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Dealing with players rolling terribly in combat? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by Zonetrooper@lemmy.world to c/dnd@lemmy.world

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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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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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,

If all else fails, you can reward them with a wand of fireballs or Staff of the Sun or similar high powered magic item. Doesn't matter how you roll with these, you're going to have some fun.

[–] Zonetrooper@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days 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.