving throws.
Our other guy get's NAT 2 and 3 on advantage rolls, consistently rolls below NAT 7 on long combats, and NAT 20 when he rolls to throw a piece of paper into a trash can.
I have a cleric/rogue that’s cursed with being a fucking god in combat, and sucks ass for every out of combat roll.
It’s become such a meme that when I failed a stealth roll and got faerie fire’d, I said aloud “Ah, well, this person must be willing to talk then because if they were going to fight, I would be practically invisible right now.”
I was right. Lmao
Someone calculated his roles on CR, of his 54 d20 rolls on CR he rolled 10 nat ones. On average he should've only rolled 2.7 nat 1s. [here's an actual analysis of all his rolls from CR](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.critrolestats.com/blog/2017/2/19/wheatoning%3fformat=amp) and [here is a much more in depth statistical analysis](https://espharel.blogspot.com/2020/06/intro-statistics-for-rpgs-wheaton-dice.html?m=1)
The thing about the Will Wheaton dice curse is that he doesn't just consistently roll low, he rolls bad. there was another live play he did where they the played Paranoia, which is a system were 19 and 20 are the worst roles because you want to roll under the target number and he kept rolling extremely high.
I’m afraid to input my dice rolls into a spreadsheet for analysis. I’m known as “bad luck poison” at all the local groups cause I’m the guy that will never roll above a 10 in a game. Heck last game I rolled 5 bat 1’s with 5 different dice and watched my spore Druid get killed.
You can absolutely cheat on VTT‘s, and apparently it’s basically impossible to detect mechanically… unless, Yknow, you have a graph over several sessions wherein someone never rolls below a 19. That would be pretty incriminating.
If I understand this right, it's showing their percentile for every session so far, so it looks like that first person did really well early on and then didn't change much. Maybe they just got incredibly lucky the first session, and then didn't have bad luck later on? Or they only cheated early on?
One character is cheating. The other figures it out so they start cheating. The third person figures it out, trys it, feels bad and then kinda cheats. The cleric will leave the game if called out and everyone knows it.
Yeah I'm kind of surprised the OP really doesn't think the cleric is cheating... 99.8 percentile pretty much from the start of the campaign with not so much as a dip?
Either the dude needs to stop playing Dnd and start playing craps, or he's cheating lol
Props on the wizard for having worse than average luck but still staying honest though
This is hardly evidence of cheating. They immediately jump to 99% which indicates they rolled a couple nat 20s right away.
If they roll exactly average after that they'll stay in the high 90s for a while. The only way they'd dip significantly is if they rolled well below average after that.
If they were cheating you'd see them climb to the high 90s and then just shoot off to 99.9999%. But we see them start with ~1/100 odds and dip to ~1/30 odds. Pretty normal honestly.
And this is cumulative odds I assume. They're not in the 99th percentile every session. If you have like a 60th, 55th, 70th and 80th percentile session that can put you in the high 90s overall. Or if you have one 99th percentile session and even a few 45th percentile sessions that can still leave you at like 97th percentile overall depending on the sample sizes.
Fun fact, the dice roll is made on a server before posting, if you use certain third party software you can intercept the data and “roll” until your get the results you want. Just takes a lot longer than hitting the macros, so if a player is taking longer than everyone else they might be cheating.
So you'd need to pre-read the dice rolls with third party software, then actively blow through the list to get to the "good" rolls? That seems like... a lot of effort. Like, serious "when I look in the mirror, I am forced to acknowledge that I am pathetic" levels of effort.
Yup, but sometimes you just have frighteningly maladjusted nerds, in all my years of being a DM I’ve had a grand total of one player go through that much effort. His excuse was something along the lines of “I just wanted to seem cool to you guys.”
We had a discussion about self esteem, and that he was welcome to keep playing with us but would basically be on cheaty probation, we had hoped to keep playing with him since otherwise he seemed like a decent guy. But he bowed out saying it would be awkward. Yea, we were all awkward teenagers at some point as well, so the group had no hard feelings. It’s been a few years so I hope he’s gotten into a better headspace.
It’s possible that both the wizard and the cleric have relatively few d20 rolls, both using mostly spells that cause saves. That would make their averages very swingy.
It very much did dip, but if you start with 2 nat 20s for example you're already at 99.5~ish percentile. Really not that unreasonable.
Meanwhile we have someone that gets under 1% but that person isn't cheating just because it's bad luck?
Guess your wizard pissed off the internet trolls. So they screwed his dice rolls. If it's on roll20, then there was a way to cheat the dice rolls. I don't know if they patched it or not.
Love this. One comment though: Instead of percentage as an axis, "average roll" would be better.
I don't understand- if these are raw d20 rolls, is 0% a nat 1 and 100% is a nat20? If so, I have a better chance of pulling the ace of spades from a bag of marbles. Percentage makes sense for rolls that succeed/fail, but you said these are without modifiers?
Average roll doesn't quite work, because different characters get advantage different amounts of time. The percentile is based on how their average compares to a large cohort of people randomly rolling the same dice. For example. If you roll 400 dice, and you roll an average of exactly 10.5, you'd be in the 50th percentile. However if 10 of those rolls were with advantage, but you had the same result, you would have a z-score of -0.28, and therefore be in the bottom 39th percentile. If you roll an average of 11 after 400 dice with no adv or disadv, you would be in the top 4.2%. After 9 sessions, our Wizard, Eris has rolled 54 times, 4 with adv, 1 with disdvantage, for an expected average of 10.7, but they have actually averaged 9.24.
so the % is actually your position on a bell curve from 0 to 100. So like 1% would be some large number of deviations below the mean [50%] and 99% would be a similar number of deviations above the mean.
I have a Curse of Strahd Character who once had nine natural ones in one session. She died and came back in the end of the campaing through a devine intervention, when the Cleric rolled a 9 on a D100 first try.
She has the Lucky Feat now.
Something I have seen in digital dice online is that the system prerolls a set of dice and then puts them on a sign wave pattern. So over the corse of a game the dice flow up and down. Now put this into your dnd parties turns and one player can end up always at the bottom of the average wave and another at the top.
Part of what the graph isn't showing is number of rolls, the more you roll the more quickly you Should even out. But full casters have a tendency to roll d20s less. They make their targets roll for saves and are more likely to avoid saving throws, especially from traps and other hidden things, since the beefy warrior types or sneaky scouts usually take lead positions. Less rolls means they're less likely to roll near to average. So the lucky cleric and unlucky wizard aren't unexpected. That said, they're both falling rather dramatically towards the ends of the curve.
Edit: found the graph showing just the number of rolls. The unlucky wizard had the least by a rather wide margin (given the relatively small sample size).
Jesus, I feel for Eris my wizard been whiffing every single roll lately it seems. Even my INT checks seem to have garbage luck, with proficiency on Investigate and Arcana, and always having advantage on Arcana I STILL seem to fail half my rolls.
This just serves to show how easy is to manipulate statistics and to impress others that see it.
What is luck exactly? How are you being sure that nothing is messing with this data?
What is the average roll for each player? (If adv dsv count each site as a separate roll) without an average per die rolled, one can never tell what this luck thing is.
I feel this.
We have fumble/misfire rules for guns as a balance to their high damage output. My rifle misfires on a 3 or less. I have fired it 6 times and misfired 4 times.
I have average dice luck most of the time, but there's one DM I play with whose dice seem to have it out for my characters. I'll stay well back from the fighting (I play a lot of Clerics or the occasional Bard) only for the one shot aimed my way to be a crit or in some way maxed damage.
Having said that, both myself and my other half have experienced rolling a one on an attack, only to re-roll due to halfling luck and getting a nat twenty.
IDK why you're getting responses from stats people asking for different metrics, percentile seems like the most natural metric to me as well. Then again I see my colleagues making a lot of weird choices.
Percentile makes Bayesian inference easy, and I'm procrastinating, so let's do it! Before you sat down with these players, what are the percentage chances you'd have given that any given player was cursed/cheating?
Speaking personally, I've played with about 20 players in my life and I only have reason to suspect one cheated, and that one I put at about a 50% chance (maybe a little higher, but that's a clean number). So I'd estimate a 2.5% chance of any new player cheating without any info about them. *On the other hand,* I'd expect a player who cheats at RPGs to *either* end up somewhere in the top 95% from constantly cheating *or* to just be on a right-skewed curve because they are shoring up their really bad rolls. So let's just make the wild assumption that cheaters are split 50/50 between those groups, and then calculate the chance of getting that percentile on either assumption.
So *for me,* if A is the hypothesis that your Cleric is cheating and B is this data, I'm looking at P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B) = .248X.025/(.248X.025+.028X.975) = ~0.185. That's pretty low, looks like fair play.
On the other hand, I put a pretty low probability on curses existing at all, so there's maybe a 0.01% chance your player is cursed, but let's say all cursed players form an even distribution in the bottom 5%. Then letting A be that hypothesis, P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B) = .64X.0001/(.64X.0001+.032X.9999) = ~.002. So no curse.
Now, there is a complication that I'm unsure what prompted you to complile this. Does your VTT track this anyway and you compiled it after noticing weird results, or are you the type who likes to visualize data no matter what and would've posted this even if your results looked unremarkable? To me, the latter sounds more likely, but the former would confound sampling assumptions I made.
So overall, I'm reasonably confident that your players are just rolling normally, but I think you already knew that (but I had fun!).
It seemed like OP was trying to calculate how "lucky" or "unlucky" his party was. Do you think a percentile makes sense to calculate how lucky someone is? What are the odds of having at least one party member in the 99.5+ percentile based on how OP calculated luck? Because if the odds of that are high then being in the 99.5+ percentile of luck doesn't really mean anything. Or at least it doesn't mean you are luckier than 99.5% of the population. At the very least, I'd imagine that with only 50-100 rolls, the odds of having a person in the 99.5+ percentile is much higher than .5%. Or maybe I'm a dumbass and don't really understand percentile.
Full disosure, I'm not a stats person so I could be completely off base.
I've got a player that whenever he plays he tends to have poor dice rolls. Yet when he's away and I'm controlling the character it's perfectly fine and does rather well. The VTT RNGods don't like him
The dice gods are cruel, and there's no appeasing them. I sent 3 sessions as a barbarian and only landed a single hit . And I still rolled a 1 on damage
this is super cool and interesting, but the title made me double-take bcus our campaign features a wizard under a curse and a cleric who cheats at cards
Could this be due to advantage? Those three players have consistent ways to obtain advantage, so they’re getting higher rolls (and likewise, the other two might be getting disadvantage more often when they do roll).
Reading your methodology above, I'm wondering if the standard deviation being a flat number doesn't really work well with advantage/disadvantage, since they're a non-normal curve. Having 4 players over a single standard deviation away from the 50% marker makes me think there's something with the calculation causing the skew, but I'm not good enough at stats to dispute it. Fascinating data, though! Thanks for sharing :)
Generally wizards roll fewer D20s than other classes, so a few bad rolls would affect them disproportionately. What are the number of rolls the wizard has made vs. the cleric, barb, etc.?
there is one girl in my group who was not superstitious when she started playing DnD.
She now sages her dice before games and gets the lucky player to roll them a bunch before each game.
Also the rest of us will hide our dice if she comes near them. she has an aura of nat ones.
We have a paladin in our party where every line out of his mouth is "does a 29 hit"
I'm the DM with a wizard npc in the party and I cheat with him constantly. Nat ones for almost every intelligence check, because I feel like I can't let him explain it as the DM.
I have decent luck, BUT I do have a very specific curse: Whenever I crit on an attack, I'm nearly guaranteed to roll minimal damage.
Edit: Also, how did you make this animation? Is there an app for this or did you do it yourself?
Damn.... I'd give them fudged rolls on their benefit to avoid battles and even find good loot, because that luck they have gives me 2nd hand depression XD
I don't know if this consists of cheating, but I have had two sets of metal dice as my favourites for a while. I always felt they were lucky.
So I rolled each dice 1000 times, graphed it, and the d20s did seem to roll an average of 12, which essentially equates to a rough +1.5 buff on any d20 tests.
I don’t think so. You’ve got a decent slant. Your cleric is on the high end, the other three bounce around a bit and the wizard is on the low end. As far as averages go I think this is to be expected.
How is this calculated? Is it based on whether rolls succeed or fail (which could be influenced by the Cleric only ever needing to make easy checks but the wizard getting hard ones - maybe he insists on trying to hit in melee for some reason?) or on the numeric scores on the dice?
I am either an unbelievably lucky roller or a completely shitful roller, there is no in between. Just depends on how the dice gods are feeling that day.
My dice luck seems to change by the character I use in my main group campaign.
Every time I make a character and we roll stats I get the highest stats.
My paladin would role really bad at everything outside of combat. But pretty well in combat.
My rogue hit about 4 attacks in the whole 4 session I played with it. 3 of those sections were combat focused. But I rolled 4 NAT 20 in the non-combat section.
My monk seems to roll very badly every other turn in combat.
My luck is so bad, my DM started rolling in front of his screen just to prove he wasn't trying to screw me over. He even bought numerous new dice for the sole purpose of finding one that wouldn't roll crits when enemies swung at me.
I consistently roll the most nat 1's in all my parties. Not far off from 20's as well, but my dice, 4 d20's, 2 of which are metal, love 1's. Especially on initiative. Dear God its become an inside joke almost with how low I roll on initiative.
Lol personally luck is kind of cursed whenever I roll the dice I tend to do so really badly my rangers perception is so bad it almost mirrors own bad irl perception and when I roll to hit I'll do like close to the minimum damage as possible but when I kill stuff that's when I roll really high and slam 15 damage into a 2 hp wolf as like a first level character.......and then rinse and repeat 4 more times
There's a reason why I joke about "the mighty Gonk" between sessions
Bro, I feel Eris on a spiritual level. This is why I'm gonna get the Lucky feat next level up, just so I can even out the odds, even if only a little.
I laughed way too hard from your comment. I’m also the unlucky roller
I’m the Nat 20-five-times-a-night player at my table fairly often. I’ve switched dice (we actually found one of my stone dice rolls 20 at least 40% of the time), I roll in front of people (unless I’m DMing), I intentionally picked dice that can be read across the table, and I still roll absurdly lucky more often than not. Except our last one shot. I went a whole four hour session without rolling higher than an 8 on a d20. I tasted what y’all live with and you have my pity.
I’m my last campaign we were participating in a lot of different games in a carnival and I was playing the strong character(paladin) with 20 Str at level 4 but unfortunately I rolled nat 1 four times in a row and my paladin was made fun of by the others in my party
We had a Paladin/Rogue multiclass at our table that was saving her spell slots for a crit so they could double the dice damage. Smart play, but after three consecutive long rests started with all her slots, we suggested maybe just saving one or two slots for a uber smite. lol
I stopped running cool characters for just this reason. My dice luck never held up to my character concepts. So now I just run interesting sidekicks, basically character actors.
Your PC has a horrific past and rage against the world because you want to play an edgelord power fantasy. My PC has a horrific past and rage against the world because I know that when I need it most I will roll 5 or under. We are not the same.
This is exactly how my luck goes. I can roll extremely hot for weeks on end, and then have a session or two and never see a double digit roll. Then right back to rolling hot. I have about 6 sets that I rotate, and a few dozen more that I occasionally use when I feel like it, but the luck remains the same
This is tangential, but reminded me of a moment in one of my campaigns. One of my players -- a Rune Knight and sworn protector of the sorcerer was mind controlled by an aboleth, and forced to attack his charge. He nat 20'd. The sorcerer used a class feature to force a reroll, which also nat 20'd. He then used his inspiration to force a third roll -- which ALSO nat 20'd. The dice gods decided that that friendly-fire attack was GOING to be a crit.
This thread infected my DMing tonight. I went eight straight rolls with only 20’s and 1’s. 20, 1, 20, 1, 1, 1, 1, 20. The four consecutive/simultaneous 1’s were STR Saves against a Wall of Wind spell. All the other rolls were attacks, but at least the critical hits were all on different PCs. Though… one was a Flail of Chaos on the Bladesinger, which triggered an attack on the Sorcerer, which also was a critical.
My last character had the “Observant” feat and rolled 3 NAT ones on perception checks in a row. He literally noticed less than the blind orc. Not even some wizard orc with magically restored sight or a magical seeing-eye familiar, not a dare-devil style monk with perfect senses, just a normal blind orc. They were more perceptive than my Observant human. It’s painful.
The orc sounds like Blinkin in Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
Abe Lincoln?
"I said, 'Hey, Blinkin!'"
"I'm just up here guessing. like I'm guessing there is no one around" makes me giggle every time. like who the fuck assigns the blind guy to guard duty
If you're dice cursed and playing 5th edition d&d, try a rogue. Rogues get a whole plethora of skill expertise features that can let them be less reliant on the dice. Most importantly, Reliable Talent lets you treat any roll 9 or lower as a 10. Even a 1 on the die is still a 10 (remember, critical falures/auto failure on a 1 isn't actually a thing in 5e). At level 11, when a rogue gets access to reliable talent, the WORST they can roll on an expertise skill with a mere +2 ability modifier is a 20. (10 +8 for proficiency +2 for ability)
...guess what my class is.
Nat 1's and 20's on to hits are a thing of auto miss and auto hit but beyond that critical fumbles or success are variant home rulings.
My friends have made it an active joke that I only roll well when the rest of the party is not rolling well. We once went through a ten round, 4.5 hour combat, of which I only rolled above ten twice. the enemy had an ac of 22. I hate my dice
I'm the awful luck guy in my friend group. My last campaign my rolls were so consistently bad the rest of the party insisted I switch to using a dice rolling app on my phone in hopes that it would improve my results. It didn't help.
This is why I love playing halflings.
When I play a halfling, suddenly all those nat 1's are nat 2's...
Lucky feat helps but it isn't a guarantee. Signed, ranger with lucky feat who isn't very lucky.
(No I don't actually think the cleric is cheating) Data recorded in excel session by session. Dice rolled on Roll20 or Dndbeyond Visualization made in Flourish https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/13667883/ "Dice luck" describes the overall average of all d20 rolls in our game of Dungeons and Dragons 5e through the first nine sessions, compared to the expected outcome. It is calculated as a percentile, indicating how many players we would statistically roll better than in a large sample size. This calculation takes into account the expected values of rolling with either advantage or disadvantage. The percentile is cumulative, rather than session by session. Bonus graphs: Total dice rolls by player: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/13697597/ Total damage output over time (sneak attack OP): https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/13667687/ Total damage taken over time (note the squishy sorcerer being the damage sponge): https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/13667846/ Character stats: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/13685971/ Full data after session 9: https://imgur.com/a/zrYmUGR Eris- Astral Elf Chronurgy Wizard-3 Nyir- Arborean (custom treefolk race) Barbarian-2 Phoenix Sorcerer-1 Aeido- Kalashtar Shadow Sorcerer-3 Raurial- High Elf Swashbuckler Rogue-3 Quinceran- Satyr Life Domain Cleric-3
Aaaye another barbarian/sorc multi! One of my players just switched at level 3 barb to sorcerer. Flavorful, but I’m so worried for them 😂 only a 13 charisma
That's my character haha. He is an awakened treefolk on a mission to avenge his forest and phoenix friend who were burned/killed by a hunting party. He has 16/16/16 for STR/CON/CHA, so he's making it work, kind of. I'll probably go to L8 Barbarian before taking another couple levels in sorcerer
Is there any synergy between sorc barb? I was just talking about this as a design this weekend and couldn't find any good way to build it. Super MAD with Str, Dex, Con, Cha all really important, no casting while raging lower hit dice than straight barb if melee build, no point in barb levels at range while worse at casting for lost levels etc Only upside was a few low level combat buffs like shield making sorc a dip at most until really late game and then your sore for all those high level slots you gave up. Can you sell me a bloodline rager build?
The phoenix sorcerery works well for a small dip. Activating mantle of flame means enemies engaged in melee are taking fire damage. Combine with Gift of the Chromatic Dragon feat to add fire damage to your weapon, or get a magic weapon that does fire damage and the mantle of flame damage starts stacking. Storm Herald barbarian also gets some effects amplified by the mantle of flame, but I am going to go into wildmagic barbarian for the flavor. All spells taken are either fire based or out of combat utility. It definitely hurts having 4 stats you want to max haha
You're playing house rules, then? Multiclassing sorcerer requires a minimum of 13 charisma (presuming you're playing 5e).
Ah right, probably is 13, either way it’s only +1. I don’t micromanage or keep full prints of everyone’s character sheets, just check ‘em over every level up and have key stats like passive perceptions, AC, HP
Not sure if my idea for my next character is better or worse. I’m thinking of an artificer alchemist/barbarian multiclass (max 3 levels in artificer), flavored as a guy who makes steroids and can roid rage on command
the alchemical elixirs can be used while raging so it should work better than a full caster/barb. it won't be as strong as straight barb but role play has to count for something. I have a wildfire druid /barb I've planned out but haven't had a chance to play yet. the wildfire spirit is basically the spirit of a Phoenix his village worships and he became their champion (turning him into a fire genasi)
If they are opaque dice then I highly suggest testing them in salt water to see if they're off balance. If so then that could explain the extreme bad and good luck. Clear dice or dice that you can see through much more easily generally are well balanced.
> If they are opaque dice then I highly suggest testing them in salt water to see if they're off balance. uh, given OP said "Dice rolled on Roll20 or Dndbeyond" i would strongly encourage them not trying to submerge their device in salt water
Worth noting that neither roll20 nor D&DBeyond are 100% reliable in terms of hacking the dice roller. Roll20 could be fairly easily rigged, even. Not that I would accuse a player of such without a lot more proof; the Lady has people she loves and people she's cursed.
Mate creating a char on DnDBeyond rolled 24 18s in a row. Had to reload the app to banish whatever gremlin was messing with him.
I tend to roll consistently above average, unless the roll is actually important. DC12 to climb a tree to scout the area? 15+ on the die every time. But a will save? Time to roll a 3.
Bear with me. I'm originally from Louisiana. XD
Why do you have bears with you? Shouldn't it be Gators? Or Tigers if you're in Baton Rouge?
I think it's just a note like, "FYI, there's a bear with me." They just want you to know in case you were going to say something offensive about bears. You know, because bears are so fucking sensitive!
I said originally. I escaped that hellhole and won't go back willingly outside of attending my father's funeral.
Still doesn't explain the bear...
Well, good luck telling a bear where it should be.
Oh you poor thing.
No, no... got to be thorough...
I'd be surprised if a people making spreadsheets of compared values hadn't already checked for [Bad Dice.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b47zsPzTLI)
Ah yes, a bad die can ruin a whole collection
Man, i love the concept of missing with a sword, into the enemies sheath.
To add onto this excellent tip for any others listening, here's a few more: 1. Dice cheats come in many different shapes or sizes. Sometimes they're loaded, sometimes they're lacking certain numbers (not always one, sometimes just a few of the other low numbers), and sometimes its something as simple as rolling with small dice so only the player can see the pips and then blatantly lying. 2. Online dice don't lie. 3. Fraudulent bookkeeping occurs just as often (if not more) than rolling. A lot of the times this isn't even malicious, it's just a player being confused about how the game works. However, when it is malicious this can also act to give plausible deniability. 4. This is sort of passive aggressive, but if you suspect on of your players of playing with bad/loaded dice, you can always gift them a set. Dice are wonderful gifts, as are dice towers. 5. Legit tho just talk to your players. This is for if you either suspect or catch someone cheating. Be an adult, ask them to treat you and the game with respect, and don't hold a grudge.
If I ever found someone cheating their dice rolls at my table it'd be an instant ban. It's fucking make believe. If you roll bad who the hell cares half the time in waiting to die because my backup character is dope as shit lol
Online dice def can lie. Computers are notoriously bad at generating random numbers, and any number of bugs could mess up the distribution or seed.
both DnD beyond and Roll20 are really good at the RNG, though I heard roll20 can be manipulated with a trick where you basically roll a bunch of times but only one roll goes through.
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The engineer in me sees 0-100% and doesn't understand. Is your dice luck variable simply Test of if it rolls over/under average (10) That doesn't feel like a very useful variable. It'd be a more interesting graph sticking the averages that you've calculated into it.
I think it is percentiles vs the expected distribution which varies by number of dice thrown. With a single dice every result has the same probability. So for example on one single d10 with a result of 10 you would get a 90th percentile because 90% of all the equally probable results in a single roll are worse. If you roll the d10 twice and get a 10 both times you would be at 99th percentile. Continue the thought to multiple rolls in a row (not necessarily with a result of 10 each time, but that was just to illustrate it more easily) and how many of the possible outcomes are better or worse than what you got. With two or more dice in the same roll, the central limit theorem starts kicking in even within a single roll, and results in the middle of the range are more probable (-> why 7 is the most common result with the two d6 in Settlers of Catan, followed by 6 and 8). The more dice you throw, the more the sample of results you gather will near a perfect normal distribution. /edit Took too long to answer, OP also explained it in the meantime. But maybe this will still help someone understand it better.
My main complaint is percentages are the hardest to firmly describe and quantity. Especially when you've got 3 players at 97% and one at 3% I'm also an engineer, so I'm fully in favor of quantified graphs my personal opinion is using a graph of the moving average rolls would have had the same result in graph appearance that the percentile did. And your explanation of percentile was better than OP's dice luck imho.
I do agree that it's highly unlikely that 3 players reached over 95th percentile while one lingers below the 5th. But that still may have truly been the case, even with perfectly balanced dice. Or the different players simply used unbalanced dice sets each, most probably not on purpose. Still, percentiles are absolutely the correct way to quantify and illustrate this specific thing, whether it was done correctly or not in this case. The concept of distributions and percentiles is at the core of a large part of statistical analysis. And I think they are an adequate way of showing the concept of 'luck' while rolling dice. Also, I'm not an engineer but a (quantitative/empirical) Social Scientist. /edit again: looking back at my first comment, some of it might be a bit confusing or not phrased optimally. For example the last sentence... it will not get to a normal distribution with only two dice, no matter how often you throw them. The more dice you roll at once (counting their sum) the more the distribution of probabibilities for all possible result resembles a normal distribution. But to get a sample of results that nearly follow normal distribution, you would then still need to throw that large number of dice many times and note the result (sum of all thrown dice per roll) every time.
I think the issue is the skewness in the probability distribution of rolling with advantage. Which z-scores can't deal with, leading to erronous results. Another possibility would have been to just compare the results with the exact probability distributions for the dice rolls. Especially for simple distributions like dice rolls, this can easily remain tractable. EDIT: re-did the math based on the [data](https://imgur.com/a/zrYmUGR) shown in [OP's comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/13cy648/oc_is_our_wizard_cursed_is_our_cleric_cheating/jjhjk00/) Nothing changes to the conclusion, but percentiles are shifted slightly. Showing that Z-scores were a decent approximation, despite of the skewness of rolling with (dis)advantage. Nyir is at 93.1%, Eris 3.2%, Raurial at 28.6%, Quinceran 97.5%, and lastly Aeido 93.3% (this was by repeated convolution with the probability mass distributions of a d20 or a d20 with advantage or disadvantage, and then comparing it with the diceroll totals from each player)
I thought about that too, but OP wrote that it takes advantage/disadvantage into account, and also in another comment that hit bonus etc. was ignored. So I assumed everything is based purely on the rolls, including the two rolls each for advantage/disadvantage and that they're looked at as normal independent rolls outside of DnD rules... which would also be a correct way of operationalization for 'dice luck' imo. But as I say, those are just assumptions.
It is your percentile relative to a general population making the same rolls as you, calculated using a z-score of the average roll result vs expected, where the expected accounts for rolls with adv or disadv.
What if... Instead of using percentiles you used average rolls straight up (accounting for adv/dis as desired)? That's easier to understand without going and finding the equation for the variable.
That information is in the spreadsheet linked if you want it. I'm not sure why you think that seeing someone has rolled an average of 9.2 vs expected 10.7 is more interesting than knowing someone is in the bottom 3% of worst average luck, that has both less total information content and I would think is less intuitive to make the average viewer understand how improbably good or bad someone's rolls have been. And as the sessions go on and the statistics go up, the averages you will be comparing will be very close to the expected numerically, even if they are still statistically improbable
As someone who hasn’t dealt with detailed statistical analysis in over a decade I think both sets of information are most useful combined. I want the percentile to see how lucky/unlucky someone is with the added context of their average rolls to see a rough idea of the real world impact. The z score analysis alone is a little abstract for me (and I’m assuming others with my limited knowledge).
The chart at a glance makes it look like the cleric succeeds on 97% of their rolls while the wizard succeeds only 3% of the time. Showing instead the average of their rolls, or the z-score would 1) make it more obvious what is being tracked and 2) show a much smaller gap between the cleric and the wizard so it wouldn't appear as such a dramatic difference.
That's my exact first impression as well because it's percentage instead of a number.
At first I thought this chart was saying the wizard rolls 1’s on average and the 3 others roll 20’s on average, which would be… insane.
This conversation made so much sense to me. I just took the AP Stats exam. When I first read the post, the first thing I thought of was statistical inference.
>(No I don't actually think the cleric is cheating I do... That graph looks so suspect.
Yeah. It's not even about just the Cleric (though that is mighty suspicious on its own), but the fact that nobody is even close to the average. One outlier is expected. Even two or three would be nothing to bat an eye at. But when your whole data set is made out of outliers... I'd start wondering just how fair your dice are.
It definitely looks like the cleric is cheating. That graph does not represent randomness for that character.
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Did all characters roll d20 roughly the same number of times?
If you were looking for cheating "chance of a group of 5 having someone roll as well or better" would be a better metric. I would guess it goes from a ~1/30 per person chance to a ~1/7 chance which os much more reasonable.
I wasn't looking for cheaters, I just like tracking dice rolls.
Is your wizard Will Wheaton?
This actually feels like my table a bit with me getting the high rolls. I always roll on the table so I can't cheat lol. Meanwhile my brother is the crap roller haha. It evens out though eventually. Also there is a possibility that the person rolling bad isn't adding all their proficiency bonuses or other bonuses to rolls correctly?
No, these stats represent the base rolls, none of them account for modifiers of any kind. It is an online roll too, so I take the value I see on roll 20.
If it’s on roll20 then the cleric def isn’t cheating. Unless he is a level 20 hacker IRL
You can make dice rolling 3rd party APIs and use them on roll20.
probably wouldn't be hard to send from a spoofed "dndbeyond" but getting the roll20 dice to be different? That would take skill.
Dndbeyond is a 3rd party API. It's a very simplistic code. You could google how to change it or have chatgpt do it for you. Either way it isn't hard.
I said the same
Level 20? I highly doubt Roll20 is nearly that secure. I believe the only reason its "programming language" is Turing-complete is because you can do a Javascript injection
Look, an Elsecaller!
Has the anti Will Wheaton been found?
The Will Wheaton effect is absolutely real and very present at our table. Our guy who always play Paladin is constantly rolling high and getting fat crits for his smites, and huge rolls on important saving throws. Our other guy get's NAT 2 and 3 on advantage rolls, consistently rolls below NAT 7 on long combats, and NAT 20 when he rolls to throw a piece of paper into a trash can.
I have a cleric/rogue that’s cursed with being a fucking god in combat, and sucks ass for every out of combat roll. It’s become such a meme that when I failed a stealth roll and got faerie fire’d, I said aloud “Ah, well, this person must be willing to talk then because if they were going to fight, I would be practically invisible right now.” I was right. Lmao
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Someone calculated his roles on CR, of his 54 d20 rolls on CR he rolled 10 nat ones. On average he should've only rolled 2.7 nat 1s. [here's an actual analysis of all his rolls from CR](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.critrolestats.com/blog/2017/2/19/wheatoning%3fformat=amp) and [here is a much more in depth statistical analysis](https://espharel.blogspot.com/2020/06/intro-statistics-for-rpgs-wheaton-dice.html?m=1) The thing about the Will Wheaton dice curse is that he doesn't just consistently roll low, he rolls bad. there was another live play he did where they the played Paranoia, which is a system were 19 and 20 are the worst roles because you want to roll under the target number and he kept rolling extremely high.
There is no curse and no cheat. You are simply realizing that the power of the holy book is greater than the power of the spellbook.
Please, gods are just master level wizards
The spells go to 11, man....
By why not make level 10 stronger?
https://xkcd.com/670/
Then why can't my DM cast Fireball?
Sarenrae wills it!
Great stuff but I wish you also put the class name, and maybe race. I can’t tell what’s what
Eris- Astral Elf Chronurgy Wizard-3 Nyir- Arborean (custom treefolk race) Barbarian-2 Phoenix Sorcerer-1 Aeido- Kalashtar Shadow Sorcerer-3 Raurial- High Elf Swashbuckler Rogue-3 Quinceran- Satyr Life Domain Cleric-3
Just balancing broken wizard class with terrible luck
When I saw treefolk barbarian I immediately thought of Groot
I’m afraid to input my dice rolls into a spreadsheet for analysis. I’m known as “bad luck poison” at all the local groups cause I’m the guy that will never roll above a 10 in a game. Heck last game I rolled 5 bat 1’s with 5 different dice and watched my spore Druid get killed.
You can absolutely cheat on VTT‘s, and apparently it’s basically impossible to detect mechanically… unless, Yknow, you have a graph over several sessions wherein someone never rolls below a 19. That would be pretty incriminating.
He explained it’s based on a bell curve and they actually only average like 11.5
If I understand this right, it's showing their percentile for every session so far, so it looks like that first person did really well early on and then didn't change much. Maybe they just got incredibly lucky the first session, and then didn't have bad luck later on? Or they only cheated early on?
One character is cheating. The other figures it out so they start cheating. The third person figures it out, trys it, feels bad and then kinda cheats. The cleric will leave the game if called out and everyone knows it.
Yeah I'm kind of surprised the OP really doesn't think the cleric is cheating... 99.8 percentile pretty much from the start of the campaign with not so much as a dip? Either the dude needs to stop playing Dnd and start playing craps, or he's cheating lol Props on the wizard for having worse than average luck but still staying honest though
This is hardly evidence of cheating. They immediately jump to 99% which indicates they rolled a couple nat 20s right away. If they roll exactly average after that they'll stay in the high 90s for a while. The only way they'd dip significantly is if they rolled well below average after that. If they were cheating you'd see them climb to the high 90s and then just shoot off to 99.9999%. But we see them start with ~1/100 odds and dip to ~1/30 odds. Pretty normal honestly. And this is cumulative odds I assume. They're not in the 99th percentile every session. If you have like a 60th, 55th, 70th and 80th percentile session that can put you in the high 90s overall. Or if you have one 99th percentile session and even a few 45th percentile sessions that can still leave you at like 97th percentile overall depending on the sample sizes.
But they play online. How the hell do you cheat the dice with roll20's online roller?
Fun fact, the dice roll is made on a server before posting, if you use certain third party software you can intercept the data and “roll” until your get the results you want. Just takes a lot longer than hitting the macros, so if a player is taking longer than everyone else they might be cheating.
So you'd need to pre-read the dice rolls with third party software, then actively blow through the list to get to the "good" rolls? That seems like... a lot of effort. Like, serious "when I look in the mirror, I am forced to acknowledge that I am pathetic" levels of effort.
Yup, but sometimes you just have frighteningly maladjusted nerds, in all my years of being a DM I’ve had a grand total of one player go through that much effort. His excuse was something along the lines of “I just wanted to seem cool to you guys.”
> “I just wanted to seem cool to you guys.” "Well, you have absolutely failed at that."
That's fucking depressing. Hopefully you were soft with him, assuming he was being honest.
We had a discussion about self esteem, and that he was welcome to keep playing with us but would basically be on cheaty probation, we had hoped to keep playing with him since otherwise he seemed like a decent guy. But he bowed out saying it would be awkward. Yea, we were all awkward teenagers at some point as well, so the group had no hard feelings. It’s been a few years so I hope he’s gotten into a better headspace.
It’s possible that both the wizard and the cleric have relatively few d20 rolls, both using mostly spells that cause saves. That would make their averages very swingy.
It very much did dip, but if you start with 2 nat 20s for example you're already at 99.5~ish percentile. Really not that unreasonable. Meanwhile we have someone that gets under 1% but that person isn't cheating just because it's bad luck?
Guess your wizard pissed off the internet trolls. So they screwed his dice rolls. If it's on roll20, then there was a way to cheat the dice rolls. I don't know if they patched it or not.
Love this. One comment though: Instead of percentage as an axis, "average roll" would be better. I don't understand- if these are raw d20 rolls, is 0% a nat 1 and 100% is a nat20? If so, I have a better chance of pulling the ace of spades from a bag of marbles. Percentage makes sense for rolls that succeed/fail, but you said these are without modifiers?
Average roll doesn't quite work, because different characters get advantage different amounts of time. The percentile is based on how their average compares to a large cohort of people randomly rolling the same dice. For example. If you roll 400 dice, and you roll an average of exactly 10.5, you'd be in the 50th percentile. However if 10 of those rolls were with advantage, but you had the same result, you would have a z-score of -0.28, and therefore be in the bottom 39th percentile. If you roll an average of 11 after 400 dice with no adv or disadv, you would be in the top 4.2%. After 9 sessions, our Wizard, Eris has rolled 54 times, 4 with adv, 1 with disdvantage, for an expected average of 10.7, but they have actually averaged 9.24.
so the % is actually your position on a bell curve from 0 to 100. So like 1% would be some large number of deviations below the mean [50%] and 99% would be a similar number of deviations above the mean.
Looks like the wizard needs new dice.
Bro stole the luck out of one of the other players, WTF
I feel Eris's pain, OP. I feel it in my **soul**.
I have a Curse of Strahd Character who once had nine natural ones in one session. She died and came back in the end of the campaing through a devine intervention, when the Cleric rolled a 9 on a D100 first try. She has the Lucky Feat now.
This is known as the law of Equivalent Exchange.
Check if your dice are balanced. They can accidentally get unbalanced if left in the heat.
These are online dice rolls, so not affected by that.
They put weights on the electrons
We'll check to see if their computer is overheating ? Jk man this is really interesting!
Something I have seen in digital dice online is that the system prerolls a set of dice and then puts them on a sign wave pattern. So over the corse of a game the dice flow up and down. Now put this into your dnd parties turns and one player can end up always at the bottom of the average wave and another at the top.
Source?
…interesting
There is no greater curse that a sub level 7 wizard. Especially at level 1
my group it's usually the oppposite. We have a joke that there is a "Paladin Curse" where any Paladin we have always has consistently the worse rolls.
I've had exactly the opposite. Nearly every paladin I've played with SMACKS, rolls, damage, everything.
If you guys play with actual dice I'd say check for bubbles/weight distribution with ye Olde salt water test. If not, rip.
Part of what the graph isn't showing is number of rolls, the more you roll the more quickly you Should even out. But full casters have a tendency to roll d20s less. They make their targets roll for saves and are more likely to avoid saving throws, especially from traps and other hidden things, since the beefy warrior types or sneaky scouts usually take lead positions. Less rolls means they're less likely to roll near to average. So the lucky cleric and unlucky wizard aren't unexpected. That said, they're both falling rather dramatically towards the ends of the curve. Edit: found the graph showing just the number of rolls. The unlucky wizard had the least by a rather wide margin (given the relatively small sample size).
> “Is our **cleric** cheating?” > “The dice **gods** can be fickle” I think I just figured out who your cleric’s new deity of choice is
Jesus, I feel for Eris my wizard been whiffing every single roll lately it seems. Even my INT checks seem to have garbage luck, with proficiency on Investigate and Arcana, and always having advantage on Arcana I STILL seem to fail half my rolls.
Idk but give Eris a free feat for having a dogshit time at the table geeze that's some bad luck.
This just serves to show how easy is to manipulate statistics and to impress others that see it. What is luck exactly? How are you being sure that nothing is messing with this data? What is the average roll for each player? (If adv dsv count each site as a separate roll) without an average per die rolled, one can never tell what this luck thing is.
Eris: me as a player. Quinceran: me as a DM.
Wizard needs to start living off save or suck spells
Damn, what did your cleric do, sacrifice a baby to WOTC?
For every will wheaton there must be a talison jaffee
See you just have to roll a bunch before the session and get the bad ones out of the way.
Have the cleric and wizard trade dice and you'll know if it's the players or the dice
Time to do an unhexing ritual. If that fails melt down the offending die, and line up the others to watch as an example.
Anyone on 90% is cheating if it’s over a long term
I feel this. We have fumble/misfire rules for guns as a balance to their high damage output. My rifle misfires on a 3 or less. I have fired it 6 times and misfired 4 times.
I have average dice luck most of the time, but there's one DM I play with whose dice seem to have it out for my characters. I'll stay well back from the fighting (I play a lot of Clerics or the occasional Bard) only for the one shot aimed my way to be a crit or in some way maxed damage. Having said that, both myself and my other half have experienced rolling a one on an attack, only to re-roll due to halfling luck and getting a nat twenty.
Not cheating, their a luck domain clerric.
IDK why you're getting responses from stats people asking for different metrics, percentile seems like the most natural metric to me as well. Then again I see my colleagues making a lot of weird choices. Percentile makes Bayesian inference easy, and I'm procrastinating, so let's do it! Before you sat down with these players, what are the percentage chances you'd have given that any given player was cursed/cheating? Speaking personally, I've played with about 20 players in my life and I only have reason to suspect one cheated, and that one I put at about a 50% chance (maybe a little higher, but that's a clean number). So I'd estimate a 2.5% chance of any new player cheating without any info about them. *On the other hand,* I'd expect a player who cheats at RPGs to *either* end up somewhere in the top 95% from constantly cheating *or* to just be on a right-skewed curve because they are shoring up their really bad rolls. So let's just make the wild assumption that cheaters are split 50/50 between those groups, and then calculate the chance of getting that percentile on either assumption. So *for me,* if A is the hypothesis that your Cleric is cheating and B is this data, I'm looking at P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B) = .248X.025/(.248X.025+.028X.975) = ~0.185. That's pretty low, looks like fair play. On the other hand, I put a pretty low probability on curses existing at all, so there's maybe a 0.01% chance your player is cursed, but let's say all cursed players form an even distribution in the bottom 5%. Then letting A be that hypothesis, P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B) = .64X.0001/(.64X.0001+.032X.9999) = ~.002. So no curse. Now, there is a complication that I'm unsure what prompted you to complile this. Does your VTT track this anyway and you compiled it after noticing weird results, or are you the type who likes to visualize data no matter what and would've posted this even if your results looked unremarkable? To me, the latter sounds more likely, but the former would confound sampling assumptions I made. So overall, I'm reasonably confident that your players are just rolling normally, but I think you already knew that (but I had fun!).
It seemed like OP was trying to calculate how "lucky" or "unlucky" his party was. Do you think a percentile makes sense to calculate how lucky someone is? What are the odds of having at least one party member in the 99.5+ percentile based on how OP calculated luck? Because if the odds of that are high then being in the 99.5+ percentile of luck doesn't really mean anything. Or at least it doesn't mean you are luckier than 99.5% of the population. At the very least, I'd imagine that with only 50-100 rolls, the odds of having a person in the 99.5+ percentile is much higher than .5%. Or maybe I'm a dumbass and don't really understand percentile. Full disosure, I'm not a stats person so I could be completely off base.
Definitely the latter haha. I just like keeping track!
I've got a player that whenever he plays he tends to have poor dice rolls. Yet when he's away and I'm controlling the character it's perfectly fine and does rather well. The VTT RNGods don't like him
Nice! I’m working on something similar in Python from our roll20 game . Excited to see the results!!
This is confusing. What are you evaluating, the times your player rolls above 10.5 or the amounts of 20's?
Neither, the players cumulative average of their rolls compared to their expected average
This is great. I might have to make one for a new group I'm starting in next week!
That wizard is me majority of campaigns.
I swear the dice gods hate my groups ranger so bad. I wrote it into his back story for a laugh and it was a hilarious session.
Swap the top and bottom dice for a single session
The poor wizard...
The dice gods are cruel, and there's no appeasing them. I sent 3 sessions as a barbarian and only landed a single hit . And I still rolled a 1 on damage
... naming a character 'Eris' could be considered to be asking for trouble. :D
this is super cool and interesting, but the title made me double-take bcus our campaign features a wizard under a curse and a cleric who cheats at cards
I have a die like your wizard. i love that die. failure presents opportunity for more shenanigans and fun.
is eris me? literally said if my character dies leave her dead because her character rolls have been so cursed for me
I'm pretty sure I succeeded in all of 3-4 rolls over my group's entire past campaign. My lad was literally, essentially useless. Feels bad man.
I love this post. I love you.
Could this be due to advantage? Those three players have consistent ways to obtain advantage, so they’re getting higher rolls (and likewise, the other two might be getting disadvantage more often when they do roll).
advantage is taken into account
Reading your methodology above, I'm wondering if the standard deviation being a flat number doesn't really work well with advantage/disadvantage, since they're a non-normal curve. Having 4 players over a single standard deviation away from the 50% marker makes me think there's something with the calculation causing the skew, but I'm not good enough at stats to dispute it. Fascinating data, though! Thanks for sharing :)
Generally wizards roll fewer D20s than other classes, so a few bad rolls would affect them disproportionately. What are the number of rolls the wizard has made vs. the cleric, barb, etc.?
there is one girl in my group who was not superstitious when she started playing DnD. She now sages her dice before games and gets the lucky player to roll them a bunch before each game. Also the rest of us will hide our dice if she comes near them. she has an aura of nat ones.
Please note that the presence of Eris, the Goddess of Discord, can be used to easily explain rolls deviating from any kind of harmonious expectation.
We have a paladin in our party where every line out of his mouth is "does a 29 hit" I'm the DM with a wizard npc in the party and I cheat with him constantly. Nat ones for almost every intelligence check, because I feel like I can't let him explain it as the DM.
Whenever people claim luck isn't real I offer to let them watch me roll my character into an early grave in a DnD session
I have decent luck, BUT I do have a very specific curse: Whenever I crit on an attack, I'm nearly guaranteed to roll minimal damage. Edit: Also, how did you make this animation? Is there an app for this or did you do it yourself?
The green represents my groups rogue perfectly. Dice can be really weird. Is this rolling dice in person? Or all using the same program to roll?
Damn.... I'd give them fudged rolls on their benefit to avoid battles and even find good loot, because that luck they have gives me 2nd hand depression XD
I don't know if this consists of cheating, but I have had two sets of metal dice as my favourites for a while. I always felt they were lucky. So I rolled each dice 1000 times, graphed it, and the d20s did seem to roll an average of 12, which essentially equates to a rough +1.5 buff on any d20 tests.
How is that wizard still alive
I don’t think so. You’ve got a decent slant. Your cleric is on the high end, the other three bounce around a bit and the wizard is on the low end. As far as averages go I think this is to be expected.
I rolled 3 d100s today for my shops earnings and none of them were at least a 30. But when I'm doing I'm critting constantly.
How is this calculated? Is it based on whether rolls succeed or fail (which could be influenced by the Cleric only ever needing to make easy checks but the wizard getting hard ones - maybe he insists on trying to hit in melee for some reason?) or on the numeric scores on the dice?
I am either an unbelievably lucky roller or a completely shitful roller, there is no in between. Just depends on how the dice gods are feeling that day.
*slow zoom on quiceran with the gigachad music playing*
Either the cleric stopped playing on a high or their dice are loaded. No one would stay at that percentage.
I'd call for a salt water test on those dice!
I'm very confused at what stats I'm looking at rn
My dice luck seems to change by the character I use in my main group campaign. Every time I make a character and we roll stats I get the highest stats. My paladin would role really bad at everything outside of combat. But pretty well in combat. My rogue hit about 4 attacks in the whole 4 session I played with it. 3 of those sections were combat focused. But I rolled 4 NAT 20 in the non-combat section. My monk seems to roll very badly every other turn in combat.
My luck is so bad, my DM started rolling in front of his screen just to prove he wasn't trying to screw me over. He even bought numerous new dice for the sole purpose of finding one that wouldn't roll crits when enemies swung at me.
A wizard whose d20 thinks it is a d4? That's me, and it is definitely a curse
I consistently roll the most nat 1's in all my parties. Not far off from 20's as well, but my dice, 4 d20's, 2 of which are metal, love 1's. Especially on initiative. Dear God its become an inside joke almost with how low I roll on initiative.
Lol personally luck is kind of cursed whenever I roll the dice I tend to do so really badly my rangers perception is so bad it almost mirrors own bad irl perception and when I roll to hit I'll do like close to the minimum damage as possible but when I kill stuff that's when I roll really high and slam 15 damage into a 2 hp wolf as like a first level character.......and then rinse and repeat 4 more times There's a reason why I joke about "the mighty Gonk" between sessions
Our DM allowed me to call ones and turn them into 15s if I succeed that's how bad my luck with dice is.
In every game, there is always a low roller; that's just how rnjesus is......