Man I love these stories, keep em up.

1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1,  …can’t stop laughing

1/640 million chance

well you could probably have better luck at vegas

Damn those guys have worse than me.

Wow. That’s… pretty terrible luck. I’ve seen some bad sequences of rolls, but nothing that bad.

Thinking about it, I feel like there’s two ways you could’ve salvaged the situation. Mind you, it took a bit of thinking to come up with these, so I don’t know if they really could’ve been thought up on the spot.

The first is to have one of the opposing operatives hear the commotion on top of the train car (I mean, that thief guy bouncing on top must have created a bunch of noise) and go to investigate. They weren’t able to get any guns through security, but the guy is armed with a grappling hook that was smuggled on board as two innocuous items. When he sees the chopper, he fires at it with the hook to keep it from escaping (captured agents are valuable!) and the party can use that to rappel down. Now they still have a huge problem as their chopper is effectively trapped flying with the train, the other operative team potentially knows about their infiltration, and they have to deal with the enemy agent on top of the train. But it’s still better than flat-out losing before even getting to the mission.

The other possibility is to have the same thing happen as above, but in this case, the guy is actually a deep-cover friendly agent who is there for some unrelated reason — you could even make him a medic to fudge some stabilization on the thief dude. He agrees to help the party, but now the party owes him a favor. Hell, if the thief dies, you could have the player play the double agent instead.

Like I said, though, these ideas took a bit of a think and I don’t know if the added pressure of a running game would yield such results.

Metal Gear?  My Mullet approves!  In fact…

“Most of these stories end up with my players dying”

To quote Otacon: “You’re bad luck!”

As usual, this story makes me glad I have a vivid imagination.  I even got to tweak the mental imagery a bit for my own amusement:  When the second guy attempted to cling to the train, I pictured a zany, Airplane! or Top Secret-like comedy film where one guy has already failed, another man tries to attempt the same task, and he just runs head-first into the side of a speeding bullet train, TWICE, just being slammed and repelled off like a Loony Toons character. 

Even Rowan Atkinson in Rat Race had better luck with running at speeding trains.  Hell, even the monkey-crew from Final Fantasy 8 had a more successful run at a train mission than the poor saps in this story.  It’s so sad, yet highly amusing. 

And a side note, to properly, and appropriately end this video, to quote the Iron Sheik:

FACK!

This is quickly becoming my favorite Spoony “show”.

I love these stories, I really do. As an avid gamer, I have LIVED them, I assure you.

Quick question, though. Um … when are you going to release some movie and/or game reviews? I’m curious to see how FF X2 turns out, and I am NOT going to play it myself!

I haven’t watched this yet, it’ll be a treat for tomorrow! I just wanted to say, I love these stories, I love hearing you tell them and I love hearing about Spoony!Kid. I’ve always liked to listen to your v-logs while playing wow; its great listening when farming something. I’m a huuuge fan (of you more so than your ‘spoony’ persona, heh) and I hope you keep telling stories, even if you run out of ‘counter monkey’ ones. :)

Roll a 1 six times in a row?… they weren’t using loaded dice by mistake, were they?

Wow, that’s a bad set of rolls.  Rolling any given number on a d20 is 1:20, rolling any given number on a d20 six times is 1:20x20x20x20x20x20, or 1 in 6.4 million.  Definitely very poor odds.

My worst story with critical successes and critical failures also comes from Spycraft.  This is a mission from Living Spycraft called “Ground Truth,” where the team has to get into North Korea, make their way to a secret underground base, and find out for certain whether or not the facility has nuclear weapons.  There’s two ways into the country – either a soft entry, where the team poses as a trade delegation or something to get to a nearby (5km) town to the site, and evade their handler; or a hard entry, where the team boards a spy plane and does a HALO jump at night.

I had six players in this group: a US Marine (the team’s gun bunny), a US Pararescue trooper (who also served as the team’s hacker), a Mossad operative (who was their intrusion specialist and martial artist), two facemen (one specialized in disguises, the other an excellent con man), and a wheelman (he could drive anything, and usually ran it into the bad guys).  I suspected they’d do both options – the military folk would lean towards the hard entry, while the non-military operatives would lean towards the soft entry.  I was proved right, and they began their planning.

Now, here’s how a HALO jump works in Spycraft.  It’s a Sport (Skydiving) roll, and it starts at a DC 10.  For those of you unfamiliar with d20, basically, you roll a d20, add your ranks in Sport (Skydiving) and your Dexterity modifier to the roll.  Naturally, not many people have the Sport (Skydiving) skill, so for an expenditure of 2 Gadget Points, the team members could request an emergency training session and gain two temporary ranks in Sport (Skydiving).  Of course, if the agent already had spent points to buy Sport (Skydiving), as the Pararescue guy did, he can’t benefit from that.  So, basically, in order to successfully open your chute at the first opportunity (roughly a thousand feet above ground), they had at least a +4 bonus, so they needed to roll a 6 or better.  Naturally, the longer you wait to pull your chute, the harder the check becomes.  So, why wouldn’t you pull at the first opportunity?  Well, the DC you open your chute at becomes the DC for people to notice you during the final bit of your descent.  So, the longer you wait, the harder you are to notice.  So, naturally, my group decides to all wait.

So, now they’re roughly 750 feet above the ground.  The DC is now 15.  The Marine suddenly does some quick math.  “If I wait much longer, the ground and I are going to meet, and the ground is going to win that exchange!”  He deploys.  “OK,” I tell him, “make your roll.”

He rolls a natural 20!  He also spends an action point to ensure it’s a critical success, and land perfectly in the drop zone.  He cuts himself free of the chute, pulls his rifle, and begins securing the LZ.

So, now it’s the Mossad agent and the Pararescue guy plummeting towards their doom, and they’re about 500 feet above ground.  The DC is now 20.  The Mossad agent was waiting for this, and he pulls his chute as well.  “OK,” I tell him, “make your roll.”

Another natural 20!  He too spends an action point to ensure it’s a critical success, and he lands very close to the Marine, cuts himself free of the chute, pulls his weapon and begins securing the LZ as well.

Now the Pararescue guy has a decision.  Does he wait for the final moment, at 250 feet above the ground, or does he pull his chute now?  Eventually, after weighing his options, he decides to pull now.  (Which was a good choice, as the DC jumps from 20 to 30.)

“OK,” I tell him, “make your roll.”

What can be said about what happened next?  Well, I suppose the best thing that could be said was “he didn’t botch.”  He rolled, like, a 4 or something.  With his bonuses, he gets about a 10, meaning he fails the roll.

Now, the good news is that the chute deployed, slowing his descent, so he wouldn’t become street pizza.  However, it’s definitely a hard landing right now, meaning he’ll be taking a d6 points of damage for every point he missed the roll by – 10d6 at level 4 or 5 is going to hurt a lot. 

Fortunately, Spycraft provides ways to help alleviate the fickleness of the dice with action points.  One of the more powerful things they can do is you can spend them to gain an additional d4 to add directly to the total of your check.  Moreover, if you roll a 4 on the die, you get to roll an additional d4 and add that to the total.  And on top of that, if you keep rolling 4s, you get to keep doing that.  So, there’s ways to deal with a poor roll at a bad time.

So, the Pararescue guy decides to use his first action point.  He picks up his d4.  He gets a 1.  Not what he wanted, clearly, so he uses a second action point, and rolls again.  He gets another 1.  So, he’s managed to reduce the damage from 10d6 to 8d6.  He sighs and uses his final action point.  He picks up his d4 again, starts to roll it, thinks better of it, and uses a different d4.

Yep, you guessed it.  He gets a 1.

So, he lands and takes 7d6 points of daamge.  This blows through his Vitality (basically, superficial damage that comes back rather quickly), and dives right into his Wounds (the shots that actually hurt).

Oh, did I mention, he’s also their medic?  And that this is roughly 5 minutes into the game?

They bring him back up, using all of their healing they’d budgeted for the mission, and get him moving, but he’s got a sprained ankle (or worse) from this, so they’re moving a lot slower than they were wanting to behind enemy lines.

Things eventually got better for them, but it was a VERY rough way to start the adventure.  It’s still one of the more memorable stories from my gaming experiences.

If I were you, I would maybe begin to save money and open a hobby store myself. You could advertise it in your website it could have competitive play for several tcgs as well as rpg seeing that you like this stuff so mutch.

Double post -oops-

Maybe one of the guys slipped you a loaded dice that would always land on a 1 or 2 so he could troll everybody? I dunno, I just feel so bad for you and those guys you played with :(

listening to this, i was confused at the end. why should they have blamed spoony for their own bad dice rolls? that’s pretty much the worst thing to do

Disregard

I mostly play oWoD. I had a rank 2 Silent Strider kill my Rank 5 Elder Get of Fenris in one hit. When i rolled for soak, botched the roll. I’m like damn, okay you messed him up. Well with werewolves you can roll rage to soak any damage he goes into Incapacitated to heal up all the wounds. well I botched that roll as well. So a very weak character literaly destroyed someone he didn’t stand a real chance against.

On the flip side, this is Karma. Back when I was younger I played a Level 1 Elf Ranger. We had to deal with a vampire in a small village. We had a week to prepare for the vampire to come back. Granted he has the right to arrogant . As the ranged fighter, my job was simple, kill the vampire with a arrow through the heart. The paladin had put Invisible to undead on me so i could get a clean shot. In a miracle shot, I got a natural 20 for an aimed shot to the heart.  Besides seeing the GM with the most messed up look on his face.

I had a 4.0 Gnome Bard at level 3 and had managed to stack my skills into stupid plus stats up to 14 but mostly 11 into useless things like, bluff, intimidate, theft, sneak and general trickery (I know a 3ft gnome with more intimidate than our tank)

The DM at the time had set up a campaign where we had to escape a town after rescuing a wanted man who rewarded us with stolen items from the king of the realm. We hit a hard time trying to escape, we were critical failing everything, in an attempt to evade guards and police the party finally made it out after 2 hours and barely with any supplies left and the campaign was looking to be back on track when we bumped into a couple of trolls (threw in at low level to give us supplies). by now I had gotten to level three and had the ability to shrink items and enchant at low level..

Most fights I hung back because I had no defence but this time I used my sneaking to get right in and distract the trolls and aided in victory, I was rewarded with one prize of my choice so I skinned them. and pocketed their skins in my hold all reluctantly the DM agreed and I shrank the skin down to fit.

About 2 more sessions in we happened across the main guard of the town who was essential in our quest, the DM had planned for him to alert the king of our whereabouts through the mountains so we could challenge the king in the end to a fight for victory.

But here is what happened instead.
I put the troll skin on and the clothes from a town guard decided for the first time in the campaign to try a bluff check.
I said I was a mountain guide helping wounded soldiers back to their families.
The DM frowned at this and said well for a start he doubts your a troll so there is a -10 to your bluff check and then he also recognises some party members so that’s a further -25 (this DM really didn’t want me to succeed he basically rail roaded me in to a check which I was going to fail, forgetting I had a bluff check of +15 and a disguise bonus of +2.
So I rolled and got my only critical of the whole campaign and I mean only, I failed to crit everywhere.
DM checked my stats and added up the totals and the other players by know were laughing that I even had a plus 2 after minuses. only because I argued that my disguise although crap and transparent counted. So the DM played along and rolled his perception check, and critical failed.

Needless to say the DM got majorly upset that I had successfully bluffed past a central plot point in his quest and tried to shoe horn in another bandit to attack me to shed my disguise. To arise suspicion in the Guard, however I used my plus 11 in intimidate to keep him quiet and the DM was forced to abandon the campaign and we escaped the land with the jewels. Needless to say I haven’t been invited back. But it’s was so worth it:)

Actually, We had a problem like this. My friend Whit can’t win for tryin’ in games, I mean, it’s not just botches, she just keeps low rolling a lot. It probably doesn’t help at all that she combines this with some bad decision making, often getting herself into really bad situations that could have been easily avoided with a bit of forethought.

We finally worked out a system to deal with the problem: We would have a pinch roller for her in dire situations, but as well, we would help minmax her character for what she wanted to do so that the dice just didn’t matter for this. Exalted further helped us out in this regard by having rules put that if you have at least 7 dice for a check that requires only 1 successes, that you don’t have to roll, since success is generally assumed, and for every three dice you have for the check, it increases, so with 10 dice you don’t have to roll diff 2 checks, 13 you don’t have to roll diff 3s, 16 you don’t have to roll diff 4s, and finally, if you have 19 dice to a check, you wouldn’t have to roll diff 5 checks. The game is high epic fantasy, so it’s built to have your characters be capable of some really insane shit.

My worst run of dice was actually only my second ever combat playing D&D.  We’d run into a giant snake or something, an unintelligent animal big or no, and I won initiative so I went first.  I rolled a one.  Now my DM had a series of charts to give critical misses and critical hits a bit more flavour.  He rolls a percentile and says, “Ok you hit one of your party members (decided by a d4 dice roll).  Roll a second attack against your friend.”  I roll a 20.  DM rolls his percentile again and sighs, “You crippled his right arm.”  Now this was our fighter, and I had just managed to take out his sword arm.

The horror doesn’t end there though because I was a dual wielding Ranger, I had another attack.  So I roll and, big surprise it’s a 1.  DM rolls and says, “Ok you’ve actually managed to hit yourself.  Roll another attack.”  I roll a 20, at this point the DM’s thinking maybe I should roll for the monsters, and he checks the chart again.  He puts his face in his hands and to this day I’m not sure if he was laughing or crying, looks at me and says, “You cut your own head off.”

At which point I got up from the table and said, “Ok I’m going to roll up another character and we’re all agreed he doesn’t get to play with anything sharp.”

My two biggest fails both ended in horrible deaths for my characters.
The first one was a half werewolf barbarian, we were sneaking into a hag’s camp to retrieve a magical artifact and my barbarian, (having 6 Int) wandered slightly off to the side. GM tells me to roll perception, somehow I missed the nine foot tall minotaur creeping up behind me. GM then rolls attack, nat. 20, my barbarian didn’t survive the 180 points of damage from behind.
Second one was in Paladium Rifts, we were all playing demigod’s and godlings. My character was a son of Horus, and had falcon wings, lacking any other powers I served as heavy weapons support. The fail came when I got into melee with a sniper. I got a good hit off on him before we started grappling, the sniper pulled a vibro-knife and made a called shot to my head, nat. 20. I rolled my dodge, nat. 1……..

Sometimes i think, ‘Boy, it’d be great to get all these gamers together PbP or PbEm or what have you. Lot of cool people makes for a cool game, right?’
Then I think about it, really. to many conflicting scheduals, mine included. Second best thing is reading all the stories.
So, Cesear demands more!

It’s pretty funny to imagine all these highly trained specialists preparing for the mission. They’re ready. They’re psyched. Then the super-ninja bounces off the train repeatedly and collapses on the ground. The medical expert injures him further as he accesses the injuries and their increasingly desperate plans all fail.

Worst runs of bad luck I have seen in games I have played are usually ones I run. The worst incident was where in a single, non-boss encounter with 3 mercenaries against a player group of 6. The players were ambushed by all of our dice at the same time. In the first three rounds of combat they had missed or fumbled every attack on the mercenaries, and the mercs with their mediocre equipment managed to crit for the first eight attacks(all natural 20′s if you are curious), and then around one crit every third roll, crippling the party in short order and dealing more damage on average then the boss battle I had planned. Strangely enough, this has, to a lesser degree, happened frequently with the enemy crit problem. It got to a point that weak enemies were regularly capable of causing player death or near death experiences out of sheer luck instead of any measurable ability or stats when they were merely supposed to hamper the group some. After that particularly bad string of DM crits I implemented a house rule that seems to have spread to sister groups in the area. The ’3 crit rule’. where the DM may only crit 3 times per game, or battle of a battle carries over into the next game.

I remember one time, I was in a small group of characters that I’d just joined a few weeks before hand. There was one time when the group was wandering down into a deep basement of some building. As our tank-warrior opened up a door, inside were three sleeping grizzly bears. Of course, as luck would have it he rolled terribly when checking if he was quiet enough not to wake them. They woke up, turned and looked at him and charged for the door.

As the first one came in close, he rolled an agility check to see if he could slam the door shut in time… Not only did he roll a 20, allowing him to slam the door shut just as the first bear flew at the door, crushing its face in the process and dealing damage, but as the second bear jumped toward the door at the same time, our DM rolled a fumble… so the second bear ended up crashing head first (badly) into the door, breaking its neck in the process.

That was a good start to what could have been a nasty battle :P

My personal best was in the same game whereby I, as an archer/assassin/thief style character, was attacked by a giant frog. It managed to flick out its tounge and wrap it around me, pulling me in close and just as it was about to swallow me whole, I fired an arrow (the tip of which I poisoned not long before entering the area it resided) into its mouth, rolling high enough against the DM’s roll to cause enough damage to kill it out-right.
…Our warrior cut out it’s tounge that he later had crafted into a whip…

All the stories in the comments are so awesome! They are just the most epic stories.

The best set of awesome rolls I ever got was when I was playing WoD. It was just me and one other person. It was the first session, and I was playing a intellectual character, low physical stats. I REALLY wasn’t prepared.

We are in this house, and we find out that there is a vampire in the basement. We’re still upstairs but we have to go fight downstairs eventually. I have like no weapons and I’m freaking out I’m gonna die so early, but I’m gonna try. I decide to make steaks out of chair legs, which takes a bit with no craft stats.

We go down. Its a super old super powerful vampire that we cannot possibly take. My companion attacks and is immediately knocked unconscious. I’m told I have no chance of running, cause she’s so fast. So, I go at her with the table leg. I have tons of penalties. I have to grapple and then stab to even get damage. The leg is a improvised weapon and gets penalties. I rolled at least 6 crits consecutively. Not only do I grapple, and stab her, without taking damage cause her rolls sucked bad too, but I kill her. Not even torpor, I straight up kill her.

The DM was flabbergasted. His whole game was planned around her. Apparently we were suppose to get rescued or captured or something. But my character was just too awesome.

LOL! Great story!

I usually fail half of my rolls.

I am to this day known in my group as the fumblemaster, we play 3.5 DnD but with a few houserules, one of the houserules is a fumble table that you roll on when rolling a nat 1 in combat, I know there are a few of those in diferent systems, but I’m not sure where this one is taken from. this particular chart rolls open handed, meaning that if you roll 95-98 you roll twice and if you roll 99 or 100 on the table you roll three times. I am rather lucky with most of my d20 checks, but then (and this has happened 5 times at this point) when I fumble I roll so incredibly high that it’s insane. the two worst cases was a centaur using a giant maul. I fumbled and rolled 100, 100, 98, 99, 100. and at this point the others are looking at me and I’m just staring at my dice, we all know we’re fucked… the result after having rolled on the fumble table was that I hit my friend for triple damage twice, hit my friend for double damage, hit myself for quadruble dmg, fell down, was stunned for 20 rounds, hit myself for another quadruble damage and then again for trice damage…
at the time we where a rather small group and that meant that this was our very first total whipeout. we got killed not by the GM’s monsters, but by me, murdering my entire team in a single full round action. this would be a great story if it hadn’t happened again and again since then…