this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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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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[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 0 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

so a very important question to ask is... do your players want you to thumb the scales, or do they rather want to see where the shitty rolls go? Sometimes, the best solution is to let it play out. Sometimes, the chance of failure makes it more fun, more dramatic. Sometimes, they're emotionally invested in the characters. Maybe instead of goosing the dice rolls or something, give them options for when the dice rolls fail- maybe they become prisoners and can then escape and find some way of poisoning enough people to complete the objective. maybe they can talk their way out of it; or they can fix up some sort of trap or set up some kind of envirmomental thingamdoo.

this is where you need to know what kind of things your players look for, and what you can sneak into the campaign for them to find.

ways to help out a bit might include tossing some healing potions or useful elixirs into the world, either as loot to be found or as drops. that's a bit more subtle. or weapon oils for their weapons. Spell scrolls for the mages, too.

alternatively you could toss them advantage occasionally. They'll know you're doing it, of course, but then, nobody really calls that out. alternatively you can bring in a DMPC that buffs them, and sets them right so they don't have to blow so many spell slots while still letting them guide the action.

as a side note, if you're using a digital dice generator, there may be an issue with it's script. Older rngs or modern ones that focus on speed or 'efficient' coding generally aren't entirely random that sometimes leads to faulty spreads. If you can, have it give you an absurdly large number of rolls and report the counts of each number. GPt-4 gave this result for a 500d20:

Face count
1 26
2 24
3 30
4 25
5 29
6 28
7 30
8 26
9 27
10 28
11 24
12 25
13 30
14 29
15 29
16 27
17 27
18 25
19 27
20 29

As you can see they're all fairly even, but not perfectly so. (it averages out to 10.5, but that's actually somewhat meaningless since true random is going to be... well. random.) in a large pile of rolls, you shouldn't see them be all perfect.