Dice are fickle bastards.
I buy new dice every time a new campaign starts (or I at least try to, anyway). It’s a way to commemorate the start of a new game. I try to use these dice exclusively for that particular game.
Unfortunately, I’m not always able to keep that promise. Sometimes, the dice are just out to screw you and revel in your misfortune. Take this story, for example.
Imagine a beautiful set of dice, a shiny, cloudy blue set. You’ve done your practice rolls, you see the high numbers, and it’s time. It’s time to rock faces. This was me, some 8 years ago. My character, primed and ready.
I have never seen the fates laugh so hard.
In the first game session, my sorcerer missed his shocking grasp spell. Fumbled it, actually. This wouldn’t have been so bad, but we had a critical fumble dice at our table. Instead of just falling over, I instead shocked myself and was dazed for a round. Then the thing we were fighting took me down with it’s next hit while I was messed up. I don’t think I hit a single time in combat with a non Magic Missile spell.
Other roles suffered a similar fate. I rolled 7 or below for any check I needed to make. I tried (and failed) a lot of things that night.
Finally, the time came for me to scale the mage tower we were in. We were trying to get to the top floor, but we were stuck. I elected (I don’t know why I did, really. I had a 8 strength and no climb ranks) to climb out of the window and climb to the next floor’s window and find the door to the previous floor to open it.
I started out fine. I got a decent roll, and began my accent. The tower was high, and was also surrounded by the living dead. I couldn’t risk failure, or I’d fall into death (if the fall damage itself didn’t kill me). Of course, by this point I didn’t trust my dice, so when I found myself about half-way to the next floor and needed to make another climb check, I said “screw that”, and took ten.
Took ten on a climb skill when I had a -1 to all strength based skills. I wish I was making this up.
I immediately fell, failed my chance to catch onto the window I climbed out of, and straight into the undead horde. I don’t know if the fall damage killed me or if the zombies and skeletons did, but that was the end of the line for my sorcerer. I looked down to my dice, shaking my head at them, then threw them into the bottom of the dice bag to be forgotten. And they stayed forgotten until I ended up using them without remembering the hell they put my poor Halfling Sorcerer through.
They actually rolled pretty well since then, actually. Maybe it was just my Halfling they didn’t like.
i buy a new set of dice every time i have a bad night with my last set of dice. i call them traitors and curse them. i currently have a ridiculously large bag of dice filled with the curs that no longer roll well. i used one set of dice for nearly a year before it turned on me. now, it sits with the rest of the turncloaks in bitter exile. i know that feel, bro.