Red Castle, I never thought of such thematic ways to ease that tension, and those all sound awesome. Might have to steal a few of those and try it out.
My rule of thumb is to never blame the dice, blame the pilot or the crew instead!
Since I'm kinda an ambassador of the game (being the one that promote it around here), i can't allow myself to get angry or show any kind of bad sportsmanship, you never know who's watching and getting pissed off will only hurt the image of the game. If for some reason I get too invested, I try to step back and remind myself that it is only a game and that my opponent doesn't have to deal with my bad mood. If I see someone getting angry, more often than not about dice, I'll also take a moment to remind them that they have no control over it, **** happens, and that it's only a game.
Haha, right. I guess WuFame and myself would fall under the ambassador title here in our local area. We try to encourage people to play with our stuff and set up demo games. I never blame the dice either. It's funny, a lot of the time when the dice are blamed it is usually just folks not noticing when they get hot rolls, how easily some forget those natural double hits on red dice. That said I've seen some games where there was certainly some bad luck. But blaming the dice just makes it sound like you're losing to yourself, like your opponent isn't actually trying to win or anything.