Don’t you have several sets of dice, and don’t you ‘dog walk’ your d20s at the beginning of a session to see which one(s) are the lucky ones for the night? Asking for a friend…

Another suggestion for an in-universe way to tip the scales in your players’ favor would be to invent circumstances where your players’ “quick thinking” (read as: heavily signposted narrative elements) could lead to their enemies fighting with some form of disadvantage, without necessarily requiring a good roll.

As an example, say the party have found the bad guys’ base in an industrial area of town. They’re at the Moston Molasses Market, and it’s an unseasonably warm day in the middle of winter (I don’t know, let’s call it January 15th or equivalent). When the players arrive, they immediately notice that there are these enormous liquid storage silos lining the courtyard, where several mooks are milling. Additionally, without rolling because it’s obvious, one tank is literally bursting at the seams, with these long, dark brown streaks oozing out of the rivet joints. Maybe they need to make a skill check to determine this for sure, but it’s a reasonable assumption that striking that tank will cause it to burst. Given the size of the object and the foregone conclusion that this thing is gonna burst at some point with or without getting whacked, I would not ask the players for an attack roll if they chose to utilize my signposting. Instead, auto-success, the tank bursts, a wave of molasses escapes, and now the baddies that aren’t engulfed in a semi-solid wave of sticky goop at a minimum find themselves fighting in difficult terrain.

Obviously, that’s a hyper specific example born out of reading a certain Wikipedia article earlier today, but I hope it illustrates my point. As the architect of the world, the only limit is your creativity when it comes to what challenges your party face. Maybe, before their terrible stealth roll reveals them to the trio of trolls hunting them in the woods, the party overheard two of the trolls discussing how their companion isn’t allowed to cook their meals anymore, cause they’ve both got indigestion. Uh-oh, party gets found, but two of the three enemies have a level of exhaustion (or whatever other nerf you want to slap on that simulates having bubble guts) and their heart isn’t really in this fight, so they’ll bail at the first sign of resistance. Or, if a player is attentive to your narration, they might describe how their character aims a blow right in the belly of the troll that mentioned their stomach issues. If it hits (and, honestly, if it were me, I’d grant auto-success for the player’s listening skills), the troll’s eyes go wide, and he flees on his next turn. Depending on the tone of your story, more scatological narration may be included in that action.

In short, if you’re concerned the experience of your players prevents you from just tweaking numbers from behind the screen, all you have to do is bend the world to justify your tweaks. Hell, you don’t even have to have this ready to go ahead of time. Maybe you planned to have a super easy encounter with a couple of feral wolves on the way to the next village. Nothing challenging, just a reminder that the players are in with wilderness. But, uh-oh, the dice are turning Lassie and friends into Hellhounds with a taste for PC spleen. Rather than letting the campaign end with a whimper, as the heroes of Wherever wind up as puppy chow on a random stretch of dirt track, all of a sudden, the animals cease their attack and perk up their ears. In the distance, between their ragged breaths and the sound of their heartbeat pulsing in their ears, the party hear a howl. The wolves respond in kind and melt into the woods. Maybe with a roll, maybe without, your call, the players realize that the direction of the first howl just so happened to be exactly in the direction of the village they were travelling to. DUN DUN DUNNNNN!

From the your perspective, it was a random encounter gone sideways due to poor luck, and you had to invent a deus ex machina on the fly to prevent an anti-climax. However, from the player’s perspective, you have seeded a new narrative hook without relying on dry exposition, and it’s one that they might have some personal investment in. You’re under no obligation to dissuade them of the error in their assumption. Heck, in spit-balling what could have caused the situation, they may even give you ideas for how you’re going to incorporate this new dynamic into whatever you originally had planned for them at the new village.

Idk if any of that is of any use to you, but I hope it at least gives you some ideas for levers you can pull which affect difficulty that are a little more nuanced then, “oh shit, uhhhh I guess this monster’s AC is going to be 12 for the rest of this fight”.

I have a rule as DM that I will never fudge rolls against the players, but I will fudge rolls in their favor if it fits the narrative. Three players consecutively miss an enemy? Oh no, next turn it got a critical fail and then failed a Dex save, slipping and landing prone. I guess the players get advantage on melee attacks! Don’t do this often, but I’m the right spot it’s fine.

Monsters can just be dumb, too. INT of 6 means those Blobby Blobs are gonna fight poorly, attacking the tank and splitting up attacks. Also, the players don’t know your monsters’ stats, so you can make an attack that would get it to 1 HP instead kill an enemy. I also don’t do this often, but sometimes they just get unlucky, and no reason to TPK.

Speaking of TPK, you can let them fail forward. Monsters rarely have reason to attack downed/unconscious PCs, so let them roll death saves, but it usually takes a while to die. Everyone’s unconscious? Stop combat, no more death saves. Instead, they wake up as prisoners and have to escape. I had a particularly fun one where my players would have died to a trio of night hags (if you’ve played Curse of Strahd, you know the ones). Instead, they woke up and were given a mission, but the bags also stole parts of their “souls,” taking Max HP from one player, speed from another, giving one a trait that they would lose all hope, stealing another’s eye (disadvantage on Perception), etc. Then they had to fulfill the mission, but later came back at a higher level and beat the hags, gaining their souls back. Everyone loved getting revenge!

We’re all experienced players, and it’s a digital platform

My recent game has been similar. Not because I roll badly, but because the GM is incapable of rolling below a 16.

And I say: if they die, they die. You’re playing digital, you’re not going to run out of character sheets.

You might consider adding a puzzle element to encounters that can lower the effective difficulty with clever maneuvers or strategies.

As an example, fighting in a room with a big chandelier overhead. A player can cut the chandelier at the opportune moment to pin a major adversary, allowing them to coup de grace or simply flaunt their victory to the villain’s face.

Or perhaps fighting in a room full of mirrors that allow a clever player to reflect a gaze attack. Or doing Battleship style combat, where you have to pick the square of a hidden enemy, but you guarantee a hit if you guess correctly.

In general, try introducing non-dice resolutions to the scene - guessing a magic word that disables a key piece of enemy tech, baiting enemies into an area or formation before springing a trap, completing a ritual that can summon a powerful ally by solving a rubric cube.

If all else fails, you can drop some nice loot them. Awand of fireballs or Staff of the Sun or similar high powered magic item, for instance. Doesn’t matter how you roll with these, you’re going to have some fun.

If its me and I need them to push through something like this they befriend an NPC that is either powerful enough to carry them through combat or gives them an artificial buff to hit rolls or something, like a baby dragon they gain focus from because they have yo protect him or a mischievous imp that sings silly ballads that inspire them. And when theyre out of that slump said imp or baby dragon dies tragically.

dice lack finesse. they are simple and portable and functional. You, as the DM, must provide the missing finesse

They need to roll the d20 and not the d12.

But seriously, the party can figure out AC, but not hit points. If something is dragging on, just have things die on the next hit. I know some people would complain about it, but it is the group’s game, if something isn’t fun, change it. You have the power.

Also, some things fight to the death, but it is also ok to have some things surrender or run away. Fighting a group of bandits? When one goes down, have someone scream “Bear! No!” and run away crying. Killed half the goblins? The rest turn tail and run.

There are many levers to pull, and don’t be afraid to use them.

Players not succeeding on rolls isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It can increase tension in your encounters and is ultimately something you can’t control directly. You can fudge dice on your end, but honestly this reduces tension and if you’re not decisive about it can be pretty noticable.

So what can you affect? First, the stats of the monsters you’re throwing against them or the DCs that you’re looking for can be adjusted. If they’re consistently struggling more than is enjoyable, you can always scale things back a bit when you’re prepping encounters. Inspiration can also be a great way to let the players swing things in their favor without feeling like they’re being handed a success. There are also times when you can throw in a “oh actually, roll that with advantage” with some reasonable excuse, which also doesn’t feel like a gimme. But aside from this you have a whole toolkit in your ability to shape the world around them.

Magic items can be really helpful here. A staff with silvery barbs or bless or something similar can be a great way to put some die manipulation into your players’ hands, especially if the party composition lacks things like this. But don’t forget that you can also use set pieces.

Maybe the ceiling above an enemy has a weak point, or they’re standing directly under a chandelier or some nets. Maybe an enemy prefers their own safety in a crowded fight over that of their allies and drops an AOE that brings some friendly fire. Maybe some magic item or wards on the monster are responsible for part of its AC and dispelling it might help. The options are only limited to what you can imagine.

For great tension in a game, though, you want there to be risk of failure. Resist the urge to just hand the win to your players. Your job isn’t to make sure they win every encounter, that’s their job. They’ll sort it out themselves. Maybe they don’t, though, and they’re taken alive. Maybe the entire party wipes and properly dies, but in 100 years someone enters their tomb and ressurrects them to perform some task that they’re uniquely suited for. Maybe some sketchy wizard who wants something from them and has been scrying on them for the past week teleports them away, only to back them into a corner and try to make them do something against their interests or beliefs. Maybe they’re captured and lose this particular fight, but are able to rest wherever they’re being held and find others to help them secure their belongings and fight back.

In general, don’t worry about how the dice are rolling. They’re meant to be out of your control, but you can do literally anything with the world.

Can you have everyone roll a 50d100?

I’m curious if there’s a technical issue at play that’s influencing the random number generator. Such as a script blocker or privacy tool. There should be no discernible pattern between the players.

There’s also the phenomenon that true random doesn’t feel random. Such as when a music player feels like it’s shuffling between the same 20 songs instead of the whole list.

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:

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.

this only works if you can fix the digital dice to be better, heh.

Side note… anybody else here hate karmic dice in bg3?

check your dice. Bet they’re loaded. if you’re just using acrylic and they’re not from the 90’s… they’re probably fine. a salt water test is going to give you gross errors caused by a bad CG. (loaded dice.) otherwise you’re going to be doing some type of statistical analysis.

(I did this to the murderhobo in my party once. it was… hilarious)

8 years = a lot of platforms. 10 different sets of physical dice at least, roll20, maptool, dndbeyond, brockjonesdiceroller, drawsteeltool, orcpub, dozens of different digital platforms.

All abysmal rolls all the time.

I’ve used dozens of sets, including a dozen different online dice rollers. Its all abysmal luck on every platform.

I really think you were one of the few people who actually read that bit of the original post… thank you!

Don’t know if you caught it in the OP, but this is already a digital platform. I will look into the idea of a “trinket of luck” or something (non-attuned, because punishing them for their bad luck seems like a bad move).

Oh, trust me. I’m already working in that kind of thing.

Actually it was a sign of how incredibly frustrated my group is with this situation that they - who normally will pull out every stop to ensure not a single foe escapes - looked at the fleeing NPCs and said “Nah, forget that. We’re not dealing with more of that.”

Computers can’t do random. They usually approximate random by truncating seconds since epoc and throwing them into an algorithm the hashes them up into something that’s sort of random. Problem is that time is not really random. You ever notice that your random music shuffle seems to play the same shit all the time? Unless of course somebody else is there to listen, then it plays crazy shit you’ve never heard before. It probably has less to do with luck and more to do with you having regular listening habits, and the times that it plays crazy shit is those times that you are listening outside of your normal habits. And then there’s the algorithm that they use. There’s been a number of digital games that I have stopped playing because the “randomizer” was so shit that I could begin to “predict” future rolls.