"Blaming the Dice" Topic

Writing in Slingshot magazine, Richard Jeffrey-Cook observes:

In my experience most players blame the dice for their defeats but this is rarely the cause.

In your experience, do wargamers blame the dice rather than take the blame for their own defeats?

Yes.

Of course I blame the dice!!

I blame my bad rolling rather than the dice themselves. Altho I have been known to grab my personal dice away from other players. We all know there are only so many good rolls in dice and I don't want anybody wasting any of mine.

No. I'm not that bothered about 'winning', if I were I would take up a competitive sport.

The game's the thing.

I'm not bloody superstitious about dice either. It is not a craps game.

I am quite capable of losing with or without help from the dice. My problem is the innate inability to get the KEY die roll. I'm average on the rest.

I've seen other players blame dice (theirs or their opponents'), but they most often blame some error of judgement or other non-dice mishap.

Sometimes.

Yeah, what connard says.

I am a terrible commander to start with and I will admit that any time I am asked. But most of the time my dice don't help the situation.

I blame the OFM sometimes. But much like my other whinge and whine sessions, when I blame the dice, it's all for a giggle and nothing serious.

Eric

> In your experience, do wargamers blame the dice rather than take the blame for their own defeats?

Well, they are the guilty party.

Well, it all depends – I've seen defeat snatched from the jaws of victory all too often by a spree of bad die rolls. In one instance I literally watched a player roll some 30 dice and all of them rolled less than 3 over the course of two turns – and defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory as his army simply ceased to exist as a fighting force.

I am a PERFECT general only the forces of bad dice can defeat me .

The "Uno Kid" and "Lord Ought Ought" says "Its the dang dice!

First I try to place all the blame on my co-generals. If that doesn't work I'll blame the scenario, rules, dice, gamemaster, etc.

Sometimes, the dice just suck.

JohnG

I don't, but my opponent always does! :^)

Dale

This is a trick question, right?

I have taken 100 dice of each D type and have done tests. I found most of them roll uneven and some even roll like they are loaded good or bad.

Of course I blame the dice. It hurts less than blaming myself. It's poor sportsmanship to blame my near perfect record on my opponent.

So, the dice are to blame for me losing yet another game.

Having played Warmaster solo, and had several turns with no one moving, yes I blame the dice

Tonight I was unable to roll well and when I did my opponent saved with elan! Actually the same happend quite a lot on Tuesday, so no matter how elite or superior your troops and how good the tactical position if your dice are bad and the enemy's good then just try and enjoy the game!!!

Tally Ho!

..only when my dice consistantly roll way below the laws of probability!
Sun Tsu put it so well – It is possible to know how to win but not be able to do so (paraphrased!)

Nope. It's all me. When I lose, I can usually pinpoint my own misstep that got me into that mess. I don't play as often as I like, so most of those mistakes have to do with poor planning, or some rule that I forgot about, or just taking stupid risks (Although the stupid risks sometimes work in my favor too).

I have noticed that some nights I roll unusually well and some nights unusually badly, but there's no supernatural reason for that. That's just the way the cookie bounces.

Dice can be off sided but bad tactics are worse. I do not care about winning in a wargame. I play to have fun. Real war was a something else.
VR
James Mattes

When you watch your opponent snatch victory by rolling boxcars five times in six rolls, blaming the dice comes naturally.

I do not blame the dice, any more than I will blame an impartial referee. The dice know what the correct result is, deliver it, and never act unfairly.

I always consider it bad form when someone says"I could have won but my dice were bad" It always comes off as belittling your opponent to me.

In wargaming, I get lucky, in roleplaying, I fumble a lot.

Only my opponent's failures are poor dice luck. My failures of course are due to his good defensive play, just like his successes are good offensive play. My successes are good dice luck.

Yes

Sometimes it really is the dice.

Example:
when you have to roll a 3+ on the D10 to save 4 times and roll only 1s and 2s for 3 turns in a row its the dice and only the dice.

Yes

Also – don't be fooled by that "The dice average out over a game" mantra. Most likely they do, but BEFORE each dice roll is made and recorded both players should assign an importance factor to the roll. Some games load up the importance of a DR on a single roll (or handful of rolls). An example is CWC (or any rule set where a unit can be activated multiple times), the first activation roll is far more important then the third, since missing the first one means not even getting to try for any others.

Any game with a single "uber" unit that can be eliminated (or have the gun jam, etc…) by a single bad DR is also weighted.

In over 50 years, I've seen a lot of dice rolls, good,
bad, and indifferent.

But the most amazing thing I ever saw was in a game at
Historicon ('04 ??).

I don't recall who rolled the die (Dick Bryant ??)
but it lit upon a corner and STUCK there, perfectly
balanced ! It was a D6, so nothing to do with the
angles of a multi-faceted die such as an 8, 10
or other.

Dick took a picture of it – wonder what ever happened
to the pic ?

There are also games where it really doesn't make as
much difference how proficient a player is with a
rule system, as much as it depends upon how many times
the player gets to roll dice.

This is especially true when critical hits are in play.

I have really bad dice Karma

but I'm a pretty good tactician and roleplayer

Rolls generally even out. But the timing is the important thing. My last game a 2nd class unit holed up in a stone church consistantly picked off artillerists at medium range with frightening regularity (over a few turns).

Last year but one, I played a WW1 naval game with some old pals based on what would have happened had Troubridge's 1st Cruiser Squadron attempted to engage "an enemy then flying" and bring the Goeben and the Breslau to battle when they ran through the Med in 1914.

I played Admiral Souchon, flying his flag in the Goeben, and blew the living daylights out of the poor 1st Cruiser Squadron. The rules we used have a gunnery system carefully matched to historical hitting and damage rates, but, on the basis of the dice I rolled in the game, I later worked out that I would only have done better in one game out of ten thousand. The 1st Cruiser Squadron are on a hiding to nothing in this scenario anyway, but I really was quite outrageously lucky (and I suspect that the dice weren't very fair).

This Xmas just gone, we played the battlecruiser action at Jutland, using the same ruules, and I was the German again. This time my hitting rate was about a third what one would have expected on average luck -- not as distant an outlier as the previous year, but still nowhere near average. And I also made a critical tactical mistake that got me two major units torpedoed and lost me the game.

I cannot ascribe vitory or defeat in either case solely to the dice, but the idea that "it all averages out in the long run" is pretty misleading, as the "long run" is in general a great deal longer than the number of dice rolls you will ever make in a single game.

All the best,

John.

It is not the dice,they are just the minions for the gods they work for.I blame them instead.

Mr P doesn't blame the dice, everyone does for him. He has an appalling record of rolling badly, just when he really needs not to. He's legendary.

Random chance normally does not effect my normal sub standard performance.

Maybe I should praise the dice for getting my out of silly situations more?

A friend of mine went along to a two day Warmaster tournie at GW HQ. At the end of day one, the dice were squarely blamed for a less than stellar performance and hurled in the bin. New dice – new attitude – better results on day two !!

In regular gaming sessions, he is utterly convinced at the power of lucky dice – my plentiful white dice have been roundly cursed (for granting me luck on occasion) and will not be touched with a barge pole. There has even been threatening talk of banning the white dice (which was laughed out of court).

Wierd. This stuff is real….

Always, always blame the dice!

My die rolling is perfectly average.

I roll high when I need low

I roll low when I need high.