Thursday, January 6, 2011

Luck in Wargaming

So, today, I'm going to talk about a subject that's very close to my heart, and I'm sure it's very close to many of yours. That subject is: Luck.

Luck is 50% of wargaming. That is what must be excepted right off the bat. You can make up the best tactics, the cheesiest army list, or exploit as many loopholes as you want, but if the dice aren't with you, then there's nothing you can do about it.

There are two schools of thought on this subject: The first one is the logical, sane one. First off in this is that the dice, despite what the demotivational poster above might say, do not hate you. They are simply little cubes with small dots indented in them. They might roll a 5, they might roll a 2, it's completely down to chance.

As it happens, this theory is not very fun, which leads to the second theory, which involves contact between wargamers and fate. Every wargamer I know has some sort of superstition . Kasrkar, for instance, thinks that putting his super ugly pink dice around a unit in the movement phase will make them roll well in the shooting phase. I, on the other hand, regularly sacrifice spare HQ models to the dice gods, in the hopes that they will take pity upon me, and bless my dice with 6's galore.

Another belief that those in our gaming club hold is that some gamers are predestined from birth to either roll badly, or well. There are two branches of this, as well. The first branch deals with the extremes of dice rolling. One person I know, Sam, is the only person I have ever met who can roll 18 dice, and have 14 of those come up as 1s. Carter, on the other hand, can roll 5s and 6s like you wouldn't believe. On the downside, however, if he loses a combat, his unit almost always fails the subsequent Morale check!

The other branch is more exact, that players roll better or worse for different dice rolls. For instance: I will seize the initiative from you. Every time. There is nothing you can do about it. I also cannot make Power Armor saves to save my life. My poor chaos marines have a bad habit of dying to lasgun fire, because I can't roll above a 2. Xander, on the other hand, makes 3++s like nobody you will ever see. He believes that this stems from his yelling of "Bob Marley!" before making an important dice roll.

Well, that's all for today. What kind of rolls do you make well?

2 comments:

  1. I've also found that making the sound the gun makes helps.

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  2. And then you have Paul and I's way of thinking.
    When you roll dice, whip 'em out!
    put a lot of Oomph! in them.
    it generally raises your dice rolls!
    and also, you need to appease the gods with the tiger yell at other people.
    I will show what that is when I see you next.

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