When Captain Crits’s Luck Ran Out
Or
Bardman Begins
His name is Thomas, but I gave him the nickname Captain Crits. Never in my nearly half a decade of running Dungeons & Dragons have I come across a luckier man. He struck debilitating blows against once-fearsome boss monsters, shook off the effects of devastating spells, and waltzed past deadly traps with ease, a seemingly never-ending stream of natural 20s allowing him to survive encounter after encounter. We made him use different dice, made him use dice towers, but nothing seemed to hinder his good fortune. And in the odd chance he did fail a roll, well, that’s what his ever-present Lucky feat was for. Truly, this man was blessed by Tymora.
This might have been irritating if Thomas was smug about it, but he wasn’t. Actually, the guy is one of the most affable people I’ve ever had the pleasure of roleplaying with. He was a great roleplayer, always coming up with memorable characters that had a connection to whatever campaign we were running, and always doing his level best to keep the party working together. Because he usually ran high-Charisma characters, as well as his propensity for getting us out of trouble by sheer good luck, he often arose as something as a leader amongst the party, whether they were plundering the long-forgotten depths of an ancient dungeon or launching sabotage missions against the evil empire.
However, eventually the protection of Tymora would wane and the shadow of Beshaba fell upon Captain Crits, resulting in a series of failed rolls that thankfully proved more hilarious than deadly.
It was the start of a new adventure I was running, specifically the 1st edition classic Against the Cult of the Reptile God, modified for a 5e party of adventurers. Rather than starting in Orlane, the small farming village from the module, I had the party start out in a town of my own invention, called Serpent’s Briar. A shipment of crops from Orlane was more than a week overdue, and the soldiers sent to investigate the holdup hadn’t returned. As such, Baroness Petrona Arrowfist, the leader of Serpent’s Briar, hired out a group of adventurers to investigate what was happening in Orlane, hoping that a band of travelers would arouse less suspicion than her guards must have.
The party planned to set out for Orlane the next day, as it was late afternoon by the time that they had their meeting with the baroness. After ensuring they were well-supplied for the journey, they decided to investigate a few rumors they had learned. I love using rumors to sow future plothooks, or just to give players things to do during downtime, and I had given each player an index card with two rumors on it. The players split up and wandered around Serpent’s Briar to inquire about their individual rumors. Was the librarian, a human raised by a family of kobolds, secretly leading a cult to a dragon? Was the skittish apothecary keeping illegal drugs in her potion shop? Hijinks insured, resulting in half the party being banned from the library and the other half being banned from the potionary. Good stuff.
Captain Crits, however, had his own rumor to investigate, one he didn’t want to share with the party quite yet. He was playing a half-elf bard who was secretly a vigilante, strumming his lute during the day and busting criminals at night. One of his rumors was that a mysterious figure had been seen lurking around the baroness’s estate at night: a hulking figure clad in black robes. Believing that this guy couldn’t be up to anything good, Crits decided to investigate. And so, as the full moon slowly drifted across the starlit sky, he snuck out of his room at the inn after curfew, clad in a black cloak of his own, and began to stealthily make his way to the baroness’s estate.
“I am music. I am the night. I am… Bardman!”
After sneaking past the patrolling guards, Crits arrived at the baroness’s estate just in time to see a hulking figure clad in black scaling the wall that surrounded the manor. He followed after, nimbly climbing up the wall and peeking over just in time to see the cloaked figure placing a ladder against a balcony on the second floor of the mansion.
The prowler shimmied up the ladder to the balcony, where a beautiful young woman in a nightgown was waiting for him. As it turns out, Captain Crits had discovered not a burglar or assassin, but a moonlit romantic rendezvous. The baroness’s daughter, Bianca, was secretly seeing a half-orc handyman from the town. Having spent her adolescence surrounded by two-faced and bootlicking nobles, Bianca was intrigued by her lover’s blunt and down-to-earth nature. She knew her mother wouldn’t approve, so she and the half-orc had decided to keep their relationship a secret, at least for the time being.
Of course, Captain Crits didn’t know any of that, though he was able to guess what was happening well enough just by watching the two hold hands and stare longingly into each other’s eyes. Unable to hear what they were saying to one another, Crits decided to move closer to listen in. I asked for a stealth roll, and Captain Crits… rolled a 1. Which, hey, was still a crit, so he’s still on-point. (For context, we had a longstanding table rule that a roll of 1 is an automatic failure. What’s more, it is always a spectacular failure.)
A brief silence befell the table, followed by nervous laughter from everybody. The party was still level 1, so Crits didn’t have the Lucky feat or any other way to reroll his failure. I described that, as he tries to sneak forward, he accidently trips and knocks over a large ceramic garden pot, which smashed noisily into pieces as it fell to the ground. Bianca and her half orc lover froze in terror, lights began to illuminate the windows of the manor as people inside woke up, and the guards patrolling the grounds began to shout in alarm.
Captain Crits and the half-orc both made a run for it, the half-orc pulling down the ladder and tossing it back into the garden shed where he had gotten it as he ran. Captain Crits tried to make another stealth check but failed again, though thankfully not a critical failure, whilst the half-orc, surprisingly, managed to successfully duck behind some hedges and hide. Crits dashed away and haphazardly crashed through flowerbeds and hedges just as the backdoor of the manor opened, revealing the baroness’s personal bodyguard: a female half-orc, almost seven feet tall, clad only in a nightgown and wielding a massive maul. With his darkvision, Captain Crits could see her eyes blaze with fury as she charged after him, her weapon raised and a war cry upon her lips.
With an angry half-orc at his heels, Captain Crits decided to forgo stealth for the moment and settled on just running, noisily dashing through the garden. His escape is cut off by the stone wall that surrounded the baroness’s estate, ten feet tall and made of stone. The brickwork wasn’t smooth, so the DC to climb it was pretty low. Captain Crits had climbed it easily when he was sneaking in, so naturally he rolled a 1. Again.
I describe that Captain Crits made it halfway up the wall before losing his grip and falling down, landing flat on his back. The bodyguard drew closer, now less than ten feet from him, screaming a battle cry at the top of her lungs. Desperate, Crits rose to his feet and attempted another athletics check to climb. He rolled just below a 10, not enough to scale the wall in one go, but not enough to fall off either.
Then came the bodyguard’s turn. She ran forward and grappled Crits, seizing his leg with a grip like a vice, roughly trying to yank him off the wall. For a moment, it looked like Crits was caught, and that he might need to roll up a new character if he couldn’t give a satisfactory answer to the baroness as to why he was sneaking around her property in the middle of the night, both in disguise and carrying weapons. Fortunately, it seemed that the dice had finally had enough of tormenting the poor guy, because he managed to roll high enough to escape the bodyguard’s grip, leaving her with nothing but his boot. Crits scrambled up the wall and didn’t even bother to try climbing down the other side, leaping down and running into the streets. Once he was out of sight of the guards, he ditched his remaining boot and stealthily returned to the inn to lick his wounds.
Naturally, when the morning arrived, the guards were running around town putting up wanted posters for the mysterious prowler that had nearly been caught at the baroness’s estate. Fortunately, they never got a look at Crits’s face, so he was in the clear. Unfortunately, Crits was the only intruder who was spotted, so the guards were on the hunt for a five-foot half-elf instead of a seven-foot half-orc. Crits, naturally, never mentioned this little incident to the party, and decided to put his vigilante career on a brief hiatus, at least until the real prowler was caught.
There was a lot of tension at the table that day as Crits’s increasingly desperate attempts to escape went constantly wrong, but there were lots of laughs, too. What makes this story stand out in my mind, however, is that Crits took his bad rolls in stride and laughed along with us. For someone who spent so much time winning, he was also a graceful loser, and one of the finest players I’ve had the pleasure of playing with.
It’s easy to get discouraged when the dice don’t roll our way, but a positive attitude can sometimes let us laugh at our own failures rather than sulk and moan about our bad luck. Captain Crits rolled extraordinarily well most times, and sometimes he failed, but he always took it in stride and had a good time whether he won or lost. I don’t think I really appreciated just how refreshing it was to have such a good sport at my table until I came across players who would huff and groan and glare at me whenever they failed, as if I was somehow responsible for their bad luck.
In games as in life, events may transpire that are completely beyond our control, for better or for worse. How we deal with the bad times is at least as important as how we deal with the good. We can endure our hardships with a positive attitude, hopeful that things will be better later, or we can take every disappointment as a personal attack and sulk. Personally, I try to approach life like Captain Crits did: no matter how many times he fell down, he got back up, and I try to do the same, even if it means losing a boot or two.
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