Had an interesting game last night:

My opponent put a list on the table that had me genuinely worried. It was going to be a nasty game, and it would be a struggle to pull out a win.

Well I did win, and at every turn, every combat phase, every asteroid, the only thing my opponent did wrong was roll bad dice, instead of rolling perfect dice like I did.

It never had to do with him bumping, or leaving a ship in multiple arcs. It never had to do with poor action choices or a flawed strategy. The dice, and dice alone were responsible for his losing that game. Or at least that was the mentality I saw.

Can the dice be fickle?Sure, but when you place the blame solely on your dice, you never get better as a player. You never look for the flaws in your actions, the holes in your plan, the weaknesses of your build, etc.

Do improbable rolls happen - absolutely. But if...

Your roll was unmodified

You bumped

You were stressed

You're in multiple firing arcs

Your opponent has tokens

...then there were better options available to you that you didn't make use of at some point during the game. Look back a few turns - was there a spot where a barrel roll was the better choice? Or a straight 3 instead of a soft 3? Would the hull upgrade have better better than the Stealth Device, or spreading points more evenly across ships, etc?

All these things go into a game, and if you sit back and blame the dice, you'll never see the myriad of places where you can improve.

Plus, you just sound like a sore loser - because blaming the dice takes the credit away from your opponent's ability to out play you.

After rolling 17 1's in a row, across multiple d20's and the improbable failure that is all my dice rolling, I assuredly CAN blame the dice.

Losing a Nationals game due to rolling 0 Evades & Eyes on 11 Focused Evade dice.

Fluke game, sure - that doesn't mean I cannot or will not blame them and only them - in that game.

Oh, man! There are times when my dice fail me at critical moments! My friend has a knack for one-shotting ships at Range 3 through and Asteroid. That being said, there was a time Howlrunner survived three Range 1 shots in a single phase.

It is possible to roll below average in a game. But, given time, the dice will average out. Best learn how to mitigate dice rolling.

Warhammer Fantasy Battle, needed 3's. Rolled 8 dice, all of them were 2's. Dragon charge, wounding on 2's, 6attacks, all 1's.

Yeah you can blame the dice. not all of them, but some were created in this evil dimension where all happiness dies.

I won't play certain people because literally everytime I've beaten them they just blame the dice. It's actually insulting, because it's basically saying you didn't beat me , the dice did.

But I have had games that come down to a couple of critical rolls that I completely whiffed. Even still, I always hesitate to simply blame the dice. I always think on what I could have done differently.

Do not rely on dice. They will fail you.

Instead, rely on positioning and actions. They will not.

I absolutely lost a game last night that I could've won if my dice had rolled better. And I hadn't flown my ace into an asteroid, or misjudged and bumped, or...a million other things that hurt my dice rolling capacity.

I would wager a huge percentage of times when the dice 'fail' is because we didn't pilot well enough in the first place.

I lose all the time due to dice.

Mind you, thats because i'm pretty bad at the game and end up rolling the dice in bad situations brought about by bad piloting.

Still....it's the dice that get me, clearly

I absolutely lost a game last night that I could've won if my dice had rolled better. And I hadn't flown my ace into an asteroid, or misjudged and bumped, or...a million other things that hurt my dice rolling capacity.

I would wager a huge percentage of times when the dice 'fail' is because we didn't pilot well enough in the first place.

Particularly when positioning can render your Green dice completely irrelevant. They can't kill what they can't shoot.

My dice have been really hot the last few games. My opponent's dice have not been as good. It certainly plays a factor, but you're right - there are many variables that go into whether or not a ship blows up.

Well....I would've beaten you at that game of pool.....except they didn't have any chalk for my hand. Or for the end of the stick. The stick was bent, too.

Listen, everyone beats me at billiards. The reason I lose is because I am terrible at the game.

After losing a few games to bad dices, I sat down for a few minutes, opened an Excel sheet and pulled on my good old statistics class that I thought I would never use in real life. I then looked at the average number of hits or evades a ship can do depending on the number of dices, evades, focus and target locks available... and then I put that into practice. Suddenly, my dice were doing a lot better because I was putting probabilities on my side instead of relying on luck. Combined with creative positionning, it helped a whole lot

Dice are obviously not the reason for every lost game that happens, and over time they do tend to average out. Over the course of a single battle however, they can be the deciding factor between win and loss. My worst dice streak was a game of Flames of War where I had to take a 4+ test (on a D6) each turn, with a re-roll if I failed. I failed this test seven turns in a row! That's fourteen rolled dice! The odds of something like that happening is only 0.0061%!!

man that reminds of a game I played where I thought my opponent had made a critical error of flying Carnor Jax into the arcs of Wedge (R3 w/Focus), Rookie (R3), and a Gold (R2 w/Focus & ICT). My dice betrayed me..... Wedge 2 hits and a crit, Carnor... 4 natural evades.... Rookie, 3 blanks, Carnor, 3 evades 1 blank (natural!!!), Y-wing, 2 hits 1 blank, Carnor, 2 evades 1 focus, when Carnor fired at Wedge 3 hits, Wedge 3 blanks 3 BLANKS!!! I wanted to smash that Squint model sooo badly, guess you can't win 'em all

After rolling 17 1's in a row, across multiple d20's and the improbable failure that is all my dice rolling, I assuredly CAN blame the dice.

I calls BS. A million monkeys rolling for a million years couldn't pull that off.

Suddenly, my dice were doing a lot better because I was putting probabilities on my side instead of relying on luck. Combined with creative positionning, it helped a whole lot

...and that's why you see a lot of Fat Hans. Movement is less important due to turret, so if you flub a manuever, you still at least get a shot at things. With C-3PO, you get to garuntee at least one evade. The Falcon title gives you an evade. Gunner and Han Solo give even more assurity that you will hit. Engine Boost lets you evade out of arcs or farther range.

I lost last night, and I wanted to blame the dice. But the truth is I rolled about average. What really cost me the game was one big mistake on my part and a good list with good flying on the other guys part. He had a fairly effective XXY list, Luke, Wes and Horton, vs my Rexler w/HLC and 3 black squad with predator.

My huge mistake, was not noticing that my Defender had a stress on it from Wes w/stress bot, when I dove in on his Y-wing. So Rexler spent the rest of the game stressed and ionized.

So naturally I rolled a bunch of <eyes> the rest of the game that Rexler was around, and wanted to curse my luck... But luck wasn't the factor, it was me making a boneheaded play that really hurt.

Also as was pointed out above by others, it wasn't just that I made a single mistake, it was that the other guy played well.

I won a game last night that really wasn't close.

My opponent took a total of 2 R3 obstructed, 2 R3 unobstructed, and 1 R1 shots at me before he conceded, at which point I had lost my shields and 1 hull on a B wing, while I had killed everything of his except a B wing. I clearly outflew my opponent, and can only really say I did one thing sub-optimal (I DD'd into his lead B wing to prevent two R1 shots, and I thought the angle of the crash would still provide me a shot on the rear B wing at R1, but it was half a mil out, so he had a R1 shot on my A while it had no shot).

However, the dice were not fair to him. I took two HLC shots on his E wing, the first one he had a focus+evade, and took 3 damage by rolling 3 blanks and spending his evade token, the next time he did not have anything (K turn), and rolled 3 focii, killing him off. In similiar return fire, his R1 B on my A (the same TL modifier and F+E defense, and 4v3 dice) he also rolled 4 hits, but I rolled 2 evades, focus, and spent both tokens to walk away without damage.

Not saying that he lost because of dice since I minimized the number of shots he had on me, and the ones he had were typically bad shots, but the dice gods clearly had a role (no pun intended) in how big my win was.

So, everyone, what have we learned?

Play more games so the dice average out!

Having hot and cold streaks is perfectly common in games. Your list and your play has to be adjusted by the possibilities that happens. All the time i see people who only target lock a very damaged ship with one of their ships, while the rest of their ships target lock another. And many times it will result on that ship not being killed, and the rest of the ships not being able to kill the other ship aswell, dividing their fire too much because they tried to optimize too hard their damage potential instead of assuring you kill ships.

Whenever you want something done and you think you are very likely to get it done with one ship, but it is entirely possible you don't (i am talking about anything lower than a 90%), use two ships instead.

The list had a lot to do with it. I had a league game a few weeks ago, where the other player list was somewhat decent against mine, but deployed and played at my strenghts and managed to focus fire better, but he would only blame the dice. Of course i would just follow him, and say "tough luck man", because some people can't grasp how probability fundamentals can work.

And yes, that's right, how big a lose and win can be differentiated by dice, i had times where i only had to kill a B with one hull point, shooting with 2 Ties at range 1, and missing miserably, but at that point i already lost the game, the dice failed me at getting a better MoV, not losing the game.

but the dice gods clearly had a role (no pun intended) in how big my win was.

I think that's a good point.

I think it's seldom that someone really wins or loses based on the dice. Any time you find a case where one die roll changed the outcome of the game, the truth is almost always that you put yourself in a place where you had to make that roll. A number of decisions earlier in the game lead you to this 'do or die' situation.

But I think it's fair to say that the margin of victory can be decided by the dice. In my game last night I had Wes with 2 damage and no shields. Just one hit with one of my two predator equipped Black Squad fighters would of finished him off. Killing Luke with R2-D2 would've been another issue...

IMO the worse part about blaming the dice is like was said above, is how it tries to steal the victory from the other guy. That he/she didn't actually win because they played better, but they won only because my dice failed.

That's the problem with a turret-heavy meta

With no arcs to dodge, there's not much you can blame aside from dice especially when your Ties/Zs start getting one-shot thanks to consistent blanking

So yes, there are absolutely situations in which dice are to blame. They're rare, but if you set up a situation in where probability is supposed to favor you, such as concentrating swarm firepower on a large ship while ideally blocking to deny action or maintaining range 3 as Dash versus Decimators, and instead your opponent emerges victorious...well, no amount of strategy can beat the right amount of luck

So yes, there are absolutely situations in which dice are to blame.

Sure, I don't think anyone would say there's never a case where the dice just completely fail them. The game where you roll 1 evade out of every 10-12 dice rolled, it's rare but it does happen.

But even then, it is IMO poor sport to blame the dice, at least in front of the other guy.