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While there’s a beauty to the offline potential of atabletopgame, that doesn’t stop this analog entertainment format from pervading the internet. Cultures, memes, celebrities, and myths all spread like digital wildfire. One of the more baffling but undeniable ideas to perpetuate online tabletop culture is the Wheaton Dice Curse.
Actor, performer, and internet personality Wil Wheaton has made a massive name for himself in the ‘nerd’ scene. From child acting in Stand By Me to his time in Star Trek, he eventually established himself as a voice for tabletop gaming of all sorts. Unfortunately, his misfortune with dice resulted in some infamy of its own. Allow us to explain.
What Is The Wheaton Dice Curse?
Wil Wheaton has played countless tabletop games publicly, even hosting his tabletop show for production company Geek & Sundry called TableTop. This would lead to Wheaton appearing on a number of other popular tabletop shows, such as Critical Role and the Wizards of the Coast game held at PAX 2010.
Wheaton, however, appears to haveuncommonly poor luck with dice rolls, often rolling a ‘critical failure’ in Dungeons & Dragons games or other similarly catastrophic rolls in other tabletop games. This happened so regularly that the community (and Wheaton) took notice, calling his bizarre statistical tendenciesthe Wheaton Dice Curse.
There is no explanation. That is some… I don’t know what ancient relic his family uncovered two generations ago that led this blood curse from generation to generation to this day, but that man breaks math and physics. I don’t understand it.
Matt Mercer
He has accepted the playful nature of the curse, embracing it and openly joking about the phenomenon with other players. Wheaton will often call out when he’s going to roll poorly, as well, to amplify the comedic value.
It also inspired a related superstition that Wheatoncoming in contact with someone else’s dicewill cause them to also become cursed.
How Many Nat 1s Did Wil Wheaton Roll?
While we don’t have the full and complete data required to know Wheaton’s lifetime total of critical failures, we do have a metric to go by.
According to stat analysis byCritRoleStats.com, Wheatonrolled a D20 a total of 54 timesbetween his guest appearance in two episodes of Critical Role. Of those rolls,ten were a ‘natural one’and25 were below a five.
Since a D20 has, well, 20 sides, then each number has only a five percent chance to appear at any given roll. Wheaton, however,rolled a one about 18.5 percent of thetime. Similarly, there is a 20 percent chance of rolling below a five on a standard D20. He managed to r ll the same numbersabout 48 percent of the time.
