I Roll 20's

I am one of those most hated gamer types: the profoundly lucky type. Please note: as previously mentioned, I am unusually lucky. But my luck isn't always good (in fact, it's usually bad). The number one way to ensure I have good luck is to hand me a set of dice and tell me to roll for initiative, at which point, I will become that lucky sonovah*&^%$ who has to be constantly reminded of the finer points of the rules but will none the less slaughter everyone and everything else because s/he keeps rolling whatever it is s/he needs to, even if it's astronomically unlikely.

I grew up playing not Dungeons and Dragons (I didn't pick that up until 3rd edition when I was in college, honestly), but BattleTech. Classic BattleTech, thank you very much. This basically means that I learned to play a strategy heavy hexagon-based war game that involves giant robots blasting each other into smithereens. I was taught to play BattleTech by my proud father, who was attempting to figure out how to get me more interested in math. It only sort-of worked: to this day, I can (roughly) figure probability in my head but I can't multiply or divide deliberately without use of a calculator, even though to figure out my to-hit probability, I am certainly doing one or the other somewhere in the recesses of my demented little mind. I am also very good with decimals and remembering how much more damage my head can take before my pilot passes out. If you play BattleTech, these are extremely useful skills. It has also, I am told, made me a bizarre and frustrating chess player. Not a good one, mind. But bizarre and frustrating to play against.

My father is not an inherently lucky player. I am. This has created great mirth in our father-daughter destruction time over the years.

For a year or two, while I was in high school, my Dad and I gamed with a group in a rural town in Delaware that played BattleTech most Friday nights. They initially made the assumption that my father was dragging me along to baby-sit my younger brothers (barely out of the toddling stage). I believe they were initially also of the mind to "spare the girl and humor her." This condescending attitude lasted about an hour into our first game, at which point I was reclassified as A Very Large Threat.

My father tells the story better than I do, but to the best of my recollection, this was more or less how it went down.

I was piloting a Wolfhound. This is a relatively small medium size-classed mech, which is only important isofar as that I was in one of the smallest, most lightly armored mechs on the field that evening. After realizing that I was going to take very effective potshots at them and thus probably shouldn't be ignored despite 1. being a very small mech and 2. being a very young lady, one of the other players turned his assault-class heavy mech on me. My mech took exactly one hit. To the head. Which due to the rules of the game, since that was where my pilot was located, meant I had to roll to see if my pilot was injured. He was; he had a concussion. I then had to roll to see if he remained conscious. He did not. He passed out, which cased my mech to fall down. This had the knock-off effect of making me a very hard to hit target: a prone mech just isn't as good a target as one that is standing up.

For the REST OF THE SESSION, I had to roll at the start of each turn to see if my pilot would wake up. He always did. I would then spend a movement point getting the mech back on it's feet, proceed to shoot up anybody in targeting range, as they were stupid enough to turn their (thinly armored) backs on me (usually because they were pinning themselves between large buildings, and their choice was to turn their back on me, or on another assault-class mech). I would, at the end of my turn, then have to roll again, to see if my pilot stayed conscious. He never did. He would then immediately pass out, my mech would flop over again, and the players who were growing vexed with the fact that I was shooting their mechs to pieces and decided I ABSOLUTELY HAD TO DIE RIGHT THEN would be greatly frustrated at their inability to hit me, because I was on the ground, and thus harder to hit.

By the end of the night, I had taken out several other, much larger mechs. Except for that one shot to the head, all the damage my Wolfhound had taken was from hitting the ground repeatedly as the pilot repeatedly lost consciousness. This eventually indeed caused one of the legs to fall off, which didn't hamper me from hopping around the field one-leggedly blowing holes in everyone else before passing out and falling down again. The mental image was hilarious; most of my co-players did not appreciate this.

I earned their respect. And perhaps a bit of their fear; my unnatural luck occasionally has that effect on people I game with.

Even my poor husband is not immune. A year or two ago we were playing Hunter (a classic World of Darkness game) and I made a series of rolls that allowed us, at something like 100 to 1 odds, to find sufficient silver trinkets in a *hospital gift shop* to make silver buckshot with which to hunt werewolves. It was one of the rare occasions too where my luck appeared to be catching: someone else made a roll later that session that allowed him to find, via Google, the true name of a major archdemon, which you can imagine is not very likely.

My husband still grinds his teeth about this. It's fairly cute.

I miss gaming. It's a great stress-reliever (nothing quite like putting aside thoughts of the minute of civil procedure for a few hours to pretend to be a ditzy waitress who hunts vampires or something). I'm hoping maybe we can get a group together this summer after my hubby is done student teaching; it'd be a lot of fun.