When you feel like RNG is not really random

Argent Dawn
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Sometimes in certain circles it’s a running gag how some people (person behind the thread included) are bound to have bad luck with dice rolls in RP events. Usually in friend and guild groups we use simple /roll 20 or /roll to determine efficiency of one’s efforts, rather than strict success/fail numbers. I have had quite a few random events with horrible dice rolls, but some unpredictability and lack of constant success is which makes those RP events exciting.

However, recently I ran a chain of RP events with a friend lasting roughly for a week. We logged on every night and enjoyed getting back to our chars doing what they do best. Good fun!

However, with hours of RP each night and /roll 20 determining results of what our characters did personally, I had incredibly bad luck which didn’t feel “random number generation” anymore. I could barely roll numbers above 10 and if I did, it was something close to 13 at most insignificant turns. Most of my rolls were between 1-4 or 6-8. While my friend got more balanced rolls and multiple 18-20s and mostly at most significant moments (boss deaths etc). While this is no fault of my friend and he was understanding towards me, this contrast of our seemingly random luck made me think, if it’s possible to modify outcomes of rolls and make them seem just “normal”. Or could there actually be some server admin tampering with our roll outcomes on server side?

In the end of the week, I had already ran out of excuses for why my char would fail so much and reusing old excuses didn’t fit to the character anymore. While it did make me think about solutions of how to go around rolls and still keep things exciting, the amount of bad luck just keeps nagging at back of my head. Will it “unfun” my RP in the future if rolls come into question. I know I could just start using addons for rolls and ask friends to do the same, but it shouldn’t be necessary with the game’s own systems existing. Random should be random though, am I wrong to think it should be generating numbers between 1 and 20 for both of us with /roll 20, without constant favoritism towards the other. I did check it was indeed “out of 1-20” instead of “20-20” or “10-20” for example.

I wonder if anyone else has had bad roll luck to the extent that trying to make jokes out of it is no longer fun but frustrating. Has anyone here ever experienced similar? Found a bug which enables to tamper with rolls? An addon to make them seem like vanilla rolls? Could we suspect server admins tampering with RP rolls? And no, don’t tell specifics of using certain bugs if you know them, but do tell if any exist for the sake of information and truth.

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God wouldn’t that be a hoot.

But no, you’re just seeing a string of bad luck, and you only noticed because it directly affected you. If you’d had a string of good luck in the opposite manner you’d either not notice at all, or simply put it down to, well, good luck.

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The game was rigged from the start

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As Elenthas said, you just suffered a string of bad luck.

I get that a lot, but i am genuinely an unlucky person (in and out of WoW).

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I liked to use character modifiers to make the RP a little more realistic.

eg. A skilled archer might have +3 to bow shots on an r/20. But perhaps -2 to defence if they’re wearing lighter armour.

Things like that make random rolling more reasonable and fun! Personally I preferred to keep it simple though, otherwise you’re spending more time glancing at numbers rather than playing the game.

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On the opposite, you’re noticing it because it’s truly random. Every time. It doesn’t have a higher chances of rolling 2 or 18, and every new roll is reset. Rolling 2 twice in a row have no impact on whether the next roll is going to be favorable to you this time.

And as Khelnamun said, it’s why RP systems gives modifiers when they use rolls in general, which for all my grumbling about mechanics, I support.

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Congratulations, you just invented D&D! That’s basically the core of D&D, everything else is bookkeeping. :slight_smile:

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Oh this thread hits close to home.

It is a running joke within our guild that all our rolls are unapologetically trash at literally all times possible. When people join the guild, we also watch them take the inevitable turn for the worse luck wise and rapidly, they found themselves with the typical “Nightblade rolls” as we call them. The longer you stay in the guild the worse they get and so on and so forth. Terribly funny. The curse comes with the tabard.

However, since I am a hopeless nerd and decided that I had the time for this, I decided to actually test this mathematically. I made a few guildies roll an absurd amount of rolls (1-20) using the in-game /roll command, calculated the average and mean average, and in general looked at the statistical significance, standard deviation and outcome of it all and so on. I tried the same with some alts of ours too, to see if it was the guild tag or what it was.

Outcome was basically that the average of around a thousand rolls yielded the following:

  • Guild average roll: 10,46
  • Unguilged average roll: 10,58
  • Best average by individual player: 11,42
  • Worst average by individual player: 9,7

I tested a few other factors, such as how many times we rolled a 2 (our most hated dice roll and internal meme), how many nat20 and so on and so forth, and in most cases, each number showed up roughly as often as expected - 5% of all the dice thrown. There were a few outliers, but none that could be considered as statistically significant.

My theory is that the more trash rolls sitrs more emotion, and thus weighs heavily. No one remembers a 14 on a decent hit towards an enemy, but everyone will truly feel that accursed 2 when trying to evade something deadly in an event. I think you are on the right path with thinking up nice counterweights to it. We use a traited roll system that has made it a little bit easier for us, but alas, we are not spared total failure either. I agree that a night full of nothing higher than an 8 (the most common Nightblade roll with a small margain actually) is not particularly fun for anyone. The hunt for the perfect system goes on! Our current one can be found on our homepage ^^ :crescent_moon:

(Small disclaimer, if one wants to ~truly~ study this and hopefully do it better than I did, I recommend a bigger data sample than I had, a whole lot of patience and a better way of recording everything than doing it manually. Elune help you and good luck.)

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Thank you!

I always knew I’d amount to something one day.

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This is one of the reasons I use the Free Emote style for RP instead of /roll. I had too many instances where plans get derailed by the party of veterans suddenly turning into bumbling idiots. A 1 may be humorous once or twice but it quickly gets old and becomes a fun killer for the player and a pain in the posterior for the DM who has to fudge the party past their dice induced ineptitude to the next chapter of the story.

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I often noticed my RNG to vary depending on character I’d play. Nerathion would be usually a high roller, while my Huntress was a low-roller.

A highlight of mine is in an event many years ago, I rolled 1 three times in the span of like, 10 minutes, probably two of them were also consecutively. It was a team activity too done in pairs, so the other player was not a fan.

Not even modifiers would save me from bad rolls, using d100 I’d end up having a +40 to some roll and I’d still manage consistent low40s.

Sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating. Totally not why I enjoyed playing Nerathion more, too.

(Over time though, I think Nerathion ended up being more average in rolls so that also conveniently coincided with my shift towards pure emotes in fights. Hehe.)

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My life consists of bad rolls from birth.

You’ve had bad luck, is all. But perhaps instead of saying “X roll means success or failure”, go on logic instead with your RP and use rolls to determine how hard something hits or whatever.

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I haven’t met a single person who ever thought they had good or even middling rolls. Everyone will always believe their odds are bad or worse than others’, cuz thats just how we latch onto failure for the most part.

I think most guilds mistranslate D&D’s roll system into WoW. Statistically speaking, the average roll will always be stacked against the players odds because characters usually don’t have modifiers. Even a +2 or +3 modifier on certain types of rolls can really change an average “roll 20 to win or lose” event into something much better.

Suggestion: use dicemaster.

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Technically it’s not really random because it’ll be getting its random number generation from some sort of seed and I strongly doubt they’ve put an enormous amount of effort into their random number generation code but it’ll be random enough for the purposes of a dumb videogame.

Getting a bunch of bad rolls in a row is fairly unlikely but it’ll happen sometimes. Even happens with physical dice, once had a dungeon world game where I was incapable of rolling above 5 on 2d6 for an entire session which had interesting consequences for the story.

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This sort of player bias towards roll likelihood is also why Fire Emblem implemented ‘true hit’ in their games. Maths explanation is kinda boring but there’s a table here which gives a visual explanation:

https://serenesforest.net/general/true-hit/

Effectively its a weighted curve: 50% hit is roughly 50%, but as you go towards the extremes the likelihood increases than normal, so “90%” to hit is actually “98%” to hit and “10%” to hit is actually “2%” to hit.

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I rather like that, even if it might be a bit much for the average WoW event DM to play with.

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For the purposes of a video game, standard software pseudorandom number generators are indistinguishable from true randomness.

And you’re right. One can absolutely get lucky and unlucky streaks. That’s just how randomness works. It could be the same with physical dice.

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