(MAJOR (if vague) spoilers for The Ass of Ages incoming)
In most roleplaying games, the success of a character’s actions is decided by dice rolls.
That roll is almost always done with a twenty-sided die. In Pathfinder, the system we use, all actions/skills are separated into categories. Wanna jump onto a moving horse? Acrobatics check. Bluff your ass off to get another mug of ale? Roll for Deception. The GM (Game Master) decides how high the player must roll for them to succeed. Also, during character creation, the player invests points into their skills. If you want a sneaky assassin you’re probably gonna invest a lot of points in Stealth. This gives your character a preexisting bonus (or detriment) while trying to accomplish certain things.
BUT all of these rules go out the window whenever a player rolls either a natural 20 or a natural 1.
20=Automatic success regardless of what the total roll turns out to be or whether it meets the check.
1=Well…
This brings us to our last session of The Ass of Ages.
Gonna try and keep this vague for those reading that particular adventure journal, but there the three of us were, playing through the “season finale”. After this session, we’d planned Steve to GM the Starfinder Beginner Box (basically D&D in SPACE), and then Poldaran would run a homebrew campaign he’d come up with. So this was going to be the last time we’d be playing TAOA for a while. So I wanted things to be memorable.
So there the party is, discovering the secret of why so many ships wrecked onto Smuggler’s Shiv. About to face off against the final bosses. Four of them, each dangerous in different ways. The heavy hitter of the four goes into to attack one of our characters. He gets a hit in.
That player character gets a chance to retaliate.
Now I was the one running this character all night, and they’d rolled shiiiiiiiiiiiity all throughout. So, joking, I passed my twenty-sided die over to Steve. He’d been rolling high, so I was hoping the dice gods would bless the next roll. “Do you just want me to roll for you?” he asked.
I shrugged, said, “Sure.”
He did.
Natural 1.
But that’s not the end of the story. Steve then passes the same die over to Poldaran.
“Here, you try.”
“Alright.” Poldaran rolls.
Natural 1.
We burst out laughing. Playfully cursing them both out, I grabbed the die and rolled, more as a joke.
Natural 1.
We stared at it.
And we probably set off the neighbor’s dogs with how loudly we were laughing.
Afterwards, we put our heads together and decided on what kind of fate THREE natural ones would result for my character. I didn’t want to kill them…
So, instead, we cut off their arm.
So look forward to that!
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