I see where the OP is coming from. Yes it is possible that you roll nothing but blanks. Also when that is the case there isn't much you can do.

However I think FFG has done an okay (not a perfect) job of mitigating the randomness. Probably one of the reason why the meta was so divisive was the fact that there was so many ways to just remove the randomness of the dice (Emperor Palpatine, Autothrusters, C-3PO). However I don't think luck decides on who will win and who will not in most of the games of X-wing. Certainly not as much as say Hearthstone.

12 hours ago, Jeff Wilder said:

Sometimes, once folks come around (correctly) to the idea that "random is random, and probability makes sense" they over-correct, and stop believing in luck (bad or good) altogether. This is almost as wrong as believing sincerely in superstition.

Luck -- as a description of something that has happened -- is not fallacious. Somewhere in the world, as I type this, someone has just flipped a coin and gotten 10 heads in a row. (Whether that's lucky or unlucky depends on whether they cared which it was, and which they wanted.) Somewhere in the world, there are X-Wing players who -- probably up until their next game -- have consistently ended up on either side of the X-Wing dice bell curve, under one of the three-SD tails.

If we take the statement, "Wow, I have been unlucky at X-Wing," it's important to understand that while that statement might be false -- might be a product of perception bias, whatever -- that statement is not automatically false.

Compare that to, "I am unlucky at X-Wing." If the speaker means, literally, that he believes that any time he plays X-Wing he will roll poorly, then that statement is fallacious.

Don't attempt any levity in your post either. I do not believe in the general masses idea of "luck", I have a decent understanding of probabilities. Last time I was in Vegas and was learning Craps, I had the help of one of the dealers and was doing well; when the pit boss changed him out for another, I felt my luck "change" when I started doing poorly. I know that it was not luck and i did not have the expertise of someone familiar with the game assisting me and this is what the casino wanted. But it felt like my luck had changed, perhaps it was luck that I had a dealer helping a clueless new player at the table for as long as he did or maybe that is the MO for that casino/pit boss/manager/etc for new players and then bring in a cleaner.

There are a issues with mass produced, low price dice not being completely balanced, but it's been so long since my stats class I do not remember how much this would affect the curve.

I wouldn't mind seeing X-wing go to one roll and doing defense tokens instead of green dice if they decided to redo x-wing again.

Had a pair of shots the other day with a Rage/Baffle Quickdraw that made me just stare at my dice. 4 dice attack, twice, with three rerolls and a focus for.... two total hit results. That's just the way it goes sometimes.

The issue is not about luck; its about variance. The variance in the core combat system is too high and makes the core experience of maneuvering to get a model in your firing arc feel random and unrewarding. It pushes too much of the decision making out of the game itself and onto building card combos that get around the issues with the base mechanics. It's not that there shouldn't be randomness; its that minimizing the randomness should be more a function of the core rules, so that the decisions made on the table feel more rewarding than the decisions made before the game begins.

The only thing I know about dice is that, I'm fighting tooth and nail to get 3 hits on 5 dice with Expertise Rey, yet opponents with nothing more than a T/L can nail max hits 3 turns in a row.

Back when I played Warmachine, my opponents and friends would joke that the game was certain to go south for me at some point as I was using "Faction" dice.

My wife even went a brought 5 precision Backgammon dice for me, still had bad enough dice to cause my opponents to laugh.

28 minutes ago, LunarSol said:

The issue is not about luck; its about variance. The variance in the core combat system is too high and makes the core experience of maneuvering to get a model in your firing arc feel random and unrewarding. It pushes too much of the decision making out of the game itself and onto building card combos that get around the issues with the base mechanics. It's not that there shouldn't be randomness; its that minimizing the randomness should be more a function of the core rules, so that the decisions made on the table feel more rewarding than the decisions made before the game begins.

This is interesting. I think I understand what you're saying and agree with you. (Partially; see below.)

So, just for instance (do not apply to current X-Wing!) ...

Say the ships each had an inner firing arc, and an outer firing arc. At the beginning of combat, if maneuvering results in a ship being fully inside the inner firing arc, that ship would get an "offensive-focus" token. If a ship is partially outside the outer firing arc, it would get an evade token. We see a little of this with the CDP title, but it would be far more interesting (with vast design space) to see it designed into X-Wing from the beginning.

I don't personally think the variance in the core game system is necessarily too high. What I think is that it is too high ... when one's opponent has access to, and uses, the ships and upgrades that effectively negate their variance. You're still rolling dice for real ... they're just rolling dice mostly to give you the comforting illusion that you have a chance.

So, again, the problem (IMO) is that X-Wing has swung really hard, and really far, toward negating variance. This is not how the game started, and it's just not the same game some of us got hooked on. And, more importantly IMO, it's becoming less and less a game that's friendly to novices. (And, again, I'm not talking about the volume of ships and upgrades being unfriendly to novices, but rather about the types of ships and upgrades.)

I would like to add this quotation for everyone's consideration, attributed variously to Gary Player or Jerry Barber:

"The more I practice, the luckier I get."

14 hours ago, fiesta0618 said:

I would like to add this quotation for everyone's consideration, attributed variously to Gary Player or Jerry Barber:

"The more I practice, the luckier I get."

Similar, "Luck is what happens when preparedness meets opportunity."

16 hours ago, LunarSol said:

The issue is not about luck; its about variance. The variance in the core combat system is too high and makes the core experience of maneuvering to get a model in your firing arc feel random and unrewarding. It pushes too much of the decision making out of the game itself and onto building card combos that get around the issues with the base mechanics. It's not that there shouldn't be randomness; its that minimizing the randomness should be more a function of the core rules, so that the decisions made on the table feel more rewarding than the decisions made before the game begins.

This is a great addition to the overall conversation on "casual" vs. "competitive" and how folks need to be sure they're both playing the same game with regards to lists. This from Jeff Wilder gets at that as well.

15 hours ago, Jeff Wilder said:

I don't personally think the variance in the core game system is necessarily too high. What I think is that it is too high ... when one's opponent has access to, and uses, the ships and upgrades that effectively negate their variance. You're still rolling dice for real ... they're just rolling dice mostly to give you the comforting illusion that you have a chance.

I wonder if the whole "casual" vs. "competitive," labeling that doesn't really cut it, needs reframed as more one of "tolerance of variance." This negating of variance is largely the heart of the "action economy" arms race and to a degree the difference between "competitive" lists and "casual" lists.

3 hours ago, Frimmel said:

Similar, "Luck is what happens when preparedness meets opportunity."

This really describes how the core game used to play. If one side maneuvered well and could stack offensive modifiers, they were rewarded with good dice. If one side maneuvered poorly and had to constantly do red maneuvers or bump, they probably had sh*tty dice. The more prepared you were, the less subject to luck you were. The less prepared, the more subject to luck.

This didn't stop someone from K-Turning a TIE Fighter and still getting hit crit and killing another TIE Fighter at range 3 in one shot anyways, but both sides were subject to that sort of thing and it could even out over multiple turns.

What @Jeff Wilder says is on point, that the game is all about reducing variance and that a lot of the time, rolling dice is just trivial. I'd like to add to his point and propose that when the game is balanced around a ship always being invincible behind a wall of (automatic) dice mods, your only opportunities to kill that ship are when they don't have those dice mods, which are few and far between. This means that entire games can be predicated on one or two dice rolls.

Instead of dice being relevant every time that they're rolled, they're relevant far less often. You have fewer of these, 'actual' dice rolls in a game, so variance is much more of a factor in determining game outcomes than say, TIE Fighters vs. B-Wings.

I'm of the opinion that an combat mechanic should never have guaranteed results of damage. So X-wing use to work, Armada works, Imperial assault with range checking and cancel results works.

To me X-wing stopped working at it's core when the dice stopped being as important for determining your results as they were for just defining the limits of how many results you could change. It was like going from a d6(1-6) to flip a coin you deal 3 on heads, 4 on tails. Too many times I can walk by a game and see someone drastically getting out flown in the maneuver phase, and have zero chance of dealing as much damage as they are about to take because the upgrade system has done so much to dictate what your results will be. And then they lose, and I laugh, because they thought flying was more important than rolling more dice with more modifiers. Sucks really. I've been giving it a second chance after this latest set of tweaks and it still has this identity crisis of what really are the dice there for?