Image Credit paddynapper [cc BY-SA 2.0] via
Wikimedia Commons, Cropped and sharpened by Mike

Watching the Australian performance in the Women’s Ashes cricket series last night, where they absolutely destroyed the English opposition, inspired this article.

Australia batted first, and set England a target of 270 from their 50 overs (refer to this post if you don’t know enough about Cricket to know what I’m talking about).

This is a reasonable total, about par for a Women’s one-day international match. Australia then took the field and restricted England to a mere 75 for their 10 wickets. Most of the punishment was inflicted by just one bowler, but it takes a fielder or wicket-keeper to take a catch, so this was a team performance, nevertheless.

Ellyse Perry took 7 wickets for just 22 runs. This was the lowest total ever for England against Australia, and England’s greatest ever defeat in this form of the game- a 194-run loss.

It was as comprehensive a dismantling as I have ever seen on the sporting field. But don’t take my word for it – here’s a profession review of the match for those interested.

And that got me to thinking: There are times when one side of the table or the other has a horror run, when they can’t take a trick, when random chance comes out butter-side-down for every dropped slice of bread on a day when everyone is all thumbs. Equally, there are days when everything one side touches turns to gold, when they can’t lose a contest if they try.

The Improbability of Improbability

In most cases, these runs of improbable luck are best explained by the temporal concordance of a number of lesser improbabilities.

Statistically, 1/3 of the time you are up, 1/3 of the time you’re down, and 1/3 of the time you’re somewhere in the middle. But how quickly you cycle through these periods – the length, in game sessions, of these cycles – is different from one player to another, and subject to so many random distortions that they are impossible to predict.

What can be stated is that 1/3 of the time, when you are up, someone else at the table will probably be down, and someone else will be somewhere in the middle. Just 1/9th of the time, will two of you be ‘up’ at the same time. And, 1/27th of the time, all three of you will be ‘up’ at the same time.

Now, in a party of 3, that’s ALMOST as good as it gets – but we also have to consider the other side of the table. 1/3 of the time, the GM will also be ‘up’ – but 1/3 of the time, his luck will be ‘down’. So the closest equivalent to luck perfection (from the players’ perspective) will only occur 1/81th of the time.

The more players you add, the more likely it is that some of them will drag the table average ‘luck’ down, and the rarer it will be for everyone to be at their peak at the same time. Four players – one 243rd of the time. Five players – one time in 729. Six players – once in 2187 game sessions. Even if you play every week, the stars are likely to only align once in 42 years. But, when they do, the effect will be that much more profound.

And that’s with a very generous “1/3 of the time” definition of being ‘up’. What if it’s only when you’re within 10% of your best or worst that counts as having the golden touch?
3 players + GM – one in 10000. 4 players: one in 100,000. 5 players: one on 1,000,000.

Lightning has to strike somewhere. How many gaming groups are there, all over the world? If there are 10,000,000, that 1-in-a-million shot is likely to be experienced by 5-15 groups somewhere in the world every week. If there are 1 million, that’s 5-15 groups every 10 weeks, or 5 times a year. If there are 100,000, we get 5-15 occurrences every 100 weeks, or sometime in a roughly two-year time-frame.

But, personally, I would expect the 1,000,000 mark to be closer to the truth than the 100,000, by the time all the games run at gaming conventions and over the internet are taken into account.

Regardless, lightning is still going to strike somewhere every now and then – on a regular basis. How is a campaign supposed to cope? What should the GM do?

Case 1: The GM’s luck is lousy / The players can do no wrong

This is the circumstance that will transpire for at least some of the players at your table more often than the converse (which I will discuss a little later). There’s a natural tendency to compensate – avoid it like the plague.

Revise and review your personal mindset, immediately. There are three courses of action open to you, in broad terms:

1. Avoid letting players take advantage of the situation;
2. Use the situation to enhance the fun for the players;
3. Fight the situation despite the harm that it might do to the campaign in the medium-to-long term.

The problem with (3) is that you risk making your current headache a recurring migraine. “Compensating” usually requires “Overcompensating” before it has any effect, but the associated rewards for the players will linger beyond this one game session, and can turn what should be a one-session peak for the players into the new standard – this way lies Monty Haul.

Answer (1) means throwing minimized opportunities for success, reward, and advancement in the PCs direction for as long as their acquisition is an almost-inevitable outcome. Flocks of 1-HP bunny rabbits, little lost lambs, and the like. The players can tell what’s happening and will recognize your response to it for what it is – an act of desperate cowardice. Forever more, you will be the “Killjoy GM” – and your players will be ripe for other GMs to steal.

In terms of reasonable responses, that leaves only the most difficult one of all – option (2). Is there an NPC or enemy type that the players have always hated/feared and that you don’t care about, one way or the other? Now is the perfect time for him to rush in where even a fool would hesitate to tread, heaping some humiliation on his shoulders and letting the players convert their luck into a profound satisfaction that costs you nothing.

Of course, the players have a couple of choices to make, too. They can ride their luck for all its worth while it lasts – but that leaves them vulnerable and potentially exposed when the worm turns, having gotten themselves in too deep and over their heads.

They can overcompensate, or even suspect the GM of greasing a slippery slope beneath their feet, giving them just enough rope to end up in that ‘over their heads’ situation before lowering the boom on them.

Or they can simply enjoy the sense of being all-conquering without going out of their way to use it unreasonably.

I would assess the relative likelihood of these three choices as 6:3:1. Or maybe 7:2:1. But, no matter how they choose to react, it will be up to you to steer things in a safe direction.

Remember your priorities: Fun for the players, fun for yourself, preserving the campaign, telling an engaging story – generally in that order. All lucky streaks end. When they are someone else’s lucky streak, regardless of the game you’re playing, the trick is to survive until that happens.

Look at it this way: you are being gifted a rare opportunity. The PCs are riding the crest of a Tsunami, and relying on you to ensure a soft landing at the end of it.

If you want some more specific and practical advice, you can apply the techniques explained in

• Sequential Bus Theory and why it matters to GMs, and/or
• High-Fives and other in-Game Rewards, and/or
• Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Part 9: Rewards With Intent, and/or
• Objective-Oriented Experience Points.

For good measure, you can contemplate the suggestions in

• Conditional Modifier Magic: Combating Power Creep in RPGs.

Revise your priorities. This is a crisis for the campaign, but the other side of any crisis is opportunity. What you do with that opportunity is up to you – but I suggest you use it to enhance your campaign, not destroy it.

Case 2: The GM’s luck is unstoppable / The players can’t turn a trick

It’s very easy to let this situation go to your head. Don’t be tempted; it will hurt you in the long run.

Although the two may seem complete opposites, there’s more than a little similarity between this crisis and the one described above.

Once again, you have three options to contemplate, and they will sound awfully familiar:

1. Take full advantage of the situation for as long as it lasts;
2. Use the situation to enhance the fun for the players;
3. Go timid so as to give the PCs a fighting chance.

Once again, let’s take a closer look at these three alternatives, in the expectation that at least two of them will have hidden price-tags that are undesirable.

So, what does the first option boil down to? A TPK? PC humiliation (or worse yet, player humiliation)? Or simply taking every ambition the PCs have been trying to fulfill and making them impossible to achieve for the foreseeable future? On reflection, perhaps the TPK is the most palatable course!

I’m a firm believer in the maxim that only player stupidity should open the door to this sort of punishment. If the players are making reasonable choices, the application of unreasonable consequences are a failure on the part of the GM. In such cases, failures should not be terminal.

Option (3) is harder to pin down as !!br0ken!! On the surface, it seems a reasonable solution. The price that is paid is in credibility. The more you weaken the opposition to be overcome by the PCs, the less credible it is for them to have done the things that have given them a fearsome reputation, and that is fatal for player bragging rights. “Man, those woolly lambs were just killer, you know?” just doesn’t sound right.

On the contrary, the players want to be able to brag of success despite the GM doing his level best to stop them, to feel that they have achieved something noteworthy.

Don’t water down the opposition, but don’t have them call down the wrath of the Gods upon the PCs, either. Have the oh-so-superior opposition get temporarily distracted by an opportunity they hadn’t even dreamed possible – only for the players to block it, once their luck turns.

Which is sounding an awful lot like option (2) once again.

You know what? All those articles I referred to earlier are still relevant. Steer the PCs into courses where your lucky streak won’t permanently derail the campaign.

Once again, you aren’t the only one making decisions. How the players react is another question entirely – but, as a general rule, the breed tend to be incurable optimists. They know that every streak ends, eventually – at least, the smart ones do – and that they are better off manipulating circumstances so that they aren’t dependent on luck, good or bad.

And, if you do the same, it becomes a contest of roleplaying, not rollplaying, and everyone benefits by saving the die rolls for when they add to the fun. See Two ways to play: Roleplaying and Rollplaying if you don’t believe me.

An unusually short article, today – mainly because the article I was going to write started looking too long, given the intrusion of “real life” into my week. Normal service (plus some?) should resume next week.