Two of my great loves: D&D + Data.
Since August, I've been toying with the idea of tracking certain information in my various D&D games. And since September I've been making an attempt to actually track it. Unfortunately, my September tracking got lost. And even more unfortunately, I did not post about it right after the month ended.
Instead, as is often the case with data, I sat on it. And thought about it. BUT it's never too late to see what story that data can tell. So here is a breakdown of our October and November games, told through the numbers.
October
Number of games DM'ed: 1
Number of games played: 2
Total number of games: 3
Number of nat 20's: 12
Number of personal nat 20's: 1
Number of nat 20's rolled by the DM: 3
Total number of nat 20's: 16
Number of crit fails: 5
Number of personal crit fails: 1
Number of crit fails rolled by the DM: 2
Total number of crit fails: 8
Takeaways: It was a good month for nat 20's. Or at least, it was a good month for other people to roll a nat 20. Our nat 20's are straight double the number of crit fails.
At least my data is even: 1 nat 20 and 1 crit fail. That does seem low, right? Out of 3 games, one of which I was the DM and made tons of rolls, I was only able to pull out 1 nat 20? It makes me wonder if maybe I didn't do as good a job tracking as I thought. Or maybe I just need new dice.
On the other hand, the crit fails make much more sense to me. I play a halfing who can't roll a crit fail, so I'm sure when I did in game, I just snatched the dice up real quick and re-rolled, leaving my personal crit fails to be only taken from the game I DMed.
November
Number of games DM'ed: 0
Number of games played: 1
Total number of games: 1
Number of nat 20's: 8
Number of personal nat 20's: 1
Number of nat 20's rolled by the DM: 6
Total number of nat 20's: 14
Number of crit fails: 3
Number of personal crit fails: 0
Number of crit fails rolled by the DM: 8
Total number of crit fails: 11
Takeaways: November is a hard month to put together a D&D game. With holiday travel and just life, we only played one game. I'd say a normal month squeezes in at least 2 and sometimes 3. Part of the problem is we went out of town for a week and we normally host the games. But we're already well into December and have played more than 1 game, so maybe it's just November.
Second big takeaway is from those DM rolls. When I'm not the DM, generally the DM responsibility falls to my partner Geoffrey. Here, he only DMed one game, and look at his crit fails and nat 20's! You may think 6 nat 20's in one game is good, but then you see he got 8 crit fails, and it's like whoa. The dice giveth, and the dice taketh away.
Also, that one game we played in November? Really killed it with those nat 20's. There's only 2 less than the month we played 3 games.
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