Ailaros wrote:

scuddman wrote:The same mistake means different things at different levels of skill.

Actually, the same mistake means different things at different RELATIVE levels of skill. As you yourself note, the only time when the mistake will make a difference is when the two players are of grossly unequal skill.

Dashofpepper wrote: Luck has an INVERSE relationship to the one the OP is postulating. I'm telling you that at that level of play, that I am familiar with, luck is NOT predominant in determining the outcome of a game.

Okay, why?

Why? Because your above response to scuddman is itself a false assumption. You're POSTULATING that mistakes only make a difference when two players are of grossly unequal skill. In truth, mistakes always matter. They matter MOST when players are of *very* close skill.

I'm not sure we even have the ability to speak the same language. Everything you're theorizing is....backwards.

Nurglitch wrote:No, movement is 6" for Infantry, 12" for Jump Infantry, and so on. Sorry, your statement still fails to be true.

Well, as I said..

Ailaros wrote:For example, moving a unit into range allows you the chance to shoot at a unit, but just moving your unit does not mean that the opponent's unit is destroyed. The dice determine that. You only increased your odds from 0 to something greater by moving into range.

The RESULTS of the risks you chose to take are determined by die rolls, and nothing else.

You can chose to move a unit 6" in one direction, or 6" in another. They come with different risk sets. Which direction and how far you chose to move isn't determined by luck. The results of the risks you took by moving in one way and not another are determined by dice.

I mean, what would it matter if you chose to move something into range and then missed all your attacks? Just moving something into range, in this case, didn't actually do anything. It was the results of the die roll that determined if your movement actually wound up mattering or not.

Redbeard wrote:If it is turn seven (no dice roll to prolong the game), and it is your turn, and you have the opportunity to win the game by moving a vehicle to contest an opponent's objective, and you fail to do so, that is a mistake.

Yes, but in this case, you have taken luck out of the picture, so the only thing left is skill.

If it's the bottom of the last game of the turn, you KNOW your unit can't be killed (barring a dangerous terrain test or something), which means that there is no risk to moving to contest an objective. In this case, there would be NO risk to moving forward, and probably a great deal to gain. This makes it an obvious choice.

If someone decided to forgo possible gain at no risk, that would be a very bad choice, but not necessarily a "mistake" in the way people have been throwing that word around.

Dashofpepper wrote:You're POSTULATING that mistakes only make a difference when two players are of grossly unequal skill.

Actually, the theory traces the effect that mistakes have from anywhere between gross disparity, and similarity.

Dashofpepper wrote:In truth, mistakes always matter. They matter MOST when players are of *very* close skill.

Why?

Dashofpepper wrote:I'm not sure we even have the ability to speak the same language. Everything you're theorizing is....backwards.

This is not a convincing reason.

Nurglitch wrote:And yet one of the few statements in this thread that is demonstrably false, thanks to the miracle of diceless movement.

Even then, it can still be held up to be a mistake. If you misjudge how far it is to that piece of cover, and you end up leaving your unit out in the open, that's a mistake you made. Even when you're moving, your taking a gamble that you're able to move from one piece of cover to the next. That it's better to move than stand still, or whatever.

Granted, this is a type of mistake that can be fixed with skill, but it goes tos how that even movement is a gamble in 40k.

ChrisWWII wrote: If you misjudge how far it is to that piece of cover, and you end up leaving your unit out in the open, that's a mistake you made.

sourclams wrote:

Ragnar4 wrote:
What if the person making the mistake doesn't know it's a mistake? It can't be a calculated risk without understanding the risk.
I think that assessment is wrong.

It may not be calculated, but risk is still inherent and whether you acknowledge/understand that risk or not, it exists.

Right, just because you calculate a risk poorly (say, by not taking all variables into account), that doesn't mean the end result isn't a calculated risk, it just means that it was a poorly calculated calculated risk.

Movement isn't a gamble, it's a strategic choice.

Take the Hawk-Dove game I mentioned a while back. Choosing Hawk isn't a gamble, it's simply the best choice to make whether your opponent chooses Dove or Hawk. Likewise movement in Warhammer 40k is usually a constant: if you decide to move 6", you'll move 6".

That's different from taking the risk of exposing your unit to whatever it is that may cause the unit to be removed from the board, but that risk is independent of the likelihood of it occurring, and the opposing player's counter-move. Again, a matter of potential rather than luck because you know what could happen if you make that move.

Incidentally, if you're still misjudging distances, you need to play more...

Nurglitch wrote:Movement isn't a gamble, it's a strategic choice.

I agree.

The question is, what is the impact of movement on the ultimate outcome of the game? Unless you're in a specific circumstance where luck doesn't factor in, then luck is the only determiner of the outcome of anything within the game.

So what if you moved something? Movement is only a tool. The meaning of movement is only relevant in regards to what you achieved because of your movement. That which determines what you achieve ultimately boils down to luck.

Ailaros wrote:[

Dashofpepper wrote:I'm not sure we even have the ability to speak the same language. Everything you're theorizing is....backwards.

This is not a convincing reason.

You've had 11 pages of reasons. Lengthy ones explaining *why* your theory is backwards. If you don't get it now, I don't expect you will. Continue believing that skills becomes more and more irrelevant the greater they get in favor of luck being a dominant factor in your gaming.

I'm pretty sure there's nothing else I can add to this thread - its there to be read, which is the best I can offer. I really *do* just see a lot of "If I can't win, its the fault of dice" going on here. I can't influence the world, I can't change everyone's opinions, and if everyone listened to me, I suspect my tournament performances would suffer.

So for the third time!! I give up. For super duper real this time, no take-backs. I had stopped posting but continued reading, which I shouldn't have done because I got pulled back in.

My parting shot: According to the theory here, I'm either incredibly lucky or I've never played an intelligent person, because as skill goes up, luck is more important. I *am* unlucky with dice, beyond anecdotal evidence, and I still win - because at the seriously competitive 40k levels, it isn't about dice rolls, but about exploiting mistakes. Even the tiny ones.

Dashofpepper wrote:You've had 11 pages of reasons. Lengthy ones explaining *why* your theory is backwards. If you don't get it now, I don't expect you will.

Actually, of those comments from you in those 11 pages, the only reasons are based on logical fallacies. It's not that I don't get what you're saying, it's that I don't believe what you're saying is accurate.

So far, you haven't given a single convincing reason, despite 11 pages of talking.

Dashofpepper wrote:I'm pretty sure there's nothing else I can add to this thread

Actually, you haven't really added anything in the first place. It's not to say that you can't, but if you're going to be a meaningfully positive contributor to something, then you have to stop only using fallacy to make your arguments.

Dashofpepper wrote:According to the theory here, I'm either incredibly lucky or I've never played an intelligent person, because as skill goes up, luck is more important.

That is correct.

If you take offense to that conclusion, then it's your choice to be offended. If you think that the conclusion is wrong, perhaps you could offer a better, more comprehensive, more well-thought-out, more accurate theory? You know, one not based on fallacy?

sourclams wrote:

Ragnar4 wrote:
What if the person making the mistake doesn't know it's a mistake? It can't be a calculated risk without understanding the risk.
I think that assessment is wrong.

It may not be calculated, but risk is still inherent and whether you acknowledge/understand that risk or not, it exists.

This is an aspect of finance that has demonstrably proven itself in the past few years.

Those who invested in Madoff's fund, for example, bore all the risk of his eventual default, even though all the quantifiable measures pointed to the opposite.

Being oblivious to inherent risk makes you no less vulnerable to risk, and actually quite the opposite if that obliviousness results in a lack of management of risk.

It can't be a calculated risk, if you don't know the pre-cursory calcluations, it's just a full blown risk. Full blown risks are often mistakes. I mean literally.. The choice to contribute into Madoffs Fund was pure lunacy, and idiots at work, nothing more.

Dashofpepper wrote:My parting shot: According to the theory here, I'm either incredibly lucky or I've never played an intelligent person, because as skill goes up, luck is more important. I *am* unlucky with dice, beyond anecdotal evidence, and I still win - because at the seriously competitive 40k levels, it isn't about dice rolls, but about exploiting mistakes. Even the tiny ones.

I would say this one. You are playing intelligent top tier players, but your skill and preperation and devotion for the game is far above and beyond your opponents, so your winning all your games. Your not incredibly lucky, your are just that much better then the people you are facing. There are anomolies like this for any game or sport (Micheal phelps in swimming), and you can't really apply Ailaros's theory to your situation.

Thats just pure speculation though, I have never actually seen you play.

Ailaros wrote:

Dashofpepper wrote:According to the theory here, I'm either incredibly lucky or I've never played an intelligent person, because as skill goes up, luck is more important.

That is correct.

If you take offense to that conclusion, then it's your choice to be offended. If you think that the conclusion is wrong, perhaps you could offer a better, more comprehensive, more well-thought-out, more accurate theory? You know, one not based on fallacy?

You're saying the guy who plays in multiple tournaments every year has never played an intelligent person?

Yeah, there is luck involved in 40k, but good players control luck. Double up on shooting/assaulting targets instead of risking not killing X. Have redundant units so if you lose one you can still kill X or still capture objectives, or whatever.

The more skilled you become the more you know how to deal with the inherent randomness of the game.

Ailaros wrote:So what if you moved something? Movement is only a tool. The meaning of movement is only relevant in regards to what you achieved because of your movement. That which determines what you achieve ultimately boils down to luck.

Here's an exercise for you: play an objective game of Warhammer 40,000 solely in the Movement phase: no shooting, running, assault (and no vehicles either). Use rock-scissors-paper to remove any 'luck' in determining the first turn, no seizing. You may find it to be an interesting experience.

Alright, luck can swing a game, no question, but the skill comes in to hedgeing your bets and building lists. Luck is a factor, yes I can roll 15 3+ saves and make everyone, or fail like 11 of them, this is how luck swings things. No stratagey and becoming a better player is changing your odds of things happening. Army lists can be built better with built in redundencies built in to overcome a unit not preforming, and through movement and some tactical thinking you can limit the number of times you need to get that stellar roll, or limit the number of ways an oppenents good dice can nail you by hiding units, moving and baiting with other targets to keep your plan in motion, and making him make a mistake. I find the closer in skill two players are the more luck can play a factor yes, but sometimes we forget you play an oppenent and you can force favorable matchups and mistakes on his/her part by playing and moving a certain way, we play dice games with toy soldiers, but in that we also have to play our oppenent, that is where tactics and a little bit of psychology and understanding how an opponent thinks comes in, and in the area of reading and manipulating your oppenent into doing what you need him to do, that wasn't luck, the luck comes in after when you roll to do whatever you just set up. Luck affects games, but stratagy sets up the best possible odds and mismatches. Ailaros I have read many of your battle reports, which are well done, and you have several games where you won, in spite of luck. You won those games with a solid strategy and a good redundant solid list, in spite of bad luck.

Nurglitch wrote:

Ailaros wrote:So what if you moved something? Movement is only a tool. The meaning of movement is only relevant in regards to what you achieved because of your movement. That which determines what you achieve ultimately boils down to luck.

Here's an exercise for you: play an objective game of Warhammer 40,000 solely in the Movement phase: no shooting, running, assault (and no vehicles either). Use rock-scissors-paper to remove any 'luck' in determining the first turn, no seizing. You may find it to be an interesting experience.

Your right - movement has no luck factor when you are disregarding shooting and assault implications (assuming ignoring difficult and dangerous terrain as well). Congratulations, you proved nothing.

Amaya wrote:Yeah, there is luck involved in 40k, but good players control luck. Double up on shooting/assaulting targets instead of risking not killing X. Have redundant units so if you lose one you can still kill X or still capture objectives, or whatever.

Within the context of 40k, that sort of in-built redundancy more reflects the 'skill' needed to play at a higher level. I have enough plasma guns to kill 8 Terminators, but I bring double that 'just in case' I roll poorly. I have 4 troop units even though 3 is the maximum number I would ever need to win a game, but I may lose one or be forced to use #4 to contest.

Doubling up on shooting at a priority target and failing utterly due to horrendous dice rolling would be a good player attempting to control luck via redundancy, and failing through luck so bad that it cannot be sufficiently compensated for given list and point cost constraints.

doubled wrote:Alright, luck can swing a game, no question, but the skill comes in to hedgeing your bets and building lists. No, stratagey and becoming a better player is changing your odds of things happening.

I agree. We've actually talked a lot about this already. We're talking about skill relative to your opponent's skill. Remember, your skill is changing the odds for you, but your opponent is also changing the odds against you.

Ragnar4 wrote:It can't be a calculated risk, if you don't know the pre-cursory calcluations, it's just a full blown risk. Full blown risks are often mistakes. I mean literally.. The choice to contribute into Madoffs Fund was pure lunacy, and idiots at work, nothing more.

It's a poorly calculated calculated risk.

And really, the Madoff fund? When people did their risk assessment, they found a company that paid consistent dividends. It was only in hindsight that it was all a sham. If people knew in advance that investing with madoff was "lunacy" level of risk, no one would have done it.

Amaya wrote:You're saying the guy who plays in multiple tournaments every year has never played an intelligent person?

Well, those were his words, actually. What I'm saying is that if you're beating your opponents 90% of the time with really bad luck, you must be much better than your opponents.

That or you're not actually as unlucky as you say, or you're not actually winning 90% of your games. There are lots of possible ways you could read it.

So I haven't read pages 4-12 of this so I'm not up to date, but I will give an example of something that happened to me this weekend that some people might call luck, I call skill.

I was playing the chaos guy I never beat with my leaf blower army in an 1850 tournament. He reserved everything, as always. I castled up in a corner, planning on blowing him away when he came in.

We were playing the best of three objectives format, objectives being Kill Points, Destroy the most expensive unit, and destroy all troops.

He came on the board in the opposite corner. All game all I could kill was 3 oblits, and we tied at 1kp v 1kp.

Now to only kill 3 oblits I had some fairly abismal shooting. BUT, I made A LOT of tacitical mistakes that allowed a couple of unit's abismal shooting to cost me the game.

#1- I took first turn. I don't know why I did it, I think because he had a raider and I didn't want him to move it and blow smoke. In hindsight if his stuff had been on the table to shoot at I probably would have done better.
#2 - I took a master of the fleet, which was in hindsight a terrible decision. I was leaning towards it being a bad choice anyway, then this player and I come up against eachother at this store virutally every tournament, and he loves to reserve against me. It really cost me the game because his stuff came in so late, and I chose first, I only had like three shooting phases to shoot at him.
#3 - I deployed terribly. It's hard to describe without pictures but it was awful, all the important stuff in all the wrong places. It allowed him to come in on the extreme flank and then only a tiny percentage of my army had range to him.

Yes, even the tiny percentage of stuff that had range should have been able to outshoot him and win. But I think it is more approriate to blame all the factors under my control that allowed that situation to exist in the first place.

Just my opinion.

sourclams wrote:

Amaya wrote:Yeah, there is luck involved in 40k, but good players control luck. Double up on shooting/assaulting targets instead of risking not killing X. Have redundant units so if you lose one you can still kill X or still capture objectives, or whatever.

Within the context of 40k, that sort of in-built redundancy more reflects the 'skill' needed to play at a higher level. I have enough plasma guns to kill 8 Terminators, but I bring double that 'just in case' I roll poorly. I have 4 troop units even though 3 is the maximum number I would ever need to win a game, but I may lose one or be forced to use #4 to contest.

Doubling up on shooting at a priority target and failing utterly due to horrendous dice rolling would be a good player attempting to control luck via redundancy, and failing through luck so bad that it cannot be sufficiently compensated for given list and point cost constraints.

I tried to unsubscribe----but every time I enter the 40k Tactics forum here's this thread leading the group~~


Right, there are risky 40k players and pragmatic 40k players. For example, if I have two units within assault range of two units---I can do the math in my head and think statistically, I should be fine to split my assaults based on WS, # of attacks, etc. Or I can play it safe, assault one unit with two units----and overwhelm the odds to rid myself of more and more outliers.

One method is safe with smaller return---the other is riskier with larger return.

One veteran 40k player can walk up and state "Well, you play to win so split your assault--play off normal statistics and go for the throat."
Another veteran 40k player can walk up and state "Well, you go for the sure thing here and double up a unit so the dice don't get you"

Of course, you can play it safe---double up assault---and still roll nothing but 1's, therein losing both units to one as well. C'est la 40k



However, I can't really say that skill equates into adding redundancy to the system though. Some players may knowingly take risks with the dice for that large return and provided they roll normally----they will likely beat the guy that places redundancy in his system due to unit efficiency.

Dashofpepper wrote:
1. You're taking my anecdote out of context. I said that I had a game that came down to a single D6 roll BECAUSE of the mistakes I had made - which has been my issue all along; luck only factors significantly into your game when you force it to. Which is again - my whole point here, that the OP's theory of luck at top-level gaming is flawed.

No, I'm not taking your anecdote out of context, but you've continuously ignored the other side of it.

You made mistakes that allowed the game to reach that state. We both agree on that.

But here's the rub. Your opponent must also have made mistakes, that also allowed the game to reach that state. If your opponent had played better (for example, if they had ensured Mephiston was where he needed to be, rather than leaving him straddling quarters), then they would have exploited your mistakes better, and would have won outright, without the need for this last, final d6.

It isn't like you're trying to tell us that your opponent played a perfect game, and you only lost because of the d6. Your opponent also played an imperfect game. And you two are both "top players". Neither of you were noobs, doing stupid stuff. You had both fought yourselves into those finals after many rounds of competitive play.

The fact that neither of you were able to capitalize on the other's mistakes in order to win the game decisively is very telling. You're both quality players, but you just never had that opening - neither of you. Why not? Because 40k is a game with two players, and you're at cross purposes to one another. When you run into someone else who is at your skill level, that skill tends to counter itself out. Your opponent prevented you from exploiting his mistakes to the extent that you could win the game. You prevented him from exploiting your mistakes to the extent that it cost you the game. And, at the end of the game, it came down to one d6 roll.

I don't know how much more perfect an anecdote for the OP's case there could be. But you keep disregarding your opponent's impact on the game at all, just claiming that you lost because of your mistakes. But the second before that d6 was rolled, it was anyone's game, and your opponent's mistakes also led to that situation.

Ailaros wrote:

Dashofpepper wrote:According to the theory here, I'm either incredibly lucky or I've never played an intelligent person, because as skill goes up, luck is more important.

That is correct.

Dashofpepper wrote: I *am* unlucky with dice, beyond anecdotal evidence, and I still win

Ailaros...
According to your theories Dash is incredibly lucky or has never played an intelligent person, and above, you confirmed that that is correct.
Now considering Dash IS unlucky (Most of the time AFAIK) then what does that imply... considering that Dash and I participated in game not to long ago, and i was trounced all the way to hell and back?
Now, i feel quite offended by the fact that you are implying that i am unintelligent.

Dashofpepper wrote:because at the seriously competitive 40k levels, it isn't about dice rolls, but about exploiting mistakes. Even the tiny ones.

Given, the main reason for me loosing was not luck, as we were both lucky/unlucky in certain regards... And i know i'm not a hardcore tourney gamer like Dash, but our W/L ratios are roughly equal... the main reason for that loss was due to a few small mistakes. I saw them as soon as my turn ended, and so did Dash. He exploited those small mistakes with as much force as he could muster and applied the required pressure and target allocation into making any mistakes, no matter how small, into big ones.
Now i'll be the first to admit my mistakes, and ultimetly, that is what won dash the game. I know this because of two reasons. One, we had a nice discussion about it after the game, and two, because i apply the same principles in my other games. One small mistake can sway a game in such a way that luck has little to no bearing.

So skill was unequal. Don't take that personally, because it's not meant to be. Your mental flub resulted in an imperfect game, Dash capitalized on it (which would be expressed as greater skill), and if dice had rolled so badly that Dash's perfectly sound decisions to capitalize on your mistake failed, then that would be luck trumping skill.

In this case skill was unequal from the start, and the OP still stands.

sourclams wrote:So skill was unequal. Don't take that personally, because it's not meant to be. Your mental flub resulted in an imperfect game, Dash capitalized on it (which would be expressed as greater skill), and if dice had rolled so badly that Dash's perfectly sound decisions to capitalize on your mistake failed, then that would be luck trumping skill.

In this case skill was unequal from the start, and the OP still stands.

No offence taken.
I would say skill was unequal, as 2 players will never truely be "equal" in skill, one will always be slightly better than the other even if it is by the smallest amount. But taking into account the many and varied army combinations Mr.X could be "better" than Mr. Y, who is in turn "better" than Mr. Z, who is in turn "better" than Mr. X.

We both made mistakes, just because Dash was able to capitalize first does not mean he had significantly greater skill, that he was more lucky or that the match-up was significantly unequal.
The simple fact is that the tiniest mistake can cause a cascade effect resulting in one player winning and one player loosing.

This just goes back to my point that the model isn't based on reality. Nobody ever has equal skill, and skill means more than luck in general.

It's good as an intelligence exercise, but at the same time, does this model tell us anything exceptionally useful?

It's like saying that basketball teams are perfectly fair if everyone had the same level of athleticism, so the game should always go into overtime. Great, no two teams have the exact same players, strategies, and situations at the same time against each other.

Except for Eldrad. He's so powerful, he's always there, in every single Eldar army. Even when two Eldar armiies face each other.

scuddman wrote:Except for Eldrad. He's so powerful, he's always there, in every single Eldar army. Even when two Eldar armiies face each other.

Lies!

@Ailaros

Let me explain my thoughts about the influence of luck having an example:

Lascannon vs Landraider (an unequal matchup)

A low skilled player:

OK here we have a landraider and I have a lascannon. If I get it open, there will be terminators inside. So I better move my plasmaguns into position to kill them afterwards (BIG mistake...).

1. scenario: He shoots and explodes the landraider, plasmaguns shoot and kill whats inside, because the landraider was badly placed (equal skill...).
2. scenario: He shoots and fails to do anything. The landraider moves up and the terminators kill the plasmagunners

so we have a situation with a yay or nay outcome. A risk that a skilled player will not take. Because nay is not acceptable and yay can be achieved differently.

A high skilled player:

OK there is a landraider, I have a lascannon, but no other target available, so why not shooting there. Maybe I stun it.

1. scenario: He explodes the landraider, but it does not have a big influence on the game, because the opponent was equally skilled and took this scenario into consideration (disembarking behind the vehicle and terrain before for example, and/or being onto an objective anyways and/or distraction from his AV11 rhinos, whatever...)

2. scenario: He fails to do damage, but he did not expose himself to the counter, so it is not important that his shot failed.

So we have 2 example how bad luck will affect a game most likely from the perspective of a skilled and unexperienced player.

A skilled player will not take a high risk. An unexperienced player will.

This results in a more predictable gameplay of course, but the outcome will be determined by tactical decisions and most likely not by dice.
And on a highly skilled niveau the guys play for a draw as the worst result and the massacre as tha best result. A loss is not acceptable.
So the player with more skill will defeat the less skilled one. This is almost certain. There are the "certain" games, of course, but to be honest, this must be REALLY bad luck...

And equally skilled players on high level will tie most likely.
Equally skilled players on low level will get unpredictable results.

This is also the reason why a skilled player will not be tabled 99% of his games against anyone.
He also wont table his opponents on an equally high skill level 99% of his games.


Where is the logical fallacy here?

If you are top level your means are roadblocking, tankshocking, shifting forces, movement, terrain use. -> no luck involved and no luck needed
If you are bottom level your means are moving up, shoot and assault where you can and see what happens... -> luck involved and needed

So my theory is: If there were a perfect player, luck would be irrelevant. Because perfection does not exist (like equal skill level during a game) luck is a factor, but the higher it gets the less relevant it is.

I think the main fallacy of Dash's argument is that his own examples clearly show a disparity in player skill. In the first example, his opponent suffered basically no damage from his alpha strike, and then had Dash 'playing to survive', yet still allowed Dash to claim three objectives while claiming only one themselves. His opponent didn't play the mission first while Dash kept playing the mission even while behind. This shows a large disparity in skill level, if the players had been of equal skill his opponent would have moved to make sure those objectives couldn't be taken.

In his second example, his opponent reserved what may be (without full lists or point values it's hard to say) a large portion of his effective fire power. While Dash made a mistake with his ravagers, his opponent failed to follow up on this with a flub on target priority, probably the most basic skill in the game.

With no disrespect intended to either of his opponents, they clearly do not play on the same skill level as Dash, and I would say this is probably true of most people Dash plays. However that being the case, these examples are not furthering Dash's posit because the skill level is not equal. While I agree that a game in which opponents and lists are exactly equal is not going to exist outside of a theoretical environment, the pairing would have to be a little closer than these examples for me to accept them.

There is no universal governing body of 40k, any skill level assignments are therefore arbitrary.

Competitive 40k is, sadly, a joke. You go to an event with 10 people and play 3-4 of those ten and someone is declared a winner; it's ridiculous. 30 people, 60 people, 100 people, 150 people... and you still only play 3-6 of those people and someone is declared a winner, even more ridiculous.

To compound it, in most tournaments there is no qualifier for participating and no skill based organization for the first round, and only a minor one for the second. Billy could have bought his army off of e-bay and played his first game on Saturday, and play in the three round tournament on Sunday. Mediocre Bob has been playing for three months, and draws Billy for round 1, massacring him. In round 2 he plays against another player that scored a massacre in round 1, hey look it's Dash. Mediocre Bob gets tabled by turn 3.

This is 40k tournaments (this is Also WHFB tournaments as well, but sticking to the topic).

For two years I played an Ork army locally, and I never lost a game. This is not because I'm a great 40k player, but it is because I was better than the other players at the FLGS. I had my share of good and bad luck, but was always able to offset the bad luck because my opponents were not good enough to seize and capitalize on that bad luck. I played more games than the other players, I read forums more. There is a great deal to be said for practice. Someone mentioned Street Fighter earlier. If you had a guy who played SF four hours a day seven days a week, and a guy that played, meh, maybe three hours a week in a game against each other and you knew nothing besides that, who is your money on?

There are a couple more reasosn 40k is pretty silly as a competitive event, like how income can factor largely into the game. Running MSU of the latest and hotest codex, with every MSU in a vehicle, is not cheap. If someone can not afford (or can afford, but can not justify) the expense of keeping their army up to date with the latest and greatest, they're going to suffer. And lastly and probably the most telling, is the imbalance of the codices. Running Necron or Tau, or Chaos Daemons, greatly reduces your chances of doing well no matter how skilled you are.

I think the main fallacy of Dash's argument is that his own examples clearly show a disparity in player skill. In the first example, his opponent suffered basically no damage from his alpha strike, and then had Dash 'playing to survive', yet still allowed Dash to claim three objectives while claiming only one themselves. His opponent didn't play the mission first while Dash kept playing the mission even while behind. This shows a large disparity in skill level, if the players had been of equal skill his opponent would have moved to make sure those objectives couldn't be taken.

What would be the result? Draw wouldnt it?

Competitive 40k is, sadly, a joke. You go to an event with 10 people and play 3-4 of those ten and someone is declared a winner; it's ridiculous. 30 people, 60 people, 100 people, 150 people... and you still only play 3-6 of those people and someone is declared a winner, even more ridiculous.

Swiss system mitigates this problem a lot:
First game -> random
every game after first: 1. vs 2., 3. vs 4. and so on
in the course of 5 games the first random one will be a kind of irrelevant.

There are a couple more reasosn 40k is pretty silly as a competitive event, like how income can factor largely into the game.

This is true to a certain extent. It is also expensive to travel to many different tournament locations in order to be present in the community.
But there are possibilities to move around it a bit. (Borrowing models/armies, driving together with other guys to reduce costs there...)

ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote: BUT, I made A LOT of tacitical mistakes that allowed a couple of unit's abismal shooting to cost me the game.

Right, you played a poorer game and lost. There's nothing surprising about that.

-Nazdreg- wrote:A skilled player will not take a high risk. An unexperienced player will.

Well, if that's your definition of "skill", that's fine. It still fits the model.

dayve110 wrote:Now, i feel quite offended by the fact that you are implying that i am unintelligent.

Actually, those were Dash's words. When I put them into my own, you get.

Ailaros wrote:hat I'm saying is that if you're beating your opponents 90% of the time with really bad luck, you must be much better than your opponents.

That or you're not actually as unlucky as you say, or you're not actually winning 90% of your games. There are lots of possible ways you could read it.

Ailaros wrote:

ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote: BUT, I made A LOT of tacitical mistakes that allowed a couple of unit's abismal shooting to cost me the game.

Right, you played a poorer game and lost. There's nothing surprising about that.

My point is 95% of what get called poor luck is actually a poor game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And I still tied

Well, if that's your definition of "skill", that's fine. It still fits the model.

Indeed this is my definition of skill (broke down of course, it comes after knowing rules and distances and listbuilding and odds and so on).
Then why do you explain, that luck will have a lesser impact on a highly skilled level (based on my definition of skill) with your model stating that the games will be decided by dice rolls?
I read a clear discrepancy here or I got you wrong.
I would say that luck will dictate the casualty ratio and not the game result. And the casualty ratio is unimportant. Even in kill point mission.
20 marines can be made out of 4 killpoints or 2 and 16 dead marines to 5 dead marines can result in a 1:0 win for the player with 5 dead marines.

Lets have another example:

My first VASSAL game vs Dash (as far as I remember).

10th Keldonia vs his Orks.

2 objectives, I tank shocked him out of my objective with a perfectly secure tank shock. S3 vs AV14 DOG attack -> no dice
I moved onto it then -> no dice

so far so good.

to his objective, I had to run with my stormtroopers in order to contest it (assuming that the game ends afterwards) and failed by 0, whatever ", game ended, so we tied -> dice involved.

so your model says:
Dice decided. I had to run "better" and I would have won. If the game continued I probably would have lost. (I dont remember the odds about the roll to run and the game end roll actually...)

I say skill mattered. If the difference in skill between us were greater, the better player would have won.
And dice only came into consideration because we were

1. (in this game) Quite equally skilled.
2. (In this game) Not skilled enough to be independent from them.

My lack of skill was not getting a unit into a perfectly safe striking position, so I had to make a very unpredictable action in order to have a possible victory and I did not guard my objective for the next turn.
His lack of skill was his fail to secure his objective properly from those guys and he wasnt able to contest my objective for this turn.

so it was a "correct" result with a dice element in it, because we werent perfect.

So your assumption is: Our luck must have been equally good/bad in order to have the game tied? I actually dont remember how dice worked during the game. It simply didnt matter. We both had our plans and both failed because of imperfection, not because of "failure" of dice.



Now back to my opinion about luck being subjective.

You connect luck to dice rolls, is that so?

OK lets say, I roll 3 meltaguns. 1 vs a Leman Russ front armour, 2 into a blob.

One melta vs blob misses, the other one that hits fails to wound.
The 3rd melta destroys the leman russ.

so we have about average rolls in total (not loaded dice at least)
So the guard player will claim most likely that the opponent rolled well.
He will forget about those "unimportant" guardsmen and will only keep in mind the good result against the leman russ.
And he will forget that it were those 2 guardsmen that secured the objective that could have been dead.

The same works the other way round. You remember rolling below average but forget rolling above.

This leads me to the assumption that the importance of specific dice rolls will differ.
Therefore it leads to the logical decision to avoid important dice rolls in order to have a secure gameplay.

This is the reason why I think that less risky play means higher skill and the less the risk, the less important the dice.

-> dice impact will be reduced the higher the player skill is.

I think the chart would better is it said the "disparity of skill" and not just "skill".

If I'm super skilled, and my opponent is incompitent than luck, even the most extreme, is really not that important.

Then if the disparity in skill was truly zero (which it never will be) then luck is very important. Whether everything in between is an even slope or some sort of exponential graph I guess is up for debate.

But one thing is for sure, the world is going to end if we don't get this mathmatical graph about toy soldiers 100% right.

-Nazdreg- wrote:What would be the result? Draw wouldnt it?

Not likely. If he had moved into better firing lanes, or blocked off the objectives to keep Dash outside of 3", or tied him up/finished him off in assault, or tank shocked... there are too many what if's to declare the outcome, all we can say is that his opponent failed to play the mission to prevent Dash from winning. Now it may have been his intent to go for the Table rather than play the mission (fairly common in tournaments), but to not recognize what was happening to the point that you lose an objectives game 3-1? Not good.

Swiss system mitigates this problem a lot:
First game -> random
every game after first: 1. vs 2., 3. vs 4. and so on
in the course of 5 games the first random one will be a kind of irrelevant.

I disagree. Even at a 30 man tournament you're only playing 16% of the field in a 5 round match. At 150, you're playing 3% of the field. When list building to the the meta is a large part of the tournament scene, that guy down there at 25th might clean the clock of the guy at 1st. With no 'season' to match players on a winning percent of the course of the season or any other standardized matching system, declaring someone a winner of an event that only played a small sliver of the participants is inherently flawed.

This is true to a certain extent. It is also expensive to travel to many different tournament locations in order to be present in the community.
But there are possibilities to move around it a bit. (Borrowing models/armies, driving together with other guys to reduce costs there...)

Borrowing models is going to depend a great deal who you play with, as well as how long they will let you borrow them so you can get comfortable with that army. One of the places I used to play had an extremely..mm.. uptight? community. The Organizer disqualified a Cassius model because it didn't have the right pistol, and an entire space wolves army because the grey hunters were not modeled with bolt pistols, CCW AND Bolter.

They are, however options. All to often though you see two basic groups of people at tournaments, the 'normal' list guys, who have 4, maybe 5 vehicles in their army total (most of the local SM players have nearly identical lists consisting of 2 rhinos, dakka pred, vindicator, dreadnaught), and then the guys that have like 6 raiders, 4 venoms, and 3 ravagers. To no one's surprise, the top tables are going to consist of the second group far more often than the first.

I disagree. Even at a 30 man tournament you're only playing 16% of the field in a 5 round match. At 150, you're playing 3% of the field. When list building to the the meta is a large part of the tournament scene, that guy down there at 25th might clean the clock of the guy at 1st. With no 'season' to match players on a winning percent of the course of the season or any other standardized matching system, declaring someone a winner of an event that only played a small sliver of the participants is inherently flawed.

Yes it is flawed, but imho not ridiculous. Top players stay top players and bottom players stay bottom players. The midfield will be influenced by matchups, yes.

Not likely. If he had moved into better firing lanes, or blocked off the objectives to keep Dash outside of 3", or tied him up/finished him off in assault, or tank shocked... there are too many what if's to declare the outcome

But those what-ifs you presented do not involve luck. So it is up to the players skill. If he is a better player than Dash then most likely he will win , if he isnt, he probably wont win.
So if they would be identically skilled the most likely result would be a draw.
Dice can bend it a bit in one direction, so we get maybe a 12:8 instead of a 10:10.

-Nazdreg- wrote:But those what-ifs you presented do not involve luck. So it is up to the players skill. If he is a better player than Dash then most likely he will win , if he isnt, he probably wont win.
So if they would be identically skilled the most likely result would be a draw.
Dice can bend it a bit in one direction, so we get maybe a 12:8 instead of a 10:10.

So... what you're saying is that in a game with players of equal skill, luck is the largest determining factor

Dashofpepper wrote:
You've had 11 pages of reasons. Lengthy ones explaining *why* your theory is backwards. If you don't get it now, I don't expect you will.

Actually, of those comments from you in those 11 pages, the only reasons are based on logical fallacies. It's not that I don't get what you're saying, it's that I don't believe what you're saying is accurate.

So far, you haven't given a single convincing reason, despite 11 pages of talking.


Dashofpepper wrote:
I'm pretty sure there's nothing else I can add to this thread

Actually, you haven't really added anything in the first place. It's not to say that you can't, but if you're going to be a meaningfully positive contributor to something, then you have to stop only using fallacy to make your arguments.



Dashofpepper wrote:
According to the theory here, I'm either incredibly lucky or I've never played an intelligent person, because as skill goes up, luck is more important.

THIS DRECK HAS GONE ON FOR 12 PAGES?

Look I hate to say it, Ailaros, but it seems the person who has the most problems here regarding 'logic' is the person whos head is stuck up his predetermined @$$.

Why post a thread ASKING FOR OPINIONS - AND THEN CITE LOGIC?

And as far as luck/skill discussisions go, there are two people whose info is invaluable - Dash and Nurglitch.

"In my experience, there's no such thing as luck."-Obi Wan Kenobi (pimp)

I look at it like this
If 2 players have Identical skills, and an identically impossible to beat list, then sure, luck will be the winner of the match. But since that is impossible, no luck wont be the decider. Why? Because no matter HOW CLOSE 2 opponents are in skill and and how close their armies are to compare, one WILL be better then the other over the course of the game. Suer random lucky dice rolls have made me win/lose some games, but all my games? No way. Usually its just down to being out played. No matter how good someone is, they will make a mistake somewhere, and if there opponent is just as good, he/she will see that error and use it.

In my personal opinion, I think the OP is right in theory but is not right in practice.

The claim is that all things being equal the only deciding factor is dice, therefore, at its core 40k is not a tactically challenging game.

I would say that is only true in the very rare situation where both players, of equal high skill, both play perfect games with similar, if not the same, army. This situation in practical terms will never happen.

I think the OPs theory takes too much away from the Human Factor. Nobody plays perfect games, not Redbeard, not Dash, and most certainly not myself. Mistakes can and will be made, and mistakes can and will be taken advantage of.

The OP is saying that dice calculates the risks one does and luck determines whether that risk was successful. However, all good player minimize risk, sets up redundancies, etc. When you know you have something random like dice but you have a way to predict average results. calculated risks are part of the game.

I am not going to say that luck plays no factor. I have seen many of games played between good players (including Dash) come down to a few critical dice rolls. Players with the ability to make those critical dice rolls usually have an inherent advantage to those that consistently fails them, and no amount of skill will help you.

I guess, it comes down to your philosophy. You could apply this concept to life, how much does "luck" or "random chance" effect the outcomes of our lives. I know several people who always makes rational calculated risks but economy turns, or something unfortunate happens, and they are not as successful as the guy across the street who makes average decisions, but owns a fortune 500 company. Is life no more or less challenging because of luck? Can you say the same of a minatures game?

What makes 40k a tactically challenging game, especially at the top competitive levels, are the factors that you as a player can control. Your army list, the tools you bring to the table, board control, application of forces, moving properly in the movement phase to set up assaults or shooting that favors an overall battle plan. Making mistakes is part of that. You may over expose a flank, you may commit too much to a side of the board, and your opponent may be able to capitalize that. Yes, luck does play a factor in your ability to pull off your plan, but more often then not, most people loose their games because of poor choices they have made and critical dice rolls they have failed.

Both play an importance on this game, and both have to be taken into consideration. IMHO, 40k is still a tactically challenging game because it is still two people trying to juggle risks with limited resources.

Deadshane1 wrote:"In my experience, there's no such thing as luck."-Obi Wan Kenobi (pimp)

He cheats using the force

As for the whole debate.

You cannot deny that luck does exists, and when it goes extremely awry it can dominate the game more then skill. My experience has shown me that luck is a much much smaller impact on games then skill though and properly capitalizing on opportunities and the opponent's mistakes is far far far more influencing on the games outcome then a few dice rolls going bad here or there.

An example; Recent Tourny. Playing Eldar with my Tyranids. Dawn of War/Kill Points. My opponent's army stinks (5 reapers, 1 warwalker, 2 DA squads in serpents, Autarch w/10xWarp Spiders, 5 shining spears = 1500 points or so). He has a reputation as an "average" player, so he won't be doing anything tactically stunning with his force. So I setup expecting an easy win. I'll admit I played like crap which made an easy win into a tie, and there was some really really weird dice going around as well. Failed 4 outa 6 saves on my tyrant to warp spider fire...splat. 50+ rending genestealer attacks doing no damage to a warwalker and wave serpent. 24 Hive guard shots and 9 warp lances into a wave serpent doing nothing. DA rolling snake eyes on their break test after losing combat on the last turn to stick in against some stealers and a Trygon...etc. The opponent made the mistake of trying to kill my scary stuff instead of going after the easy kill points though, and I managed to get a few KP here and there and eek out a tie. Basically my opponent being bad enough that my poor rolling didn't matter.

I've found that in the closest games there are usually a couple of "critical rolls", basically events that will tip the scale of the game on a single or small number of dice rolls. That last turn run roll to snag that last objective, an important break test that could open up your opponent's lines, that critical volley of fire, an important armor save on an important character, a unit straddling table quarters (dash) etc etc. Basically the closer the skill level the more important these random events are as good players will exploit the hell out of them. Of course the way the game plays out overall determines when, where and how important theses situations come up. Some times you don't even realize when these critical rolls happen until a turn or 2 later or post game when you kick back and talk about the game and say something like, "Man, if unit X had of done Y the game would have been 100% completely different".

On the other hand, these critical rolls don't happen when there's a big skill difference, as you can cover some poor dice rolling with superior playing.

There is no such thing as "luck."
"Luck" is a concept created by pattern-seeking primates to understand variables that appear to be behaving in a consistent way incorrectly, over the short term.

"Good" or "Bad" luck is a subjective description based upon preconceived notions about perceived extremes of best or worst outcomes.

"Luck" infers some outside controlling force that tends to favor (or disfavor) despite individual needs for neutrality.

A real-life scenario: You are driving alone down the highway when you get a flat. You pull to the side of the road to change it. You might perceive this as "bad" luck. Further down the road, a boulder slides down a hillside and pulverizes the exact spot you would have been in if you had continued driving. It would have been considered "bad" luck to be killed thusly. Therefore, subjectively, the flat tire was "good" luck. However, the very next day after the flat, you are driving with your family when you make a mistake that kills your entire family. You can see where this is going...

40k is a game between two seemingly controlling players interacting with a seemingly static enviroment influenced by seemingly randomized factors, over a short term period.
"Good" or "Bad" "luck" rolling dice during this short term is purely subjective.
"Mistake" or "Mistakes" perceived to occur during this period are based upon preconceived notions of what is a correct or incorrect action at a certain point, based upon previous experience(s).

The winner, in this case of a 40k game, is the player that tends to make the correct action for the current enviroment more often than his opponent.
A so-called "high level player" is a person that tends to make more correct actions over a long period.

Deadshane1 wrote:"In my experience, there's no such thing as luck."-Obi Wan Kenobi (pimp)

I was sooo waiting for someone to quote old Ben from Star Wars......


OK, skill Vs luck, an actual applicable example:

The last time I battled with my buddy in WHFB, we did so with 3,000 points. He plays Wood Elves and I play Lizardmen. In Fantasy you roll for terrain, so you don't really get to pick all of it. We rolled it up, placed it on the table accordingly, and we then deployed our forces. The middle of the table was open, surrounded by woods and hills on each side. I marched up 3 units of mine through the middle of the table. 2 units of Saraus warriors and one unit of Temple guard. The temple guard were in the middle. He was holding back a unit of Treekin and a Treeman towards the middle as well. He decided to move the treeman into the woods on my flank because he can treesing and whatever else the wood elves do in woods, I dunno some hippie crap or whatever. So, I on purpose, marched up one saurus unit right up next to the treeman, so that if the treeman charged he would be stuck fighting that block for at least 2 turns, possibly more. Lizardmen hardly ever break, since they have decent leadership and are cold blooded.

He saw what I was doing, he saw that I was trying to block his treeman and tie him up for a few turns. So, he decided to get smart (or so he thought) and marched his treeman behind my units. So basically next turn he would have his pick of which unit he wanted to charge from the rear. I saw this and in my next turn I marched everything in the opposite direction, creating a very large gap between myself and the treeman. I also flanked my cold ones and my steggadon all the way back near his deployment zone, and that march move I made in the opposite direction but also towards his edge of the table made a huge gap between my units and the treeman.

In WHFB you must roll 2D6 and add your movement to charge. He rolled snake eyes on his charge roll, so the treeman failed and only moved two inches total. This allowed me to move again on my turn and create an even larger gap, effectively taking the treeman out of the game. My cold ones and stegadon charged the treekin to tie them up (they are actually tough as hell and I tied them up for several turns before he wiped me) and my other saurus unit and temple guard charged in for the kill on his archers, his eternal guard and his glade guard and it was game over before the treeman could even catch up and join the battle.

So, his bad move was a mistake. I capitalized on it. His bad dice rolls made his mistake even larger and I took total advantage of it. Had he rolled box cars (double 6s) his treeman probably could have charged my rear flank and stopped my units from advancing. However since he did not, and I created that huge gap he effectively took his own treeman out of the game. Now, he knew the risks and took them. Had his plan worked it could have changed the game, but it did not. He knew the risk versus reward situation and took that risk. It failed and caused him the game. Had he got better dice rolls, he maybe could have won (though wood elves are a very weak army and in dire need of a new book). So, this is a prime example of dice rolls, luck, and risk versus reward. High risk moves often do not pan out in your favor, which is why I usually never do them.

akira5665 wrote: Why post a thread ASKING FOR OPINIONS - AND THEN CITE LOGIC? the most problems here regarding 'logic' is the person whos head is stuck up his predetermined @$$.

lol

KingCracker wrote:If 2 players have Identical skills, and an identically impossible to beat list, then sure, luck will be the winner of the match. But since that is impossible, no luck wont be the decider. Why? Because no matter HOW CLOSE 2 opponents are in skill and and how close their armies are to compare, one WILL be better then the other over the course of the game. Suer random lucky dice rolls have made me win/lose some games, but all my games? No way

Mahu wrote:I would say that is only true in the very rare situation where both players, of equal high skill, both play perfect games with similar, if not the same, army. This situation in practical terms will never happen.

To reiterate a few things about this theory:

- it does not require players to be perfect.

- it does not require players to be perfectly equal in skill

- at no point does skill never matter (except with 2 perfect players, but I don't assume that will ever happen)

- the determining power of luck is based relative to skill.

Carefully read the theory again, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Well, you need to factor in also that as you go up in skill, you mitigate some luck as well. Of course, you cannot perfectly mitigate luck, but luck diminishes more too as you go up in skill. Your opponent also mitigates some luck, so some of the aspects of dice rolling go out the window. (e.g.: guys in a transport are immune to leadership tests, completely mitigating leadership, so those dice rolls cease to exist)

Also, I think my point still stands that as you and your opponent go up in skills, mistakes happen less and are smaller, but have a bigger impact at a higher level. This mitigates the "evenness" of less mistakes at a higher level, especially in an I go, you go setting.

I think you had that negatively sloping graph about mistakes tending towards zero as skill goes up.

The thing is, the impact of mistakes goes up also as your skill goes up. How much so and to what extent is debatable, but I think you should address that as well.

Also, what was the point of the original post? What is it that you take from the conclusion? My sense is that this is an attempt to try to prove that 40k is not a game of skill..not too disimilar to your old post that when you watch two good players, you don't see them doing anything special.

scuddman wrote:Well, you need to factor in also that as you go up in skill, you mitigate some luck as well.

I DO. You've actually been reading stuff on this thread, right?

scuddman wrote:The thing is, the impact of mistakes goes up also as your skill goes up.

And the impact of skill is RELATIVE between the two players. If you haven't picked that up as a core tenet of the theory yet, I don't know what I can do to make that more clear.

scuddman wrote:Also, what was the point of the original post?

Read the OP for the theory in brief.

scuddman wrote:What is it that you take from the conclusion?

The moral I've gotten from this, actually, is that the more equal in skill level you become to your opponents, the less you can take the game seriously in a tactical, competitive sense.

Given that there is diminishing return to more skill, this means that once you hit a certain level, the costs become enormous while at the same time the game continues to be determined more by luck than by skill, the further you go, and the better you get. This also means that the better you get, the less you can take the game seriously in a tactical, competitive sense, unless you're way better than your opponents (like Dash, for example).

This means, that in order to continue to have tactics as the core of my 40k experience means that either I need to whomp on worse players, or I need to change what is the core of my 40k experience, or I need to give up 40k for a game that doesn't have a random element involved. My particular choice of aesthetic has yet been determined.

And the impact of skill is RELATIVE between the two players. If you haven't picked that up as a core tenet of the theory yet, I don't know what I can do to make that more clear.

You haven't convinced me this is true. It might be a core tenet, but I say this is why it fails to match reality.

40k for a game that doesn't have a random element involved.

There are no games without random elements. All competitions have uncontrolled elements. Good luck with that. If your conclusion is how you feel about 40k, then I will point out that you will draw the same conclusions about all competitions. Even if you don't agree with me now, you will agree with me eventually.

Given that there is diminishing return to more skill, this means that once you hit a certain level, the costs become enormous while at the same time the game continues to be determined more by luck than by skill, the further you go, and the better you get. This also means that the better you get, the less you can take the game seriously in a tactical, competitive sense, unless you're way better than your opponents (like Dash, for example).

To some extent, this is true for all types of competitions, not just 40k.

My point is that a lot of people that want to compete get hung up on things outside of their control. I don't just mean 40k, I mean everything. There is this attitude of, "Well, I can't control that, so why bother?" They don't like my style as a writer, so why bother? I don't have the best boxing trainer, so why bother? If I get hit by a lucky punch, I lose, so why bother?

You know why I really like 40k? Because in real life, life is unfair. In real competitions, competitions are unfair. Bad luck and good luck represent that. It's true for everything . Your ability to overcome randomness is a better representation of real life competition than a game like chess. People always treat competitions like, "Oh, you just have to get lucky."

This is the Number One excuse I hear when people complain when I win. "You got lucky."

There was a movie (Dirty Pretty Things) where a character (Guo Yi) said, "People who are good at chess are bad at life." That's because in real life, your pieces don't always do what you want.

Ailaros wrote:

scuddman wrote:What is it that you take from the conclusion?

The moral I've gotten from this, actually, is that the more equal in skill level you become to your opponents, the less you can take the game seriously in a tactical, competitive sense.

Given that there is diminishing return to more skill, this means that once you hit a certain level, the costs become enormous while at the same time the game continues to be determined more by luck than by skill, the further you go, and the better you get. This also means that the better you get, the less you can take the game seriously in a tactical, competitive sense, unless you're way better than your opponents (like Dash, for example).

This means, that in order to continue to have tactics as the core of my 40k experience means that either I need to whomp on worse players, or I need to change what is the core of my 40k experience, or I need to give up 40k for a game that doesn't have a random element involved. My particular choice of aesthetic has yet been determined.

Not entirely true. You can always work on improving your game, understanding that, sometimes all the skill in the world won't get you a win. But just because you may lose games to the roll of the dice is no reason to abandon any reason to work on your game.

Furthermore, if your enjoyment of 40k is based solely on your win/loss percentage, I feel sorry for you, and yeah, you probably should go and do something else with your time. I'd rather lose a well-fought game than win by rote, with the same list I'd used time and again before. I'm reminded of this article. It is the experience that matters, not the result, and the experience of playing a good game, even if you lose it, is what 40k should be about.

scuddman wrote:

40k for a game that doesn't have a random element involved.

There are no games without random elements. All competitions have uncontrolled elements. Good luck with that. If your conclusion is how you feel about 40k, then I will point out that you will draw the same conclusions about all competitions. Even if you don't agree with me now, you will agree with me eventually.

You know, except chess, or go, or even checkers. You may say, 'it's random who goes first' - but in the real competitions they play multiple games, and each player goes first an equal number of times. No one ever loses their queen because they rolled ones and their opponent's pawn rolled sixes.

This is the Number One excuse I hear when people complain when I win. "You got lucky."

One of the keys to being a good player is being able to recognize the difference between your opponent getting lucky, and you making a mistake. There are times when, despite playing an optimal strategy and taking as many precautions as possible, your units just get killed. And there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that. But, you should take the opportunity to carefully examine those games and figure out if you could have done things differently to get a better result. Someone who immediately jumps to the conclusion that luck was the cause of their win or loss is someone who is making excuses. But that doesn't mean it wasn't the case

scuddman wrote:You haven't convinced me this is true. It might be a core tenet, but I say this is why it fails to match reality.

This particular part of the theory is based on the idea of a control variable. In brief, the more you can control for a variable, the less impact that variable has on the results compared to uncontrolled variables. I don't think it's that strange to think that, for players playing with the same list, on a symmetrical table, at the exact same skill level, etc. luck will be the only determining factor. Of course, no game has ever had all variables but luck completely controlled for, which is why the theory states that the more those things ARE controlled for, the less those controlled variables are determinant of the outcome of the game.

The more things become controlled, the more uncontrollable things (like luck) matter.

scuddman wrote:This is the Number One excuse I hear when people complain when I win. "You got lucky."

As Redbeard said, what if you ARE lucky? What if that IS the reason you win games?

It's one thing to take responsibility for one's actions, it's another to pretend like things outside of your control don't exist.

After all...

scuddman wrote:You know why I really like 40k? Because in real life, life is unfair. In real competitions, competitions are unfair. Bad luck and good luck represent that.

In any case, this is certainly a different aesthetic than my own. I'll admit that one of the twinges I get from losing or drawing a game I should have won due to luck is that, outside of the world of 40k, I'm not terribly successful, also for reasons beyond my control, for the most part. Were I to quit something simply because the results were determined, more or less (depending on the circumstances), by forces beyond my control, then I'd have no choice but to quit life.

One can most certainly work hard to improve one's odds, in 40k, or in real life, but success or failure is often far from earned. That one can control everything and so the end results of whatever one has worked towards is entirely based upon the skill with which you applied yourself is a tragic mental trap of the human condition.

Not to wax too much more philosophical, but it seems to me that, regarding the blatant unfairness of both 40k and real life, that one has three options: thrash violently against the world (I won't lie, I listen to rock music on occasion), take safer risks (do things which uncontrollable elements play a smaller part - so play chess instead of 40k, for example), or learn not to derive satisfaction from success. I can scarcely think which is less difficult.

Redbeard wrote: I'm reminded of this article. It is the experience that matters, not the result, and the experience of playing a good game, even if you lose it, is what 40k should be about.

A nice article. It reminds me of a similar "phases of the hunter" thing I saw once.

It seems that there is something so terribly predictable about all of this. Like, human brains are wired in such a way where this kind of behavior pattern surfaces regardless to how we apply our genius.

Hmm... I either need a psychologist or a Taoist priest to continue on from here, as my knowledge is lacking. We don't have any Taoists on dakka, do we?

Phanatik wrote:There is no such thing as "luck."
"Luck" is a concept created by pattern-seeking primates to understand variables that appear to be behaving in a consistent way incorrectly, over the short term.

"Good" or "Bad" luck is a subjective description based upon preconceived notions about perceived extremes of best or worst outcomes.

"Luck" infers some outside controlling force that tends to favor (or disfavor) despite individual needs for neutrality.

A real-life scenario: You are driving alone down the highway when you get a flat. You pull to the side of the road to change it. You might perceive this as "bad" luck. Further down the road, a boulder slides down a hillside and pulverizes the exact spot you would have been in if you had continued driving. It would have been considered "bad" luck to be killed thusly. Therefore, subjectively, the flat tire was "good" luck. However, the very next day after the flat, you are driving with your family when you make a mistake that kills your entire family. You can see where this is going...

40k is a game between two seemingly controlling players interacting with a seemingly static enviroment influenced by seemingly randomized factors, over a short term period.
"Good" or "Bad" "luck" rolling dice during this short term is purely subjective.
"Mistake" or "Mistakes" perceived to occur during this period are based upon preconceived notions of what is a correct or incorrect action at a certain point, based upon previous experience(s).

The winner, in this case of a 40k game, is the player that tends to make the correct action for the current enviroment more often than his opponent.
A so-called "high level player" is a person that tends to make more correct actions over a long period.

Way to sound like an expert on the matter. Saying there is no such thing as luck is just silly. If that were true, then how come everyone doesnt roll the same way with in reason? How can some people be awesome rollers, while others are just terrible? I am a notoriously poor roller. My wife is an insanely good roller. Infact Im so poor at it, I pass MOST of my LD saves, and I play Orks. Most people at my group is middle of the road, and we all use the same dice, and roll on the same part of my table. Ive even tried rolling the same way others roll and its the same out come. Im just not such a good roller.

Ailaros
- The moral I've gotten from this, actually, is that the more equal in skill level you become to your opponents, the less you can take the game seriously in a tactical, competitive sense.

Really?

Errrr... ok. I'm out.....

The concept of being lucky or unlucky at dice only really applies with hindsight. Just because Dash has been consistently unlucky so far isn't a predictor of his future dice rolling.

I'm very much in agreement with Redbeard that the fun of gaming is in a close-fought game, win or lose. I'm in the process of starting a PhD in game design, and that aspect -- the intrinsic reward gained from playing a hard-fought game, even if you lose -- is central to my research.

This whole thread is flawed in that the OP presented a premise that he does not want challenged.

I do not know high level play, but for sure, at low level, "wild dices" can make or break a game. There are multiple times where a "bad choice" was made to get that one shot one a Land Raider or another big target/vehicle, which either worked (destroying the target and easing off the remainder of the game), or fluked totally resulting in a lost unit on the subsequent turn by the "unlucky" player.

Luck has more impact at low level play because it is given more "opportunity" (risk high, win high.... or not). The effect of luck reduces, but is still present, as you get better since you do not place as much odds on a weak success percentage...

Does it start creeping back up near highest level of play or when players are equally skilled, not sure.... I do not think so.

gorium wrote:This whole thread is flawed in that the OP presented a premise that he does not want challenged.

Really?

From where I'm sitting the OP presented a premise that is pretty solid and is defending it with both excellent points and the patience of a saint.

My opinion is that the dice can determine the outcome of a game. A player's skill can mitigate this to some degree but never remove it entirely. I've lost games due to what I believe was horrific luck with the dice but I'm also not above admitting that I've won games due to my opponent's horrific luck with the dice.

gorium wrote:This whole thread is flawed in that the OP presented a premise that he does not want challenged.

That's not true, actually. There were a good 10 pages of thoughtful debate that helped me refine the theory a great deal. If I give the impression that I don't want it challenged, it's because I haven't seen anything particularly useful either way to the theory in several pages now. It's mostly been detractors bashing the theory without really adding anything, or correcting people's misunderstandings of what I was trying to say in the OP.

gorium wrote:Does it start creeping back up near highest level of play or when players are equally skilled, not sure.... I do not think so.

Why not?

Why not?

Since a better player will not let luck take as much place in its "gameplan" than a weaker player, the TOTAL luck or lack thereof will have a lot lesser impact (less moments where luck was crucial due to better playing, movement, opportunities).

As such, the scale, your graph, should not keep luck has a "stable" (straight line) factor through out, but it should have a steady slope down (probably linear). IF you give less weight to luck, it can not be as gamebreaker. Still has a place, but not as game changing has too new guys shooting around, and you can not figure out who will win as both are doing "silly" things.

Does this make any sense to you?

You don't want your theory challenged. You've created a theory based on a guess, and are quick to point out that no one can disprove your theory, when you can't prove it either. The only acceptable medium is actual data points regarding your theory, which a handful of Dakka's competitive elite have contributed and you've rejected. You have to PROVE your theory for it to be valid, not have an invalid theory disproven for it not to be true. It doesn't matter that you have data points to suggest otherwise, because you can't PROVE something as subjective as luck. Since you can't prove your theory, and reject any actual data relevant to the subject, the thread is honestly useless.

gorium wrote:Since a better player will not let luck take as much place in its "gameplan" than a weaker player, the TOTAL luck or lack thereof will have a lot lesser impact (less moments where luck was crucial due to better playing, movement, opportunities). Does this make any sense to you?

Yes, it does. Better players mitigate luck better than worse players.

The problem is that you're looking at player skill in a vacuum. While your are trying to mitigate your bad luck, your opponent is trying to exploit it. While you are trying to exploit your good luck, your opponent is trying to mitigate it.

The end result of if a particular piece of luck was mitigated or exploited in one way or another is based on the RELATIVE skill level between the two players.

If you are much better than your opponent, then, yes, bad luck will hardly matter, as you will be able to mitigate it, and your opponent won't be able to exploit it. This is represented by the left side of the graphs on page one. The closer in skill you become, though, the more controlled player skill becomes, meaning that it's effect on the outcome becomes less and less compared to uncontrollable variables, like luck.

Garuss Acine wrote:You don't want your theory challenged.

I DO want my theory challenged.

Garuss Acine wrote:You've created a theory based on a guess, and are quick to point out that no one can disprove your theory, when you can't prove it either.

I have not thrown positivism out yet. If you have a good reason for why I should, I'd like to hear it. In the meantime, I have NEVER pointed out that no one can disprove this theory, much less been quick to do so.

Garuss Acine wrote: The only acceptable medium is actual data points regarding your theory, which a handful of Dakka's competitive elite have contributed and you've rejected.

I've seen one or two data points, yes, but I have no way of judging the accuracy of the interpretation of those data points as judged by the presenter. Without being able to see the actual data itself, what impact should it have?

If it's simply a lack of data that's the problem, I'd point you to some data points here.

Garuss Acine wrote: It doesn't matter that you have data points to suggest otherwise, because you can't PROVE something as subjective as luck.

Luck is objective, actually. It's called statistics.

Garuss Acine wrote:Since you can't prove your theory, and reject any actual data relevant to the subject, the thread is honestly useless.

I'm sorry you feel this way. If you had something meaningful to contribute to the discussion of this theory, I'd like to hear it. Aggressive slander, unfortunately, isn't particularly helpful.

@ OP

Whatever float your boat at this point.

How convenient is a premise that solely your personal interpretation of it makes any sense? ....

gorium wrote:How convenient is a premise that solely your personal interpretation of it makes any sense? ....

Well, so far I've had several people help me refine my theory, including people who disagree with it. They've been very helpful, because they've actually positively contributed to the discussion. There have been other people who have been talking too, but what they've said has been less useful because they either didn't understand key parts of what I was saying, or because they were making arguments based on illogical thinking.

How have YOU contributed meaningfully to the discussion?

KingCracker wrote:There is no such thing as "luck."

Way to sound like an expert on the matter. Saying there is no such thing as luck is just silly. If that were true, then how come everyone doesnt roll the same way with in reason? How can some people be awesome rollers, while others are just terrible? I am a notoriously poor roller. My wife is an insanely good roller. Infact Im so poor at it, I pass MOST of my LD saves, and I play Orks. Most people at my group is middle of the road, and we all use the same dice, and roll on the same part of my table. Ive even tried rolling the same way others roll and its the same out come. Im just not such a good roller.

This is something that often comes up I think. In my opinion people who claim to be bad rollers are either playing with dices that are bad (I always suggest that both players use the same dices) or they just lose a lot and feel it's easier to excuse their losses on bad luck (more likely). If you actually have some ability to roll lower numbers than average with any dices in the long run I'm very impressed
Also it kind of strikes me that these people often don't take into consideration their good rolls. As soon as you see a bad roll you hear the complaint about how bad roller they are and whenever a good or average roll comes it just passes by without being mentioned. Don't take it personal since I don't know you and maybe this doesn't apply to you at all but this behaviour emphasizes the thought of being a "bad roller".

People who claim to be good rollers are either cheating or are simply considered good rollers by people who consider themselves bad rollers (see the argument above). Or they are just nice against their beaten opponent and says "Well, I got a bit lucky - do you want to play again?" - which is also quite friendly

Can you lose a game based on bad luck - sure! If bad luck is temporary unfavorable results outside what is expected this is possible and likely to happen regularly against players with a similar skill.

Way to sound like an expert on the matter.

I apologize for expressing an opinion in a coherent manner. I forgot this is the internet.

Saying there is no such thing as luck is just silly.

Good thing I didn't mention there is no tooth fairy, or you'd really get miffed at me.

Mizeran wrote:

KingCracker wrote:There is no such thing as "luck."

Way to sound like an expert on the matter. Saying there is no such thing as luck is just silly. If that were true, then how come everyone doesnt roll the same way with in reason? How can some people be awesome rollers, while others are just terrible? I am a notoriously poor roller. My wife is an insanely good roller. Infact Im so poor at it, I pass MOST of my LD saves, and I play Orks. Most people at my group is middle of the road, and we all use the same dice, and roll on the same part of my table. Ive even tried rolling the same way others roll and its the same out come. Im just not such a good roller.

This is something that often comes up I think. In my opinion people who claim to be bad rollers are either playing with dices that are bad (I always suggest that both players use the same dices) or they just lose a lot and feel it's easier to excuse their losses on bad luck (more likely). If you actually have some ability to roll lower numbers than average with any dices in the long run I'm very impressed
Also it kind of strikes me that these people often don't take into consideration their good rolls. As soon as you see a bad roll you hear the complaint about how bad roller they are and whenever a good or average roll comes it just passes by without being mentioned. Don't take it personal since I don't know you and maybe this doesn't apply to you at all but this behaviour emphasizes the thought of being a "bad roller".

People who claim to be good rollers are either cheating or are simply considered good rollers by people who consider themselves bad rollers (see the argument above). Or they are just nice against their beaten opponent and says "Well, I got a bit lucky - do you want to play again?" - which is also quite friendly

Can you lose a game based on bad luck - sure! If bad luck is temporary unfavorable results outside what is expected this is possible and likely to happen regularly against players with a similar skill.

No its not a win/lose thing. I also take into account my good rolls, Im not saying I ALWAYS roll bad, or Id never win. I also have spent some money on decent dice, and again everyone uses the same dice at my table(so far anyways) and I just roll poorly alot of the times. Sure sometimes I get some rather incredibly crazy rolls, for example a week or so ago, I was playing against my nephews crons, and after his saves, a 20 mob of shoota boyz scored 12 wounds....after all the saves. I was shocked and also incredibly giddy. But as most things, everyone has different opinions on everything, and I personally believe that luck is out there.


Phanatik - the tooth fairy bit made me laugh.

Ailaros wrote:[If it's simply a lack of data that's the problem, I'd point you to some data points here.

Your data points are unacceptable.

If your theory was "Luck has the ability to affect the outcome of the game" everyone would agree with you.
If your theory was "Luck has the ability to drastically affect the outcome of a game if players don't take steps to offset its effect" everyone would agree with you.
If your theory was "Luck has had a significant impact on my games" everyone would agree with you.

None of those are your theory, and unfortunately a lot of the people agreeing with you don't understand that. They say things like Monster Rain a page back or so, "I agree with the OP, luck does have the ability to affect a game." That's nice, its correct, and its not your theory.

So where your theory is that luck is the determining factor at high levels of gameplay, and you present a series of datapoints that don't represent high levels of gameplay - your datapoints are irrelevant to your theory. And why do you think that your data should be better than the data of other people who have posted in here? Who's datapoints better correlate to the "end-state" of competitive gaming that you're referring to? The gamers who are super competitive and skilled, or the theorist making guesses about why they win or lose?

All this talk about proving, or not proving things, based on data, is kind of pointless given that it's a theory that requires something that isn't going to exist.

Have any of you ever taken a physics class? They teach all sorts of fundamental laws, things that scientists have agreed on for hundreds of years. And they teach them in fantasy-land, where there is no such thing as air-resistance, or friction, or any of the myriad of other things that actual impact experimental data.

The fact that two players will not be of exactly equal skill does not change the validity of the theory. And the mathematical representation of the concepts does prove it. There is such a thing as a mathematical proof.

Just because we're unlikely to find two players of equal skill, and therefore unlikely to get actual data that supports or disproves the theory doesn't render the math obsolete. And all we have to the contrary is a handful of anecdotes that aren't even necessarily detracting from the OPs point.

When I was in college, I took a class on the theory of programming. A lot of time in this class was dedicated to mathematically proving that a program was correct. It has very little practical application - in the real world, computers have bugs, operating systems have bugs, and it's faster to just run a program through a battery of tests than it is to do the math that would prove it correct. But that doesn't mean that the proofs are wrong, it just means that they're not useful in a practical sense.

That's kind of what this theory is like. Other than possibly providing a more philosophical view into why we play a game, or why we try to get better at it, it doesn't do much for us. You cannot prove or disprove this with experimental data - the control (two equally skilled players) doesn't exist.

All you can do is create thought experiments (such as the game where it is simplified to a question of shoot-or-not-shoot) and see where they lead, or try to put the concepts into abstract terms (math) and work out the conclusion from there. Both of these approaches indicate that the OP is correct.

The thing about this whole argument is that nothing has been defined to help measure how important luck is.

During a game, each player takes a number of decisions. The results of these are determined in some cases by measurement (for example, ranges), and in other cases by randomization using dice. This second class of result can be termed lucky, by which we mean random.

I propose that we measure luck by the following criteria.

An event is termed lucky if it is determined by randomization and the result of the dice lies in either the top or bottom 16% range of probabilities for the roll.

For example if you roll two dice, there is a 6/26 chance (16.666%) of scoring in the range 2 to 4, or in the range 10 to 12.

To look at this another way, two thirds of results are not “lucky” because they fall into the middle range of expected results.

To judge the effect of luck on the game as a whole, the number of “lucky” results must be more than half the total number of decisions. If this condition is satisfied, the game has been decided by luck.

If we then gather data about a significant number of games, we can start to form a picture of how important luck is.

Dodiez wrote:None of those are your theory, and unfortunately a lot of the people agreeing with you don't understand that. They say things like Monster Rain a page back or so, "I agree with the OP, luck does have the ability to affect a game." That's nice, its correct, and its not your theory.

Okay, I suppose I answered too succinctly there?

I agree with this:

Ailaros wrote:The theory, in brief, is that 40k is actually a tactically limited game, and once you achieve a certain level of skill, your skill becomes relatively insignificant compared to luck.

If two players of comparable skill level both play a tactically flawless game the main determinant factor in whether the game is a win, loss, or draw is going to be the dice.

Now, in practice, this is going to be rare because peoples' proficiency at the game varies widely and everyone makes a mistake occasionally but I still think that in theory Ailaros is mostly correct.

Kilkrazy wrote:
I propose that we measure luck by the following criteria.

An event is termed lucky if it is determined by randomization and the result of the dice lies in either the top or bottom 16% range of probabilities for the roll.

That does not include luck that is not based on dice (for example, the opponent that you are matched up with, or the army that you're set to play against). If I bring an army to an event that has a 95% win percentage against 80% of the expected field, and a 30% win percentage against 20% of the expected field, and I have to play against one of the 20% in the first round, I'd say that is a (un)lucky pairing for me.

Nor does it include the impact of dice rolls that are essentially 50/50 chances: choice of deployment zones (especially on tables with unbalanced terrain), taking the first turn, or, as in Dash's example, the determination of which table quarter a unit ends the game in if it is straddling a boundary.

By the definition you have proposed, having the choice to go first or second in all your games in a tournament is not lucky. But every time the initiative is stolen, that is a 'lucky' event, even though that is something that most good players will pay some attention to as a what-if event.

Dodiez wrote:Your data points are unacceptable.

So where your theory is that luck is the determining factor at high levels of gameplay, and you present a series of datapoints that don't represent high levels of gameplay - your datapoints are irrelevant to your theory.

I believe that A-ros has *repeatedly* said it's about the relative skill of the players, not necessarily high levels of play. Seriously, like ten times now. Welcome to the thread.

Kilkrazy wrote:An event is termed lucky if it is determined by randomization and the result of the dice lies in either the top or bottom 16% range of probabilities for the roll.

Not to take the wind out of your sails, there's a thing called "standard deviation" which determines how much variation from the norm you can expect based on your data. Ailaros' website has a discussion on it, actually.

@Monster Rain

I disagree that w/players of comparable skill luck is the determining factor. This theory leaves out style and personality. Application of skill, even when skill levels are equal, is a major factor in such games.

I also disagree with the assertion that 40k is a tactically shallow game. In previous editions I probably would have been on your side. But with the advent of 5th edition and the shift to objective style game play, random game length, and new run/cover rules I think the game is very deep.

But to each his own. I've only had a 2 games in several years and several RTT's & GT's that I could point to the dice being the reason for the loss that game. Every other loss (including 2 in a local RTT w/my Nids lately) I can point to mistakes I made or openings I created for my opponent.

There is such thing as a mathematical proof.

But the variables, constants, and relationships between them that he is using are incorrect.

Where:

Luck = X
Skill = Y

The OP is theorizing two things. The first:

Player A vs Player B
1x + 5y vs 2x + 5y

In this theory, Player B will win because they have equal skill and Player B has better luck. This equation is acceptable.

The second:

Luck = X
Skill = Y
Game Result = Z

X + Y = Z
X !=Y
X + 5Y = Z
X + 5000Y = Z
X+ 1,000,000Y = Z
X > Y

That second mathematical concept is not acceptable, and has no logical basis, thus its rejection by so many people. The first equation, while an acceptable equation in itself, is also rejected because of incomplete variables. The second equation is drawing incorrect correlation between variables, in part because it is missing several variables - which in themselves have proven (through practical experience of players with relevant experience) to be more significant than Luck(X).

A better set of variables and set of assumptions to make an equation from would be this.
Luck: X
Skill: Y
Mistakes: A

Assumption #1: There is a relationship in determining the result of a game between variables X, Y, and A.
Assumption #2: There is a direct relationship between Y and A. Increasing the magnitude of Y exponentially increases the magnitude of A.

There are at least two additional variables.

Suitability of Terrain for each player's army: B
Suitability of Armylist for opponent player: C

Some relationship between X, Y, A, B, C between two players determines the game.

The problem with this thread has several facets.

1. The OP is hypothesizing that as Y increases, the importance of X within that equation increases exponentially. The author has no basis for this claim, and all anecdotal evidence refutes this claim.

2. The OP does not take A, B, or C into account within his equation. He is hypothesizing that at high levels of Y, X is the most important variable. Other pseudo-scientists with better credentials refute this idea by saying that at high levels of Y, A is the most important variable.

3. The OP has mistakenly concluded that A is a subset of Y and that they have an inverse magnitudal relationship. Y(a). This is a mistaken conclusion, and has also been pointed out. A exists as a separate variable to Y, and while its value decreases inversely to Y's increase (the relationship the OP should have correctly inferred), its coefficient increases exponentially with the increase of Y.

There is more, but this is sufficient.

In short, there are three issues that people have and are expressing to differing degrees of intelligibility.

1. The author's variables and assumptions are incorrect. See above. While the author has identified two of the variables in an equation, he has steadfastly refused to acknowledge the efforts of anyone trying to help him point out additional ones - because any inclusion of additional variables, or relationship between them negate his theory - which is an incomplete theorem in the first place.

2. The author's math is wrong. While the author has correctly deduced that there are coefficients to at least one of the variables (Y) and that there are relationships between them, he has arbitrarily assigned values to the variables he knows. The result ultimately comes down to "X > Y" with the author staunchly defending this viewpoint, when this opinion is not mathematically supported. X > Y cannot be proven, nor can it be disproven, but in a mathematical theorem, assumptions like that need to be supported by evidence, where in this case evidence all points to the contrary.

3. The author doesn't understand the math. The author's understanding of the math required to complete this equation is enough for him to identify the two most basic variables (X and Y), but not to identify any other variable, nor to understand the relationships between them, their orders of magnitude, nor what or where their coefficients come from. Several people in this thread have argued that experience (or we can call it learning) results in a better understanding of the math, and that the reason the author hasn't accounted for any other variables or their relevance to each other and the equation is that he doesn't understand the math (or in this case the game) well enough to do so yet.

So mathematically, we have an imcomplete equation based off of faulty assumptions, incorrect coefficents, inverse relationships, and a lack of variables being conjectured by someone who doesn't understand the algebra well enough to express a coherent formula.

Hulksmash wrote:@Monster Rain

I disagree that w/players of comparable skill luck is the determining factor.

Okay, but that's not really what I said is it?

The "tactically flawless" bit was pretty important to my point and as I said I think that would be pretty rare. Though I suppose that if both players played a tactically horrendous game the dice would also affect the outcome of the game to a greater degree as well.

Dodiez wrote:T
The second:

Luck = X
Skill = Y
Game Result = Z

X + Y = Z
X !=Y
X + 5Y = Z
X + 5000Y = Z
X+ 1,000,000Y = Z
X > Y

That second mathematical concept is not acceptable, and has no logical basis, thus its rejection by so many people.

But that's not what is being said at all.

Game results are based on some combination of luck, and the comparative player's skills. Everyone here has acknowledged that luck exists, and is a non-zero component of the equation.

The conclusion is not X > Y, it's that when Y becomes small, because it is a delta between the two player's skill, luck will become the larger component. Y = P1-P2, and so if P1 == P2, X+0=Z

A better set of variables and set of assumptions to make an equation from would be this.
Luck: X
Skill: Y
Mistakes: A

Mistakes are a factor of player skill. The assumption is that player skill can be measured in mistakes made, as well as how significant those mistakes are. If you call this variable mistakes or skill, it is the same thing. But you shouldn't double count it.

There are at least two additional variables.

Suitability of Terrain for each player's army: B
Suitability of Armylist for opponent player: C

These are uncontrolled factors, and therefore fit into the 'luck' variable. In a tournament, you do not choose your opponent, nor do you choose the terrain, or the mission. These elements, while being fixed (by someone, probably the TO) are not controllable by the players, and therefore they count as luck.

I think it is you who are failing to understand the math.

Dodiez wrote:And why do you think that your data should be better than the data of other people who have posted in here?

My data points are superior because they're much more comprehensive. They show as many variables as it is possible to show. One can then go through and make their own conclusions about why a game ended the way it did. Data points before had the tendency to boil down to "I won a game, and it wasn't because of luck. Trust me." which doesn't actually say much to the theory, even if the conclusions that the player drew were correct, which I can't verify.

Redbeard wrote:All this talk about proving, or not proving things, based on data, is kind of pointless given that it's a theory that requires something that isn't going to exist.

But we're talking about something with a limit here. The limit doesn't need to actually exist for the rest of the theory to be useful. I mean, how many equations have "as X reaches infinity" when X can never actually reach infinity?

Of course, you're right, though, this is much more a philosophical exercise than a practical manual.

Kilkrazy wrote:During a game, each player takes a number of decisions. The results of these are determined in some cases by measurement (for example, ranges), and in other cases by randomization using dice. This second class of result can be termed lucky, by which we mean random.

Sure, there are many non-random events that happen in any given game of 40k. Generally, I've been lumping them into "skill".

I'd posit that one of the core things to 40k, however, is that it's what you destroy, and what of yours gets destroyed that takes primacy (I mean, it is a wargame after all. I could repeat what I said earlier about relative list strength potential, but I'll waive that for now). After all, you can never win a kill point game without something of your opponent's being destroyed, and likewise, all objectives games would end in 0-0 draws.

Now, it just so happens that 100% of unit destruction is determined by die rolls. The game has actually been created specifically so that this is true (you can't lash someone off the table, for example). Thus, skill is actually important only in so much as it fixes the odds in your favor. That's not to belittle skill, as fixing the odds in your favor and against your opponent, when successful, makes you much more likely to win a game (based on the relative skill between the opponents), but skill alone can not win you a game of 40k.

Eventually, you have to pick up dice, and you can not control the outcome of said rolling. You can lengthen or shorten the odds, but not eliminate them altogether.

Dodiez wrote:While the author has identified two of the variables in an equation, he has steadfastly refused to acknowledge the efforts of anyone trying to help him point out additional ones - because any inclusion of additional variables, or relationship between them negate his theory - which is an incomplete theorem in the first place.

I have?

Really, on the graph on page 1, the blue like represents ALL uncontrollable variables. You can come up with as many uncontrollable variables as you want and plot their horizontal lines on the graph wherever you see fit. That doesn't change the basic idea that the more you control for certain variables, the less those variables matter compared to uncontrollable ones.

I don't see what coefficients have to do with this basic principle of the scientific method.

Hulksmash wrote:@Monster Rain

I disagree that w/players of comparable skill luck is the determining factor. This theory leaves out style and personality. Application of skill, even when skill levels are equal, is a major factor in such games.

It is not hard to argue that correctly applying your talents is part of skill. A good player knows when they need to change style. In the M:tG world, there's a fairly influential article about 'Whose the Beatdown' (or something like that). It theorizes that in every game, one player will have a more aggressive deck than the other. If the two players simply trade blows, the player with the more aggressive deck will tend to win. Therefore, it is imperative that the player with the less aggressive deck adopt a more control-based game. Failing to correctly realize when you're the beatdown player and when you're the control player will result in losses. You can design a deck to be a beatdown deck, but if you run into a more aggressive deck, you have to adjust.

Same thing in 40k, and that is all part of player skill. You might design a beatstick CC army, but if you run into an army that you cannot simply assault to win, you have to adopt a different approach, and failing to do so will see you losing the game.

But to each his own. I've only had a 2 games in several years and several RTT's & GT's that I could point to the dice being the reason for the loss that game. Every other loss (including 2 in a local RTT w/my Nids lately) I can point to mistakes I made or openings I created for my opponent.

Luck isn't just dice, it includes any factor outside your control, including match-ups and terrain. And better players are typically less likely to attribute games to luck than poorer players, simply because they see more of their own mistakes. But I think good players also discount the impact of luck when it comes to their opponent's mistakes. Like Dash's example, he easily pointed to mistakes he made that cost him the game. But he has a hard time seeing that his opponent also made mistakes, and that it was a combination of both player's mistakes that led the game to come down to a 'd6' roll. Either player could have played better and won. He blames his loss on his mistakes - and that's fair, he wants to improve his game. But I see it as a case where both players were evenly matched, neither could exploit the other's mistakes to gain the upper hand, and it came down to the luck of one roll.

Consider the daemon army issue. You have a 1/3 chance each game of the wrong wave coming in. You can mitigate this by making each wave identical, but in some games, especially at the top level, that is not going to win the game. You need to get certain elements on the table first. When that daemonic assault die comes up '2', is it a mistake that you made the uneven split? Not if the even split would have guaranteed a game loss. Some would say daemons are not consistent, and simply playing a daemon army at all is a mistake. Others (I'm in this camp) simply accept that there's a portion of luck to playing a daemon army, and sometimes you're going to a lose a game to that opening die.

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Hulksmash wrote:I disagree that w/players of comparable skill luck is the determining factor. This theory leaves out style and personality. Application of skill, even when skill levels are equal, is a major factor in such games.

This is something that has bothered me, a little. I think the focus should be off of the skill of the player, and more on the skill with which the game was played.

If a great player makes a big mistake because they weren't paying attention or something, that makes a difference. Similarly, the great player could just not care so much, and start playing whimsically. This would show that it's not his actual skill, but the skill he applied to the game that mattered. So the assumption is that the application of skill is appropriate to the skill level of the player. That's not a stretch, really.

ElCheezus wrote:
I believe that A-ros has *repeatedly* said it's about the relative skill of the players, not necessarily high levels of play. Seriously, like ten times now. Welcome to the thread.

Then A-ros is changing his assumptions and fundamentally altering an equation that already is incomplete and nonfunctional. Here's a quote from the OP:

Ailaros wrote:
The better you get, though, the smaller the mistakes you make. When you and your opponent are both seasoned players, unless one of you happens to make a real blunder that game, the most likely outcome is that the two of you are going to be making small errors, and that they're unlikely to make much of a difference with determining the outcome of the game...

While the author is correctly assuming that players are less likely to make errors (A) as their skill (Y) increases, he is incorrect in establishing their relationship. The higher that Y gets, the more significant A gets; something that has been pointed out several times and disregarded for the purposes of the author's equation.

Ailaros wrote:
... compared to luck. The point I'm trying to make is that as player skill improves, the only way that mistakes can still be a determining factor (like in chess), is if everything else is even MORE relatively irrelevant. The better you get, the less likely your mistakes are going to matter compared to what the dice show over the course of a game. The dice may be unpredictable, but there is a certain range to which they can be influential. Skill may diminish in relative importance, but luck always has the same range of influence. The less skill matters, relatively, the more luck matters.

And again, the author is dismissing a variable that he does not understand or know enough about with an absurd claim that it can only matter if everything else is irrelevant. There is no proof of concept of this idea, and practical evidence (where supplied evidence is available) should suffice to adequately disprove this claim. I should reference the correlation between luck and skill here but will save it for the next point.

Ailaros wrote:
Now, I'm not claiming that there is an ultimate level of 40k-ness where you make perfect lists, and have perfect tactics. What I'm claiming is that the closer you get to perfection, the less your perfection actually influences the course of the game. After all, if you had two perfect players with perfect lists and perfect field-play, then the ONLY determining factor would be how the dice roll.

This is the worst part of the theory.

The author is postulating that skill (Y) governs everything on the field except for luck (X) - which would make skill (Y) a coefficient of a set of variables (making mistakes, handling terrain, building a list). It is a mathematical impossibility to claim that as a coefficient approaches 1 (0.0 to 1.0) that the variable for which it is the coefficient of decrease in value.

In short, .5(XYZ) < .9(XYZ) and the author is claiming the opposite - thus the claim that the author has his equation exactly backwards. Not only does he not grasp the variables in play, not only does he draw the wrong relationships between them, but his fundamental understanding of the math itself is incorrect.

Nurglitch wrote:Philosophy is very practical. If your philosophy is that winning is predicated on player skill, then you can work to improve your skills. If your philosophy is that winning is predicated on luck, then all you have left to do is sell your armies to people that understand the difference between math and science.

Why has everyone lost sight of the difference between "relative skill" vs "absolute skill" all of a sudden?

Listen, the idea is that as two players approach the same skill level, their games are more determined by things other than skill. Basically, luck. Further, when players approach a plateau for skill, they're more and more likely to be similarly skilled. This leads to more games determined by luck. This, to me, is the basics of this thread.

Two things I see: the plateau might just be temporary. If a player in a group manages to pass the plateau in skill, then the whole group will have to step up their game to compete. So this equilibrium where luck has more dominance than we'd like might be breakable.

Second, the difference in skill for our simple equation might not be linear (skill(A) - skill(B)). What if it's the difference of their squares? This would mean as you get higher and higher up in ability, the smaller differences matter more and more. For example, if players of skills "1" and "2" (however you define the numbers) play against each other, the difference would be 2. If players of skills "9" and "10" play, it would be 19. This could account for little things mattering much more in higher levels of play, and basically lowing the effect of luck on those games.

Of course, if games are dead even, it's still just up to the dice.

@Nurglitch

Well said. And pretty much sums up my view better than I could.

@Redbeard

I've never lost a game on the opening die w/Daemons but I agree that there is much less you can do to mitigate poor dice w/Daemons but I still think, even at a high level, that they are designed to overcome that flaw. Personal opinion though and only based on personal experience.

In regards to the "Whose the Beatdown" I think you missed my point. It wasn't about army builds. It's about application. I'm an extremely aggressive player. I can and do adopt my playstyle to the list/person I'm facing but even when controlling I'm going to go for the most offensive/aggressive action even when both options are likely to result in the same thing.

An example would be on turn 5 controlling an objective with an enemy who is already in assault range but you assaulting will pull you off your objective. Behind that unit by about 9" is another unit holding an objective. Do you pull farther back onto your objective to prevent possibly being pulled off/reduce possible incoming attacks? Or do you move forward enought that combat won't pull you off the objective but will put you in position that if you win the combat you could advance on the enemy hold his? Same result, different approaches. It's hard to visualize...maybe I'll make up a Vassal picture tonight when I get home from work....

I see where you are coming from on luck but unless I'm incorrect (and I might be) the OP was based on dice luck, not luck in general. We've been discussing 1-on-1. Not event size implications so I might be missing something but why is it being brought up?

Redbeard, mistakes are not a subset of skill. As previously explained, skill can determine the frequency of mistakes, but as skill increases, so does the magnitude of the consequences of the mistake. An extremely skilled gamer does not mean that they make no mistakes; it means that the mistakes they make are fewer, and that the mistakes made in the game have a greater magnitude on the outcome.

It is a sufficiently important variable that it needs to be separately addressed and accounted for - especially when its presence is the dictating measure as Y increases, not irrelevant as the author claims.

Additionally, it is important to note that any of the single points that I made are sufficient to disprove this theory. Addressing a small piece of one of them is irrelevant to the larger issue - the hypothesis has multiple failings that prove it false.

Ailaros: Your data points may be more comprehensive, but they are irrelevant to your theory. Where your control group is Y at an increased (to as close to 1 as possible) level, you have no data points noting either increased skill or the magnitude of the effects on the other variables with that elevated level. You've rejected the data points that do show the relationships between those variables. Read Dash's battle reports, they're as comprehensive as data points can get.

You're eating a barrel of apples and believing that your experience doing so lets you hypothesize about what makes oranges taste good. You've identified that they are round, and orange, and think that's it.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

ElCheezus wrote:

the idea is that as two players approach the same skill level, their games are more determined by things other than skill. Basically, luck. Further, when players approach a plateau for skill, they're more and more likely to be similarly skilled. This leads to more games determined by luck. This, to me, is the basics of this thread.

No. There are other variables in play that are more important, the author's hypothesis of the mathematical relationship between skill and the factors he believes to be a part of it is a mathematical impossibility and disproven, and the author's conjecture that luck is more important than any of them is a false assumption.

To me, the OP has created a situation where all variable except luck have been eliminated (player skill, army list, etc), and then stated that Luck must be the dominant factor in such a situation. This strikes me as a logical fallacy, as he's defining luck to be dominant in a specific situation, and expanding that.

@Redbeard: Part of being a good player is risk management. It's called "risk" management because there is always a measure of risk. A mistake would be misjudging the risk, not in that fact that you took a risk or your risk failed.

It's also easy to show where depending on "luck" is not making a mistake. For example, you're in the assault phase at the bottom of Turn 7. There are two objectives on the board, with you controlling one and your opponent controlling the other. You have a unit in position to assault, but you need a 6 for difficult terrain to assault and contest his objective. This was the only way you could get your unit into assault range.

The mistake in such a scenario would have been either not moving to where you could get into assault range or choosing not to assault. The game would be a draw otherwise, so the proper risk management course is to attempt the assault. This gives you an 1/3 chance of winning rather than a 0/3.

@Dashofpepper: Player skill is making fewer mistakes and exploiting your opponents mistakes. The magnitude of a mistake I make doesn't go up if I'm more skilled, it goes up if my opponent is more skilled.

Nurglitch wrote:Philosophy is very practical. If your philosophy is that winning is predicated on player skill, then you can work to improve your skills. If your philosophy is that winning is predicated on luck, then all you have left to do is sell your armies to people that understand the difference between math and science.

Well, good thing that I do understand science and that I don't hold a theory that winning a game of 40k is not only predicated on luck.

ElCheezus wrote:

Hulksmash wrote:I disagree that w/players of comparable skill luck is the determining factor. This theory leaves out style and personality. Application of skill, even when skill levels are equal, is a major factor in such games.

This is something that has bothered me, a little. I think the focus should be off of the skill of the player, and more on the skill with which the game was played.

If a great player makes a big mistake because they weren't paying attention or something, that makes a difference. Similarly, the great player could just not care so much, and start playing whimsically. This would show that it's not his actual skill, but the skill he applied to the game that mattered. So the assumption is that the application of skill is appropriate to the skill level of the player. That's not a stretch, really.

Right, that's something that's actually got lost in this all a bit. This theory only looks at things on a game-by-game basis. When I'm talking about player skill, I'm not talking about an attribute of the player in general, so much as the skill level at which he is playing any given game.

I mean, I definitely don't play at the same skill level every single game.

Dodiez wrote:And again, the author is dismissing a variable that he does not understand

Which variable?

Dodiez wrote: or know enough about with an absurd claim that it can only matter if everything else is irrelevant.

Do you not believe in independent variables? Do you not understand the idea of relative difference between variables? What is confusing to you here?

Dodiez wrote: Your data points may be more comprehensive, but they are irrelevant to your theory. Where your control group is Y at an increased (to as close to 1 as possible) level, you have no data points noting either increased skill or the magnitude of the effects on the other variables with that elevated level.

In order for my data to be relevant, you would need to be able to see the skill level of the two opponents as played out, and an account of the random element of the game. My battle reports do both.

Dodiez wrote:You've rejected the data points that do show the relationships between those variables. Read Dash's battle reports, they're as comprehensive as data points can get.

Actually, they're not. Dash's reports don't make a very good catalogue of the results of random events, and it's difficult to tell exactly where units moved and why.

Basically, we're left to accept Dash's interpretation of his data, rather than the data itself.

Dodiez wrote:No. There are other variables in play that are more important, the author's hypothesis of the mathematical relationship between skill and the factors he believes to be a part of it is a mathematical impossibility and disproven

This is the fourth time I'm going to ask you this question, what variables are more important?

You're making a lot of blanket statements about how false I am here, but I'm not seeing much in the way of specifics that aren't based on a strange philosophy of how variables work.

Heffling wrote:To me, the OP has created a situation where all variable except luck have been eliminated (player skill, army list, etc), and then stated that Luck must be the dominant factor in such a situation. This strikes me as a logical fallacy

If this is a fallacy, then the scientific method is a fallacy.

I'm using the very definition of control variables here as a key part of my theory. If variables can't be controlled for, then my theory certainly breaks down, but so does the rest of science.

Ailaros, that would be primarily the variable I've labeled A. I'm not sure typing more is worthwhile since I've explained its relevance, explained why you can't dismiss it, mathematically explained the impossibility of the inverse relationships you're proposing, and you're not even pausing to consider any of it, just charging on - which is why I said that you don't understand the math. The math being the game. The variables being the factors that influence the game. And the rest would be repeating myself, which I'm not prone to do.

My favorite part of all is the part where you claim (despite all this) that if your theory is false, all of science is false too.

Nicely done.

Dodiez wrote:which is why I said that you don't understand the math.

Sure, let's assume for a moment that I don't know a thing about math.

Use a method of communication other than math to explain your point. The reason I have mostly been dismissing what you're saying is because it doesn't appear relevant, and I'm not the only one here who is under that impression. Just using a mathematical language set to explain your criticism (but not, it should be noted, a competing theory) doesn't change this.

Dodiez wrote:My favorite part of all is the part where you claim (despite all this) that if your theory is false, all of science is false too.

*sigh*

I'm really starting to get tired of people saying that I believe something or that I assume something, followed up with a statement that I neither believe nor assume.

Misinterpreting what I said does not actually change what I said.

Hulksmash wrote:
@Redbeard

I've never lost a game on the opening die w/Daemons but I agree that there is much less you can do to mitigate poor dice w/Daemons but I still think, even at a high level, that they are designed to overcome that flaw. Personal opinion though and only based on personal experience.

I won't go so far as to say I lost a game just because of that opening roll, but things get infinitely harder. Playing a Fateweaver build (which some may say is a mistake in its own right, but I had just painted it), when Fateweaver doesn't show until turn 3, by which point the units he was intended to force-multiply have already been killed, is a fairly decent example of this.

In regards to the "Whose the Beatdown" I think you missed my point. It wasn't about army builds. It's about application. I'm an extremely aggressive player. I can and do adopt my playstyle to the list/person I'm facing but even when controlling I'm going to go for the most offensive/aggressive action even when both options are likely to result in the same thing.

No, I get get that. "Whose the Beatdown" isn't about builds either, it's about knowing when you have to change your approach, and sometimes it happens mid-game. It's a skill that is learned. I understand the situation you put forth, and I see what you're saying about being aggressive or trying to defend the one point. I tend to agree with your approach in this case - it's better to go punch the other guy than wait to be punched. In fact, the more aggressive action is more often than not the correct one - and the game design backs that up. If turtling was an optimal strategy, and defense tended to trump offense, the game would not be a lot of fun to play. There would be a lot of waiting for the other guy to be the aggressor, and then killing him for doing it. Offense has to be rewarded in games like these, in order that the games be fun to play.

I see where you are coming from on luck but unless I'm incorrect (and I might be) the OP was based on dice luck, not luck in general. We've been discussing 1-on-1. Not event size implications so I might be missing something but why is it being brought up?

I didn't read it that way. I read 'luck' as being anything beyond your control, and 'skill' as being what you can control in the game. You cannot control who you play. You cannot control whether they make mistakes (barring a discussion on gamesmanship). You cannot control what terrain is at your table. As such, I believe they factor into any discussion about the implications of luck in competitive play.

Dodiez wrote:Redbeard, mistakes are not a subset of skill. As previously explained, skill can determine the frequency of mistakes, but as skill increases, so does the magnitude of the consequences of the mistake. An extremely skilled gamer does not mean that they make no mistakes; it means that the mistakes they make are fewer, and that the mistakes made in the game have a greater magnitude on the outcome.

This is still a variable that is, at its essence, controlled by the player. As such, it can be encompassed as 'skill'. Whether the skill in question was avoiding a mistake, or recovering from the mistake, or ensuring that a mistake was not catastrophic is irrelevant, it's still 'skill'.

Ailaros wrote:Misinterpreting what I said does not actually change what I said.

And ignoring the points discrediting your theory doesn't make your theory still stand up.

In keeping with tradition, this is where you are going to say, "What points?"

Dodiez wrote:

Ailaros wrote:Misinterpreting what I said does not actually change what I said.

And ignoring the points discrediting your theory doesn't make your theory still stand up.

In keeping with tradition, this is where you are going to say, "What points?"

As an objective reader of the thread (objective as in having made my point and being content with reading the thread and not being actively involved in the debate), I have to sort of ask the same question.

I've read your posts and can do some math (without even having to remove my shoes!) but I'm not really sure your proofs are going to convince anyone. In regard to ignoring points, why don't you practice what you preach and explain your position in a manner other than equations?

Because that's what scrubbman and dash and others have done, and the "luck" crowd said that the math refuted their points. So I pointed out that the math is more complex, and that the equation was not only missing variables, missing very important coefficients, and using inverse relationships.

Its all been said by someone. Morale of the store is that people will believe in whatever they want and find a reason to do so.

I've been reading this thread and wanted to post several times, but wasn't happy with what I was saying.

I think I've got it now.

I think the main problem here is that the term skill is being used to encompass too much. There are many different facets to the game, and each facet requires "skill" to master.

Since there are different skills to master, each individual with have varying degrees of skill in each category. While two people may be overall approximately equal in skill, they will envariably have different levels of mastery in the subset of skills involved. This creates an imbalance in each game as missions, deployment and matchups will each make some skills more important than others.

Therefore the point where skill is approximately equal overall is a theoretical point only, since actualy humans have more varience.

So while yes, if you were at a theoretical point where all skills where equal, the person who gets more "lucky" in the game will be more likely the winner as luck will play a major role.

However, I would argue that this point is not really relevent to actual play. More relevent is the disparity in the skills that are being tested with each particular mission/deployment/matchup combination. These mission/deployment/matchup combinations will emphasize some skills while de-emphasizing others. So games will each test different combinations of skills.

I think top level play is more about this type of disparity in skill. The people who win longer tournaments are likely the ones who are solid across the board, while those who have particular strengths and weaknesses will be the ones who can lose a game where the mission/deployment/matchup combination tests the area where they are weakest.

As an example of this, say we have 5 categories of skill (A,B,C,D,E) rated 1-5 (1 is terrible, 3 is average,5 is best) . Player A scores (A=4,B=4,C=4,D=4,E=4). Player B scores (A=3,B=3,C=5,D=5,E=5). While Player B has a higher "average" skill level, he has some points where he is stronger and some where he is weaker than Player A. If we look at a 5 game tournament, designed in mission and deployment to test each of these, Player B is more likely to encounter a player who can beat him than Player A.

Okay that was a bit longer than I wanted. I think I've made my point : The theory relies on a definition of skill which is too simplistic to be of value. While the theory does hold up, the conclusions of the upper end of the defined skill level are not relevent to actual play, as there are no perfect players, nor perfectly equal opponents.

I'm really starting to get tired of people saying that I believe something or that I assume something, followed up with a statement that I neither believe nor assume.

Misinterpreting what I said does not actually change what I said.

Then why dont you post statements that can not be misinterpreted?

OK lets do it coherently, why I am not your opinion (at some parts I am with you, but not with the summary you are doing)

The better a player gets at 40k, the smaller their mistakes are. Their lists are good, so any list-building errors are going to be very small. Their movement is good, so any movement errors are going to be small. The smaller the errors are, the less likely they are to effect the outcome of a game relative to other factors. For example, forgetting to bring any anti AV14 is much more likely to impact the game than if you accidentally drove a piece of AV14 within 48" of a model armed with a missile launcher.

I am with you here. Completely.

Of course, if you had two players of roughly equal skill at everything, these small differences would actually be the only determiner of outcome (see chess, for example). The thing is, though, there's this other element in 40k: luck.

How the dice roll is always going to be random (unless you're cheating), but even though they are not predictable in any given roll, they are still constrained (it's not possible to roll a 13 on 2D6), and they are controlled (it's not possible to get better at luck). This means that the relative luck between the two players is going to produce a set advantage to one player or another in any particular game. Now, if everyone always rolled exactly on average, this would be a relatively insignificant factor (such as the significance of luck in chess), but as it is, that's not the case in 40k.

Here I must ask, why has rolling average or not anything to do with luck? Again, if I kill a trukk with a BS4-Meltagun and fail to kill 2 Grotz with 2 others I would consider this bad rolling, but decent good luck, while killing 2 grotz with 2 BS3-Meltas while missing on a trukk I would consider solid rolling and bad luck.
Therefore even if you always roll average (what you do most of the time. The statistic deviation from the average is part of the true average as well) there can be VERY different results out of it.
Although I must stress the truth of this statement (referring to it later):
"but even though they [the dice] are not predictable in any given roll, they are still constrained (it's not possible to roll a 13 on 2D6), and they are controlled (it's not possible to get better at luck)."

There is only one final piece to this before I wrap it all up, and that is that the better you get at 40k, the less better you get at 40k, and the less it actually matters. When you start out, you make serious errors, and fixing those errors can make a huge impact in the game. The better you get, though, the smaller the mistakes you make. When you and your opponent are both seasoned players, unless one of you happens to make a real blunder that game, the most likely outcome is that the two of you are going to be making small errors, and that they're unlikely to make much of a difference with determining the outcome of the game...

What leads you to this first sentence-conclusion? Again, on a higher level small mistakes become big mistakes. Because the ability to exploit mistakes increases drastically the higher your skill is. So a small mistake will determine the outcome of a game between good players as much as a big mistake will determine the outcome between worse players.

... compared to luck. The point I'm trying to make is that as player skill improves, the only way that mistakes can still be a determining factor (like in chess), is if everything else is even MORE relatively irrelevant. The better you get, the less likely your mistakes are going to matter compared to what the dice show over the course of a game. The dice may be unpredictable, but there is a certain range to which they can be influential. Skill may diminish in relative importance, but luck always has the same range of influence. The less skill matters, relatively, the more luck matters.

This is the point I can not support at all. You say that luck is not totally unpredictable, which I agree to. Then why do you say that it is a constant immovable factor? A die has 6 sides, not a 7th, so everything that goes beyond the 1st to 6th side is beyond the influence of dice. And it is up to the players, how much influence those 6 sides has on their gameplay. So this leads me to a theory that a perfect player would be able to not lose his games without being dependent on a single dice roll.

Now, I'm not claiming that there is an ultimate level of 40k-ness where you make perfect lists, and have perfect tactics. What I'm claiming is that the closer you get to perfection, the less your perfection actually influences the course of the game. After all, if you had two perfect players with perfect lists and perfect field-play, then the ONLY determining factor would be how the dice roll.

I have the contrary opinion, see above paragraph.

Thus, my theory that 40k is actually a tactically limited game, and once you achieve a certain level of skill, your skill becomes relatively insignificant compared to luck. It's not that skill literally doesn't matter, it's that it practically doesn't matter. Yes, you can play any given game at a lower skill level (you didn't get enough sleep the night before, or just made silly mistakes), and relative skill level between players still matters.

This is actually correct concerning the individual game, because luck is >0 (given that perfection does not exist) and skill difference given that there is none, is 0.

My point is that the higher player skill level becomes, the less the difference between the players matters, and the more that the results are determined by luck.

So my conclusion would be, that games between 2 identical players are separated by dice, but not that luck (=! dice) is more important the higher your skill is.

Well for starters I don't think you should be disheartened. Its still the game we all love albeit, with some new rules to previous editions.

Also I think you're looking too much into the aspect of all comers lists with very standard builds. Shame on you. You're a guard player, you should know you can build quite a few highley competitive lists from guard to keep opponents on their toes.

My main point I want to make is that specialised lists will have great advantages over all comers lists. An infantry only army will get an advantage where an all comers list takes anti-tank weapons which are now wasted (and they don't come cheap). A gunline guard army will out shoot nearly any army regardless of lists. A mech army with lots of tanks will beat an all-comers list since they didn't bring enough anti-tank firepower. This can also be turned on you though. You'll be in trouble with infantry only if you're opponant has plenty of anti-infantry firepower for example.

As far as i'm concerned a player has a general skill in the game but also a skill at playing a certain type of list and again at facing a certain type of list. It's no good sending me to a tourny with a mech list because I blow at it. While If you give me a well built gun-line with some artillery I can clear out objectives from a distance and win without moving. This is coming from a guy who finds the artillery options useless with the exception of the manticore.

Another point i'd like to make is that just because your list is specialised doesn't mean it can't be an all-comers list. Guard infantry builds can field the guns and units to take out anything they need to. Using storm troopers you get delivery methods for melta's for example. You can still build an all comers list from a specific style.

Because of the varity of lists I feel that skill is still the main factor in the game. If you take an all-comers list and they take an infantry heavy army (to continue the infantry example) you have to make the best use of your anti-infantry guns as possible and redirect your anti-tank guns to targets which pose larger threats or have high point values.

The reason skill seems to be diminished and luck playing a larger factor is that most players play with the current generic styles. A very important point to raise is that this style changes from place to place. I played an american space marine player who used three land raiders. This caught me on the back foot since the people at my FLGS generally avoid putting too many points into super strong units. I drew but it was a mistake on my part that i'd redirected some guns from one Land raider heading towards an objective I held to one which was heading towards my lines. If I hadn't it wouldn't have been contested and I would have taken the win. I can only see this mistake after the game. In that situation I could easily make that choice again.

Building a list tailored to your play style is a skill in its own. I can't follow the current mech guard trend because It doesn't work for me. Because of that, I catch people who expect to face a mech army off guard. Luck is a contributing factor for how your list draws up against your opponants and will always be that way. People try to minimise that by making an all comers list to begin with but it only takes one stubborn player like myself who says 'no, i'll play how I want' to start mixing the lists up. I didn't know anyone to take Storm Troopers when I first started playing at my FLGS but theres a few players trying them and a few who found they don't work for them and stopped. Now a few of the players tailored their lists to take on a unit of storm troopers hiding in woodland. What happens when I don't take them?

The whole game is based on luck of the draw, luck of the dice, a players skill at controlling their army deployment and movement, target prioritizing, objective prioritizing, skill and experiance at facing certain armies, experiance at facing certain lists, good old bluff's (both with your list and tactics on the table top) ect. Theres no way any one person can master everything. Consider the bluff aspect. How do you know a certain unit is a bait unit? Look at poker players. All expert players can be fooled by a good bluff. Sometime the best can be fooled by the less experianced. The skill AND experiance of a player in 40k makes the difference in the battle. That bait unit might be a trap, it might not. If you took the bait before and is was a trap, you're likely to think the same again. What if just by chance this opponant didn't realise and hadn't intended it to look like a bait unit? That could alter your game plan in a big way even though this opponant is less experianced.

Theres too many possibilities to simply class a person as a skilled player or not. I personally feel that every player is different. Each player has they're own strength and weakness' and this is before the lists come into play. A new space marine player could beat me by sheer fluke without knowing how to control their army. Skill is what help me prevent this from happening.

Okay, so, after taking in many thoughts and ideas and sayings of many things by many people, I've now updated this theory. It's a lot cleaner now.

You can view a more printable copy of this by clicking here.

Luck and Skill in 40k v.2

LUCK

For the purpose of this theory, luck is a catchword for all of the uncontrollable variables in a game of 40k. In a tournament, this includes the order in which you play people, the list they bring, the terrain setup, etc. Of course, luck also refers to the results of individual die rolls, whether it be for mission or first turn, or for whether a meltagun penetrated armor on a vehicle.

In any reasonable game of 40k, your ability to win is going to be based on destroying (or in some other way neutralizing) your opponent's units. After all, you can not win a kill point game without killing units, and you can not win an objectives game without removing your opponent's units from the objectives. In any given event in a game, luck (especially die rolls) is going to be the determining factor of if you destroy an opponent's unit or not. The game was purposely designed in such a way that you can not ever see an opponent's unit destroyed without dice determining if they were destroyed or not. Unlike chess, which allows you to destroy your opponent's units with movement alone, 40k is solely dependent, then, on how you roll the dice.

You can do things to lengthen the odds of failure, or shorten the odds of success, but you can't remove dice as the primary mechanic of the game, and thus can not remove luck from its core.

SKILL

Just as luck is the overarching idea of uncontrollable variables, so is skill the the idea that represents all controllable variables. Skill includes such things as building a powerful list, and using them to their maximum effectiveness on the field.

Given that luck is the primary mover in the game, skill's role is entirely devoted to altering luck. Its role is predominantly to shorten your own odds of success, while lengthening the odds that your opponent succeeds. For example, if you move a meltagun that was out of range of any target in such a way where they are now in range of the target, the odds that you successfully destroy that particular target with a meltagun is shortened from a 0% chance of success to something much better, depending on what exactly you shot at. Likewise, if you move one of your units out of LOS of all your opponent's weapons (and they didn't bring any barrage), the odds that your opponent will be able to destroy that unit just lengthened from whatever it was before down to 0% (barring other circumstances like deepstriking units which can suddenly acquire LOS out of nowhere).

Remember, that this also counts list-building skill. If you have a Land raider, and your opponent does not bring anything with S8 or better, then the odds that the vehicle remains on the table the entire game are incredibly short. Likewise, the more you have on the table, the more power you have over changing the odds. You can not exploit the bad luck of your opponent if you have no units on the board, nor can you mitigate his good luck.

THE EFFECT OF LUCK

Better players may be able to get more odds-bending power out of their units, and thus can do more with less, but while the percentage of the power based on the maximum power may go up, it can never exceed the actual power, which is based on the aggregate of units on the field. After all, if someone has half their army blown off the table turn 1, they have half the potential power of their opponent. They can still win the game if, for example, they are able to get 100% out of their 50% while their opponent is only able to get 10% out of their 100%, but the maximum possible has still been determined by the luck of how hit, wounding, cover, armor penetration, leadership, etc. rolls go.

More obviously, there are several individual die rolls, over which no player has control, that can be very key rolls, and not just if one critical shot managed to destroy its target or not. This includes things such as which player goes first, and when the game ends. Most people can recall a game in which one person would have won a game, except the roll to continue ended the game one turn too early, or one turn too late.

THE EFFECT OF SKILL

Skill allows you to change the odds of luck in an attempt to control the effect of luck. If a vehicle is destroyed or not is determined by luck (after all, if you can't roll above a 2 on a vehicle damage chart, you will never destroy a vehicle), but you can make the odds of a vehicle destruction result go up with skill (such as moving several meltaguns into melta range of the vehicle, compared to only shooting a single lascannon at it). Thus skill is able to affect the results of any particular event by making a certain outcome more likely.

A better player, then, would be able to more exactingly move the odds in whatever direction he so desires. In the end, though, it's not that more skill makes the "best" result, happen, rather more skill makes the more "desired" result more likely.

This is because, 40k being based on dice, the purpose of skill is risk management. Being a risky player is not inherently better or worse than being a conservative player. If it is direly important that you destroy two of your opponent's vehicles over the course of two turns, it makes no difference if you shoot 6 lascannons at one on one turn and then 6 lascannons at the other on the second, or if you shoot 3 lascannons at both targets for both turns. In the case of the more conservative decision (the first one), you are more likely to destroy one vehicle on the first turn, while with the more risky, you are less likely to destroy either vehicle in a single turn, but you are (much) more likely to destroy both on the same turn.

Furthermore, riskier play comes with its own costs. The riskier you are, the more that the results of your actions are based on the uncontrollable factors of luck. If you roll poorly, you are likely to have less to show for your choices than the more conservative player. On the other hand conservative play also has its own cost. Being able to win REQUIRES you to roll dice, so rolling fewer dice comes at a premium - the fewer dice you roll, the more that the particular outcome of those dice matters, as you're making less use of the law of large numbers. Also, the more you focus your odds on fewer enemy units, the more likely that that one unit is to die, but the less likely that you do more damage over all (loss due to overkill).

The style of play one has plays odds in different ways, but ultimately, neither has any impact on the fact that it's still luck at the heart of it all.

If skill has no impact on luck itself, and luck has an impact on the game, then what impact does skill have on the game? In the end, while skill will not make results more favorable over the course of a game, skill will increase the chances that you have more relatively positive results. Luck is still the determiner, but a player can make more rolls where the end result is more likely favorable results. In short, player skill makes luck kinder. Said another way, skill allows a player to play the odds better.

RELATIVE SKILL

As a player's skill improves, they are able to make the battlefield more and more accurately reflect the odds they want to play. It does too, of course, also effect the odds that they want to play. Poorer players will tend to make decisions that, if successful, will have less strategic gain, and if they fail, will have more grave strategic consequences (much less their ability to fix odds one way or another in future turns).

This means that if you were able to completely control for the uncontrollable variables, the only determiner of the game would be the relative skill of the two players. The better player would gain more from success, and lose less from failure. Of course, if you had two players who played at exactly equal skill level for any given game, AND all other variables were controlled for, the end result would always be a draw. The likelihood of victory, then would be determined by the relative skill inequality of the two players. The more one player played better relative to the other, the more likely it would be that they won the game.

But this relative skill between the two players is not, in fact, the only determiner of outcome, because there is this whole set of uncontrolled variables which also have an impact on the game. As mentioned, if the players are of very different skill level, the relative skill of the two players makes a big difference on the outcome. As such, when you have a gross disparity of player skills, player skill has a bigger impact on who wins a game relative to the uncontrolled variables.

Remember, it's the relative impact of relative skill that's important here. Take, for example, two players who were perfectly equal in skill. They had the same list, playing on a symmetrical board, playing the same odds just as successfully. In this case, the only determiner of who wins the game would be luck. If one player only rolled 6's and the other player only rolled 1's, there is a 100% chance that the lucky player would win. Likewise, if both players were equal in skill, the result of who won could be determined by just a single die roll.

If you control for one factor, it becomes less important to the outcome as the other factors. Likewise, as you control for all controllable factors, then controllable factors become less important to the outcome of the game as uncontrollable factors.

As player skill approaches perfectly equal in any given game, the impact of skill on who won or lost is less. To put it another way, the closer you are in skill level to your opponent, the more that the outcome of the game is determined by luck*.

SKILL ADVANCEMENT

If luck is the prime determiner of games, then, the only way to improve your chances of winning at all are to become better than your opponent. The wider you can force the skill gap, the more skill will be a determiner of the outcome compared to luck.

The problem with skill advancement, however, is that it has diminishing return. The more that you can lengthen or shorten the odds of a particular event occurring, the more difficult it is to continue to lengthen or shorten those odds. If you really want a vehicle dead, the shortening of the odds by bringing in 1 meltagun where there was once zero is enormous. This is comparatively easy to do. However, if you're already a skilled player, and already have 20 meltaguns in melta range, being that little bit extra skilled so that you have 21 present isn't actually increasing the odds of a dead vehicle by very much.

Furthermore, just shortening the odds is not actually necessarily the sign of a better player. In the above example, the better player would likely apply 10 meltaguns to two vehicles rather than 20 onto just one. In this case, the person who shoots all 20 at a single vehicle is suffering from overkill. While the short player is insignificantly more likely to kill the vehicle they shot at, for one dead vehicle, the "risky" player is still very likely to have 2 dead vehicles as the end result of their shooting**.

As such, skill advancement doesn't really allow you to shorten or lengthen odds further (although it does this too), so much as it allows you to shorten them to exactly how short you want them, and lengthen them to the extent that you want them lengthened more exactly. As you get better in skill, the more likely that you are actually playing the the odds that you want to play.

In the end, though, you're not, over all, getting "better" odds, you are just getting more "accurate" playing of odds. This gets harder to get better at the better you get. Furthermore, it doesn't have any bearing on the actual effect of the die rolls (only shortness and length do, and even then, it's not an actual predictor).

What, then does the impact of playing exactly the odds you intended to have on the actual results of any given event or the game as a whole? None whatsoever. This means that luck is an independent variable of skill (which we already knew).


THE EFFECT OF SKILL ADVANCEMENT AND LUCK

If skill allows you to play odds better, and if the better you get, the less getting better allows you to play the odds better, this means that the better you get, the closer you get in skill level to your opponent***.

As the closer you get in skill level to your opponent, the less skill matters, and as the higher your skill level gets, the less difference there becomes in skill level, we can conclude that the end result of increasing your skill level is to lessen the impact of skill on your games, and to increase the role that luck plays in determining the outcome of your games***.


THE MORAL

This theory, then, means that the more one advances in skill at playing 40k, the less they will see their games determined by their increase in skill, and the more that they will see their games determined by luck. For a person who wishes to advance in skill, this is naturally frustrating. At whatever level of skill one notices that luck is becoming a bigger factor, at some point, they are likely to hit a level where the game is just too much about luck for personal taste.

There are a few paths open to such a gamer:

- Play more conservatively. With determined skill, you can reduce the impact of luck on your own decisions. As mentioned, though, this comes at a cost. Furthermore, you can not control how risky your opponent chooses to be. In the end, the player will see them win more games when their opponent's dice were bad, but continue to lose games due to luck when their opponents are not. More conservative play may slightly increase the threshold of winning, but in the end, the meek often lose to the bold.

- Quit. If a person can not stand losing a game because of luck, then they shouldn't play a game that's based on dice.

- Engage in selective reasoning. Some players may choose to discard the effect of luck altogether from their games. They may come up with very elaborate and complex theories with regards to why they lost a game - after all, if they can't win or lose because of luck, then there must be some other reason. Of course, the accuracy of any such theory is immediately suspect, as removing luck from a game whose main mechanic is based on dice is unlikely to be particularly accurate, regardless of how much said hallucinations comfort the thinker. Furthermore, such theories tend to be as ugly and based on fallacy as they are ultimately useless. If that doesn't bother you, though, believe in whatever you want.

- Change one's aesthetic. 40k can't be a game based solely on skill and tactics and still leave the player sane - 40k just isn't actually that deep of a game. One way to handle this is to change what one is looking for out of 40k and the way that they engage the game other than purely skill. It's not to say that if a player "gives up" on skill that they won't still get better at the game slowly over time (indeed, it would be hard not to). The point, however, is to tread a different path.

This may take on the form of purposely handicapping one's self, or mixing things up in some other way (I won with the best units in my codex, now can I win with the worst?). It may take on the form of placing a greater element on the hobbying aspect, or it may take on the form of placing a greater emphasis on the social aspect. It could also even be a change within the game itself, whether it's learning to relish the chance factor, rather than decry it when it goes against you, or whether you play to take epic photographs and write narrative battle reports. While 40k may not be the most tactically complex game, there is an awful lot to 40k other than just playing odds.


FOOTNOTES

* Footnote removed due to causing confusion.


** A player can manipulate the odds, but there is always cost associated with any decision. No player can make all odds short. For example, in order to shorten the odds of destroying one vehicle, he has to lengthen the odds of destroying a different vehicle at the same time. A player has a set amount of power in their list at once. How they choose to pool and spend that power does not change this. They may be able to reduce the impact of luck in any one event, but in 40k, this reduction comes at a strategic cost (depending on the particulars at the moment, but also due to general principles like overkill). After all, no one would advocate always only shooting 100% of your army at a single opponent's unit every turn. Plus, just shooting 100% of your army at a single unit does not guarantee its destruction.

As such, the better player is not the one who reduces the impact of luck the most, but is the one that plays the odds the best.


*** Unless you just continue on playing against much worse opponents, of course. Assuming that you continue to play against opponents of roughly the same skill level, the skill level difference between the two of you will decrease as you all get collectively better. The skill difference between basically new players is huge between someone who has literally never played before, and someone who has played a couple of games. The skill difference between a seasoned veteran and a seasoned veteran who has a couple more games worth of experience is likely to be very minimal

(I'd like to thank ArtfcllyFlvrd, Kilkrazy, Redbeard, jmurph, ElCheezus, nyenyec, and Relic_OMO for their contributions to this piece. Some of their comments can be seen here)

war is just as much luck as tactics. Worthless runts of units become inspired to do amazing feets of brilliance while the arrogance of supposedly vastly superior veterens leads them to failure.

War is like the role of the dice, all tactics do is make the chances of getting lucky increase.

This is why I think luck has little to do with winning and losing.

Scenario 1:

You and your opponent get 3 squads of basic troops, no HQ, no heavy support, no elites, not fast attack. Just basic troops. You set them up 12 inches a part from each other, with no terrain no cover. Now, play a game. The game set up and played in this scenario (which is an actual scenario from Necromunda) will highly depend on luck. There is no cover, you are already 12 inches apart from each other, whoever rolls first is going to unleash havoc on their opponent and I have pretty much eliminated army list builds from being a factor because I say you just get 3 basic units.

Now, 40K is not played like Scenario 1, it will be played like Scenario 2 (which I will explain later). There are so many factors in 40K, a typical game goes like this:

Scenario 2

You and your opponent build a detailed army list, with a concept of overall how they will play out in the game. So, before you even lay down terrain, pick sides and deploy you already have a plan on executing certain tactics with models that have specific attributes in game. Then you lay down terrain. You roll for sides and you think that side B will give your certain specific tactics for this game and your army list a better chance of crushing your enemy so you chose side B. Then you decide to keep something in reserves, deploy your forces and so forth. Every decision you make has a reaction, has meaning, and either furthers your chances of winning, or puts you in a position to lose. Sometimes you can force desired reactions out of your opponent. Then you have mission parameters. Objective based, total annihilation, pitched battle, dawn of war, or perhaps custom missions you have made up. These also factor into how a game is played. You are executing every action with a purpose, the dice roll only adds in a small randomness. You have a 16% (roughly) chance to roll each number on a D6 specifically. In a game of odds, that is actually not too bad. Consider gambling, playing the lottery, and other games of chance that have much larger odds.

So, scenario 2 is more likely how you are going to play 40K. Sure, luck will come into play, but in the grand scale of things luck plays a smaller role than anything else in general. There will be times where bad luck changes how a game may pan out or not. However, that is more of the exception to the rule, than the rule itself. I do play with a guy who has super bad dice rolls, but I saw him stomp his opponent out last game. I mean after turn 3 the Tau were pretty much destroyed and all the Tau could do was try to contest objectives to force the game into a draw. It was an Eldar Vs Tau game and the Eldar player had super bad dice rolls but still won. Part because of army list, part because of strategy, and part because of how each opponent played off each other. Now the dice rolls did affect the reserves, that luck did play into that, and the Eldar player rolled some serious bad shooting, but still ended up winning.

I just cannot buy into the concept that luck has that big of an impact in a game of 40K. If you find yourself losing tons of games, you should first ask yourself why that is the case rather than chalking it up to your opponent is more lucky than you. You need to learn from past games what to do, and apply that in future games.

Yes, there are certainly a large number of things in a given game of 40k outside of the die rolls. The question is, what is the purpose to all of these decisions? Yes, you can generically say "it helps you win", but why does it help you win?

The answer is because the steps you take are designed to kill your opponent's stuff, whether it's so that you can gain a kill point, or whether it's to stop your opponent from contesting an objective, or whether it's to blow him off of one so that you can sit on it yourself.

As whether you kill something is always determined by dice, every one of that huge pile of different things you're talking about, whether it's decisions in the list-building phase or decisions in deployment or movement or target priority (among many others), exists for the purpose of shortening the odds that you destroy your opponent's stuff (or in some other way neutralize it). Thus, skill exists to change your odds.

If you're losing a majority of your games, it's probably because you're playing the odds wrong (for example, not bringing any S8 or better weapons are playing the anti-AV14 odds very wrong). More skill can help you with this, but the actual determiner is still luck.

Otherwise, no one would ever bet on long shots.

Solid post, Ailaros! It's detailed and meticulous and easily understood.

I am gonna go a bit off topic here and use my examples in WHFB. They still apply in 40K though.

We play you deploy 1 unit at a time, until all are deployed. I love putting my Lizardmen temple guard + slaan smack down in the middle of my deployment zone and then watch my opponent either put his power units in front of it, or avoid it. I know every single time I am going to filed a Slaan and so do my opponents (you would be dumb not to) so it is not like I am going to surprise them when I deploy my Slaan. So, instead I gladly deploy him + temple guard first to force my opponents hand at deploying his power units. Then I can counter deploy my flanks accordingly, or drop a 50 model unit of Saurus warriors with spears so they get the horde bonus.

Now lets bring up my skinks. They are pretty much a throw away unit. Cheap, not really that tough, and not really all that powerful. However, they do have jungle poisoned weapons. Which means if I roll a 6 to wound you are wounded regardless of your toughness. So, my STR 3 poisoned attack can wound anything on a 6....Here is the strategy of the dice roll. Blow guns get two shots, skirmishers can march and shoot. That means they can move 12 inches, and each model can make two attacks with blow guns which are poisoned. So I can field like 20 skink skirmishers, deploy them like scouts, and march them and shoot and get two shots and anytime I roll a 6 automatic wound via jungle poison. If I am rolling 20 dice and half hit, so 10 wounds out of those 10 I am going to roll some 6s. So, yes I am playing odds, but 16% is pretty good odds, that is 1in6 (D6-duh) and it will happen.

I am still going to say, that in war gaming (outside of things like risk) dice rolls are crucial at points, but overall make up very little of who determine who wins or loses. With the exception of every now and then yes a dice roll may determine a game if both opponents are equal in skill, play into each other's hand, and get about the same dice rolls. I just don't see that being a common outcome.

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Nurglitch wrote:So, what you're saying is that when I decide to move a unit into difficult terrain and the unit only moves 2", the real determiner is luck?

What else would it be?

I mean, yes, you took a calculated risk going into cover. You knew there was the chance that you would only move 2", but if you decided to do that, it was for a reason (like to get cover saves). This is a great example of playing the odds.

If what's important to you at the time is to move as far as possible, then the odds of getting bogged down by cover may dissuade you from entering it. If what's important is getting cover saves, then you will probably play the odds a different way for a different result. If what you want is to go forward in a straight line, then the odds of getting bogged down will mean a third thing altogether.

How far you move in difficult terrain is determined by luck, because you have to roll dice to see how far you move. You have no real control over how they come up, but you DO have control over where you want to move, and if you want to take those risks.

It's all about risk management.

Nurglitch wrote:I just thought I made bad decisions. I feel better about myself now.

Good.

Anyone who thinks they are making bad decisions, when really they are just rolling poorly, should take a step back and really look at how much the dice are determining things.

Nurglitch wrote:Ailaros:

So, what you're saying is that when I decide to move a unit into difficult terrain and the unit only moves 2", the real determiner is luck?

Thank god for that. I just thought I made bad decisions. I feel better about myself now.

No, I don't think that's what he's saying.

While his original OP was contentious...if you took it at face value (like I did)...

His new theory is quite simple. In fact, this whole thread could have simply said, "In a game of 40k, if you excel at controlling all possible factors that can be controlled, the elements that you don't control will have the biggest effect on determining the outcome of the game."

That's like declaring that bananas have a yellow peel. While now acceptable, I see nothing insightful or worthy of discussion there - because the "uncontrolled" factors are no longer limited to dice.

So basically, when I approach a gaming table, if I have built an exceptionally balanced list, if I'm exceptional knowing how to apply it, and I play well and make few mistakes (and my opponent does the same)....then the biggest determinant of the game's outcome is going to be my opponent's army, how fit my army is against it, what the table and terrain look like, and how we both roll dice.

I agree. You really can't *disagree.* Feels like this is now a thread to state the obvious.

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Nurglitch wrote:So how is luck the real determiner if it's all about risk management? Maybe in US, risk manages you...

Because risk management will not blow up an opponent's vehicle, nor get your reserves in on time.

The determiner of things in 40k is dice. The realm of skill is manipulating the odds (risk management). Risk management is not a determiner of the game, it is the core of skill.

As risk management basically = skill, risk management follows under the impact of skill, as outlined in the theory.

Dashofpepper wrote:That's like declaring that bananas have a yellow peel. While now acceptable, I see nothing insightful or worthy of discussion there - because the "uncontrolled" factors are no longer limited to dice.

So basically, when I approach a gaming table, if I have built an exceptionally balanced list, if I'm exceptional knowing how to apply it, and I play well and make few mistakes (and my opponent does the same)....then the biggest determinant of the game's outcome is going to be my opponent's army, how fit my army is against it, what the table and terrain look like, and how we both roll dice.

I agree. You really can't *disagree.* Feels like this is now a thread to state the obvious.

I agree, it is all rather obvious now that I've gotten rid of such muddling words as "mistake" and more clearly defined "skill".

The more useful part of the theory, I think, is that once you accept that the better you get, the less control you have over the outcome, then what?

Ailaros wrote:
This theory, then, means that the more one advances in skill at playing 40k, the less they will see their games determined by their increase in skill, and the more that they will see their games determined by luck. In the end, 40k isn't actually that deep of a game, and one's pursuit of skill can only go so far. For a person who wishes to advance in skill, this is naturally frustrating.

Why? This isn't based on supporting facts.

Ailaros wrote:

Nurglitch wrote:So how is luck the real determiner if it's all about risk management? Maybe in US, risk manages you...

Because risk management will not blow up an opponent's vehicle, nor get your reserves in on time.

The determiner of things in 40k is dice. The realm of skill is manipulating the odds (risk management). Risk management is not a determiner of the game, it is the core of skill.

As risk management basically = skill, risk management follows under the impact of skill, as outlined in the theory.

I think we are all starting to agree, and may be talking in circles now. I haven't overly disagreed with anyone on this thread all too much, but I still think luck is a small part of the game and that you win or lose based on your decisions, not dice rolls. Risk management can really be seen as Army List management in my opinion. Do you twin link, or perhaps field an autarch in your Eldar army so you can get a +1 to your reserves roll? Do I spend points giving my squads melta bombs, grenades, or do I drop wargear in favor of fielding more models? Do I chose war gear or abilities that allow for reroll on failed rolls? Then obviously you know jump troops move 12" and can assault 6" and have short range weapons, and can be given wargear like melta bombs. So, you can use jump troops to assault vehicles rather quickly and take them out, or whatever your tactic is. I am trying to make a point that you must totally use all the attributes to the maximum of your troops and other units. Each of them have a pretty specific framework of attributes to work with.

Now in game, going to cover is hardly a bad thing. In fact, if you don't take advantage of cover saves I would say you are missing out. So, if you roll a 2 on your difficult terrain test and do not make it into the woods, that wasn't a bad move. You should still get with in cover soon, and maybe a bit unlucky because you are now behind in turns, and games only last so long. So, time is also a factor, and a calculated risk.

Ailaros wrote:
The more useful part of the theory, I think, is that once you accept that the better you get, the less control you have over the outcome, then what?

Uh....I don't think that's quite true.

There's a difference between these two statements:

Statement A: The better you get, the less control you have over the outcome of the game...
Statement B: The better you get, the more relevance "luck" and "random" factors play in your game.

Statement B is true, but is not the same as A. For Statement A to be true, both players would have to be perfectly equal in dealing with controllable factors, play their game with perfectly equal skill, and either make no mistakes on either side, or make equal mistakes of magnitude.

Since that situation can never happen (Ever heard the phrase, "There's always someone better than you?") basing your real life expectations or future plans on a hypothetical improbability is illogical.

"There may come a time in the future when technological breakthroughs are so advanced that no one on earth needs to work, and all of life is completely devoted to self-indulgence. What's the point of going on?" While hypothetically possible, it is improbable, and basing actions or conclusions on that situation are also illogical.

The statistical probability of your opponent at the table NOT being either better or worse than you in the set of "skills" defined here is so tiny that it is not worth consideration. The exception would be if we were to program two supercomputers and unleash them on each other in Vassal.

So....

The better you get, the MORE control you have over the outcome of the game, while factors not under your control become more noticeable in influencing the outcome.




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Ailaros wrote:
one's pursuit of skill can only go so far. For a person who wishes to advance in skill, this is naturally frustrating.

Could you elaborate on this?

My existence in 40k is to continually elevating my skill, in part by casting the net as far and wide as possible (both around the country and around the world) looking for players who might be better than me and teach me something - intentionally or not.

Exactly how far can the pursuit of skill go? There is someone who is the best 40k player in the world. There is not yet an adequate system for determining who that person is. I believe that I'm near the top of the heap - but I am still in learning mode, improving my skill mode, becoming more proficient with the factors under my control....by merit of being human, no one is my equal. They are superior or inferior to some degree in tactical ability. The "degrees" may be of small enough measure to establish "peer groups."

I'm honestly curious what you believe the hard cap on the pursuit of skill to be. Perfection? Something less?

DarknessEternal wrote:

For a person who wishes to advance in skill, this is naturally frustrating.

Why? This isn't based on supporting facts.

Very well, perhaps its not frustrating to everyone who wishes to advance in skill.

Crom wrote:I still think luck is a small part of the game and that you win or lose based on your decisions, not dice rolls.

But the success or failure of your decisions is based exclusively on luck. Just making a good decision doesn't mean that your decision will lead to success, or a poor decision to failure. It's the dice that determine.

Dashofpepper wrote:Statement A: The better you get, the less control you have over the outcome of the game.

For Statement A to be true, both players would have to be perfectly equal in dealing with controllable factors, play their game with perfectly equal skill, and either make no mistakes on either side, or make equal mistakes of magnitude.

I'm not sure why this misunderstanding is persisting.

In order for the statement "When you are perfectly equal in skill, you have NO control over the outcome of the game" requires players to be perfectly equal in skill. What I'm saying is that AS you get better, your control level decreases". Really, the pertinent part of this theory is the relationship between skill and luck when the players are NOT of equal skill.

Dashofpepper wrote:The better you get, the MORE control you have over the outcome of the game, while factors not under your control become more noticeable in influencing the outcome.

What?

You can't have your control over the game increase in the percentage that your control is determinant AND factors beyond your control ALSO increase in percentage of determination at the same time.

Dashofpepper wrote:

Ailaros wrote:
one's pursuit of skill can only go so far. For a person who wishes to advance in skill, this is naturally frustrating.

Could you elaborate on this?

Actually, no, I'm going to eliminate it instead.

I was thinking about something else when I wrote that, so that actual phase doesn't make sense. To make it make sense, I'd basically just be repeating the sentence before it.

But the success or failure of your decisions is based exclusively on luck. Just making a good decision doesn't mean that your decision will lead to success, or a poor decision to failure. It's the dice that determine.

Well, since we are talking about overall tactics, and there is a plethora of things you do outside the game before the game starts, which require zero dice rolls, I will have to respectfully disagree. This is just my opinion, so it is not right nor is it wrong. Here are some in game instances where dice rolls do not play a factor at all.

I have seen many games where this was not the case. I have seen players have totally crap for shooting rolls and still win. The only time this is the case is if everything else is even. Army list, table position, tactics, terrain, and so forth are larger factors than dice rolls. There are also plenty of things you can do that do not involve dice rolls. I like getting a unit of skyclaws and put a wolf guard battle leader in there and have them jump all over buildings and near other cover. A lot of times just having the presence of them and the fact that I have been known to melta bomb the hell out of vehicles I can force my opponent to move away from them. This is a controlled move, with no dice rolls, and the outcome is that I am flushing him out like hunting a rabbit. Except my skyclaws are my hound dog and m opponent is the rabbit.

Another example I do is cover valleys of cover. By valleys of cover I mean if two or more large obstacles of terrain are the the table I know vehicles will use them for cover and the low open points between them. I simply point my long fangs in a position where they can utilize cover and anything that wants to hop from out of that cover and advance towards me has to face a crap ton of long fangs. Again, no dice rolls needed for this, and this is a tactic of table control. Where I am controlling the outcome of my opponents moves because they are avoiding LOS from the massive long fang squads. This forces my opponent to make a choice. Go in and face the fire, or take the long way around and use the cover, but the long way is going to waste you a whole turn or two getting to where you want to be. All the while my skyclaws are harassing everything else that is behind cover, all the while taking advantage of cover myself. No dice rolls required, until I actually attack, and even then I have minimized my dice rolls to be most probable in my favor.

Holding an objective and going to ground. Get a +1 to cover save, and if you have enough troops in your troop unit you can hold that objective for sometimes the whole game.

Obfuscate LOS with transport vehicles is another tactic that needs no dice rolls. I load up a tactical squad in a Rhino, they get to the objective, disembark and the Rhino is now used as sacrificial cover, obfuscating them from heavy weapon or assault fire. On top of that only if they roll a 6 on the damage table the vehicle will remain there all game. I actually read a battle report where a player did this. He moved his Rhinos up to the objective, disembarked and turned his Rhinos sideways to create more cover and then just camped behind them. A valid tactic, worked out in his favor and no dice rolls were needed.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying luck doesn't influence a game, it does. I just cannot agree that luck is a deciding factor in every game and that luck is a larger factor over everything else. If I had to write a hierarchy of game elements which help you win, I would propose it be something along these lines:

Army List > tactical skill > opponent's skill > luck

We all know the phrase don't bring a knife to a gun fight. Your Army List is exactly this. I think this has the largest factor on win and lose and your tactical skill with said army list goes hand in hand. In fact on some level they should be in the same category as there is lots of tactical skill in building an Army List. However, sometimes just fielding the right unit out weighs tactics. If you field paper and I field scissors, well, you got a very up hill battle against me the whole game my friend. So in other regards Army List trumps tactics, but that is due to knowing your opponent as well. So, there is a bit of luck because you are guessing what your opponent fields. Next your opponents skill out weighs the luck as well. For all my non dice tactics listed above, my opponent could counter them by the same non dice rolling tactics and we would stalemate, or use paper against my rock. So, their luck has little to do with that. Now, last, but not least comes in the dice roll. If everything pans out and you have built your army a certain way and executed your plans utilizing the attributes given, then luck should not be an issue. Then there are those games where you just can't roll what you need, ever. Then luck may come into play and become a large factor, but averaging out how much luck affects games in your overall record, I still stand by my opinion it is the lowest factor in your win to loss ratio.

Deleted

Okay, I read your main post and the first few pages, but not all. Maybe someone has gone into this in the meanwhile and all of my points will be moot. First off, you have an issue with you hypothesis:

Ailaros wrote:The theory, in brief, is that 40k is actually a tactically limited game, and once you achieve a certain level of skill, your skill becomes relatively insignificant compared to luck.

So, to break it down, one of the things that's important to know is that this is relative. The outcome of any given game is determined by factors that are relative to each other between the players. For example, if you and your opponent both brought the same lists, then list-building errors are extremely unlikely to be a determining factor in the outcome of your list. In this case, things like how the two players use the list, or how the dice roll are far more likely to be determinant, as the lists are relatively insignificant, being equal to each other.

First off, you come out with this theory, but it is not based on anything other than your own opinion. You then go on from this as your springboard with a whole lot of conjecture that only works if your original theory is true. This is backward. A theory needs to derive from observable evidence, not the other way around.

Ailaros wrote:So, I'm working on a theory that's been mulled over in my most recent battle report, and I wanted to drag my net of input wider than just my regular readers.

I read the report. Dice rolling was not as large of a factor as you believe it was. You were playing against a list with significant advantages against your own. Among them: mobility and resilience to damage. Higher end tactics in this game revolve around the use of reserves and outflanking, neither of which you used (he didn't either, but at least he had access to them). These are important to mitigate concepts like an 'alpha strike'. You purposely chose to leave yourself open to a known strategy with your list choices.

Ailaros wrote:The better a player gets at 40k, the smaller their mistakes are. Their lists are good, so any list-building errors are going to be very small. Their movement is good, so any movement errors are going to be small. The smaller the errors are, the less likely they are to effect the outcome of a game relative to other factors. For example, forgetting to bring any anti AV14 is much more likely to impact the game than if you accidentally drove a piece of AV14 within 48" of a model armed with a missile launcher.

Here is another part where you made a statement, and have used that throughout your posts as if it were true. First off, I would say that skill would not change whether mistakes are large or small (did we even properly define how small 'small' is?). Skill would directly correlate to the number of mistakes you make. The relative size of them would be determined by your opponent's skill in exploiting them. A bunch of 'small' mistakes will lose you the game.

Ailaros wrote:How the dice roll is always going to be random (unless you're cheating), but even though they are not predictable in any given roll, they are still constrained (it's not possible to roll a 13 on 2D6), and they are controlled (it's not possible to get better at luck). This means that the relative luck between the two players is going to produce a set advantage to one player or another in any particular game. Now, if everyone always rolled exactly on average, this would be a relatively insignificant factor (such as the significance of luck in chess), but as it is, that's not the case in 40k.

You start off correct here, but quickly veer off course. Dice rolls will be random, but luck is definitely not linear across skill levels. You are forgetting a key factor that comes with skill: effective list writing. When you build redundancies into your list, you ensure a measurable outcome. The example opponent you played had a single Manticore, a model that directly counters a significant amount of your army. Yes, he could have rolled only a single missile each shot, and had wild scatters, but what happens when you bring three? Suddenly, the entire impact of these choices will greatly change the game, most notably because of the limited size of the table (meaning only so many shots are required to cover your army). On another note, the fact that it was not deployed directly behind a piece of terrain and firing indirectly the whole time is another impact (in this case player skill comes in with tactical analysis). If he has a single unit that will reliably destroy yours, he should make every effort to ensure that all four rounds of potential shooting occur. End of the day, this is just a single example, but I think you can see how that could extend to others and to the game at large. Dashofpepper's example of various numbers of Orks assaulting 10 Space Marines is another example of this. Build your list right, and luck actually stops being a factor (yes, it exists, but it is so ridiculously mitigated that it can be ignored).

So you see from here, two imperfect sub-theories were chosen by yourself as the fundamental building blocks of 'luck becomes the determining factor':

1) The incorrect belief that luck and its effect on a game is linear accross skill levels.
2) The concept that the better you are, the smaller your mistakes become.

I look forward to your response.

Dashofpepper wrote:
So....

The better you get, the MORE control you have over the outcome of the game, while factors not under your control become more noticeable in influencing the outcome.

I agree with this statement 100%.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Ailaros wrote:
one's pursuit of skill can only go so far. For a person who wishes to advance in skill, this is naturally frustrating.

Could you elaborate on this?

My existence in 40k is to continually elevating my skill, in part by casting the net as far and wide as possible (both around the country and around the world) looking for players who might be better than me and teach me something - intentionally or not.

Exactly how far can the pursuit of skill go? There is someone who is the best 40k player in the world. There is not yet an adequate system for determining who that person is. I believe that I'm near the top of the heap - but I am still in learning mode, improving my skill mode, becoming more proficient with the factors under my control....by merit of being human, no one is my equal. They are superior or inferior to some degree in tactical ability. The "degrees" may be of small enough measure to establish "peer groups."

I'm honestly curious what you believe the hard cap on the pursuit of skill to be. Perfection? Something less?

Uh, I don't think he means there is a cap on improving oneself for the purpose of improving, but, rather, that there is a point where any returns on improvement become negligible in terms of how many wins you get.

I can point to games that I have won, and yet can call out mistakes I made in that game. Clearly I can improve my skill and work on eliminating those mistakes. But doing so doesn't make me win that game anymore than I already have. Likewise, I can point to the games where I've played well, yet some factor outside of my control has meant that I did not win. Improving my skill in those cases is also unlikely to have netted an extra win. It's not that there is no room for improvement, but that the tangible gains from that improvement get less and less. The intangible gains - the human desire to improve ourselves - are still there.

Honestly, I think the real cap on pursuit of skill is when you realize that pursuing perfection is taking the fun out of the game. When your pursuit of perfection means that you're too good to play many local games with people because they're tired of always losing. When the pursuit of perfection means that you're constantly striving to solve that last weakness in your list, rather than embracing the challenge of playing with a weaker list. Refer back to that article I posted before, about the phases of the gamer. I've kind of hit that point. I know I can play with the best, I know I can make rock hard lists and crush people. I've got a wall of trophies in my basement... but I'm tired of it. I'm tired of playing games against the same handful of lists. Razorspams and TWCs, or whatever the meta of the day dictates. I'd rather play my warbikers against my friend's Ultramarines in a campaign in the basement than try to solve the meta for the next tournament.

Ailaros wrote:

Dashofpepper wrote:The better you get, the MORE control you have over the outcome of the game, while factors not under your control become more noticeable in influencing the outcome.

What?

You can't have your control over the game increase in the percentage that your control is determinant AND factors beyond your control ALSO increase in percentage of determination at the same time.

Which is why you're missing coefficients to the equation that should be the underlying principle of your hypothesis....


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Nurglitch wrote:

It might help to think of Warhammer 40k as a race between two runners in utter darkness and both armed with flashlights. It might not.

If the skill aspect dictates the relative speed of each runner and the kind of flashlight, and the luck piece is your likelihood of tripping and falling. =D

List building and codex choice are number one in games of 40k. if your list is crappy then you most liklely will loose.
Strategy comes in at a close second to list building.
Luck runs third place though if you are playing a horde army luck plays far less of a role than it would in an elite army. Any game with dice involves luck. Thus.... the dice.

I've heard Warhammer also disparagingly dismissed as Rock-Paper-Scissors which is somewhat also ironic given that the presence of random variables such as dice specifically deny categorical analysis as a combinatorial game. It combines the features of both games, but the fact is that it's a game, and games come down to the players making choices. Whether they're making choices based on what might happen, or what's likely to happen, or what they'd like to happen, they are making the choices. The dice are just reporting how it turned out.

My Rock-Paper-Scissors comment was used as an analogy nothing more. If you try to take out tanks with tactical squads with no high strength good AP weapons, you are essentially trying to beat a rock with scissors. This only holds any weight in Army List building. If you build an anti horde army and do not use any anti armor weapons and your opponent rolls out 3 AV14 tanks, then the rock paper scissors comment holds true, as an analogy. That is what I was trying to express, guess I did not make it clear that I think table top war gaming is like a game of paper-rock-scissors.

Honestly, I think the real cap on pursuit of skill is when you realize that pursuing perfection is taking the fun out of the game. When your pursuit of perfection means that you're too good to play many local games with people because they're tired of always losing. When the pursuit of perfection means that you're constantly striving to solve that last weakness in your list, rather than embracing the challenge of playing with a weaker list. Refer back to that article I posted before, about the phases of the gamer. I've kind of hit that point. I know I can play with the best, I know I can make rock hard lists and crush people. I've got a wall of trophies in my basement... but I'm tired of it. I'm tired of playing games against the same handful of lists. Razorspams and TWCs, or whatever the meta of the day dictates. I'd rather play my warbikers against my friend's Ultramarines in a campaign in the basement than try to solve the meta for the next tournament.

I think another level of skill rises from this. When you ascend to the point where you can on purpose take an inferior army list and win. Back in the day of 4th ed Fantasy I started a Lizardmen Army, which is highly broken. I won so many games and tournaments with them because of how imbalanced they were. In one campaign style tournament we were playing this guy got mad and said that Lizardmen should not be allowed in the tournament because they were OP. So, the guy running the tournament took the High Elf army list I just demolished, and we replayed the same game. Same army, same war gear, same spells, etc. He held me back, and forced a tie. He was proving a point that even with the list that the High Elf player took (which was totally a crappy build against Lizardmen) he was able to force a tie and almost beat me. He did it from just being a better player than me. Then again the guy running the tournament had been playing war games for like 15+ more years than I had, so he had lots of experience.

List building and codex choice are number one in games of 40k. if your list is crappy then you most liklely will loose.
Strategy comes in at a close second to list building.
Luck runs third place though if you are playing a horde army luck plays far less of a role than it would in an elite army. Any game with dice involves luck. Thus.... the dice.

This in a nutshell is what I was saying in my last post. I agree.

Crom wrote:Army list, table position, tactics, terrain, and so forth are larger factors than dice rolls.

But all those other things don't actually determine the outcome of anything. You can not blow up a land raider with table position, nor can you with terrain.

But even if you were right, that still doesn't address relative skill. Once you start to control for all those other variables like tactics and terrain, the less they matter, compared to noncontrollable things, like die rolls.

Nurglitch wrote:Risk management is about what you do given your opponent's vehicles blowing up or not blowing up, and your reserves coming in optimally and sub-optimally. Even games where there is no luck, such as Rock-Paper-Scissors, actually especially in those games, there is risk management.

The determiner of things in 40k are the players. They are playing this thing called a game, in which they take turns making moves, like Chess. Each move is one of a very large set of potential moves, which can be valued in three different ways.

(1) Some potential moves are valued purely because of their effect, making that move would win the game. This is expected utility. The Hawk-Dove game involve pure expected utility since there is no luck involved.

(2) Some potential moves are weighted purely by their likelihood of happening, since the effect would be the same. This is a reasonable expectation, a.k.a MATH.

(3) Some potential moves must be weighed by indexing their expected utility with the reasonable expectation of the event happening, the expected value, aka 'math-hammer'.

Regardless of how you choose to weigh the value of moves and events in the game, the game still consists of more than one player. That player has to cross-index their own potential moves with those of their opponent and choose the course that they believe will either optimize (tournament/campaign win) or satisfice (friendly game).

This is a great exposition on different types of player skill. Of course, all of them are really just changing the odds, but that's exactly what skill is

Nurglitch wrote:Whether they're making choices based on what might happen, or what's likely to happen, or what they'd like to happen, they are making the choices. The dice are just reporting how it turned out.

Exactly.

Players make decisions based on the odds that they want to play, and the dice actually determine the success or failure of their decisions.

Fearspect wrote:Okay, I read your main post and the first few pages...

I look forward to your response.

My response is that several of the things you address have already been changed. You can view the revised version of the theory here.

Redbeard wrote:Honestly, I think the real cap on pursuit of skill is when you realize that pursuing perfection is taking the fun out of the game. When your pursuit of perfection means that you're too good to play many local games with people because they're tired of always losing. When the pursuit of perfection means that you're constantly striving to solve that last weakness in your list, rather than embracing the challenge of playing with a weaker list. Refer back to that article I posted before, about the phases of the gamer. I've kind of hit that point. I know I can play with the best, I know I can make rock hard lists and crush people. I've got a wall of trophies in my basement... but I'm tired of it.

Well said.

I definitely feel like I'm at the same stage as you, but I didn't stick it out long enough to collect a bunch of trophies first.

Dashofpepper wrote:

Ailaros wrote:
You can't have your control over the game increase in the percentage that your control is determinant AND factors beyond your control ALSO increase in percentage of determination at the same time.

Which is why you're missing coefficients to the equation that should be the underlying principle of your hypothesis....

Or you're trying to obscure a contradiction you're making by using a mathematical language set.

If you have an alternate theory in which what you said isn't a contradiction, I'd like to hear it.

Ailaros-

You are missing my point. You CAN win with out rolling dice and table position does in fact change the outcome of what your opponent will do. If I am playing imperial guard and I got all my big guns pointed down the center of the table, are you going to just come down the center of the table and take the chance of all my big guns killing you?

This type of tactic forces a player like DashofPepper to weave his open top skimmers in his DE army to avoid being shot down by big guns (ideally of course). Thus limiting his options and forcing him to get creative, or have him take the chance of getting destroyed by my heavy firepower. At the same time I can also use this tactic to hopefully force him into moving into a particular position where I can put him between a rock and a hard place.

Also table position can put more scoring units in objectives. You don't have to blow the crap out of your opponent to win a game in 40K. In fact I am finding that 5th edition is really all about mission objectives as kill points don't always matter. Owning the table can have many many benefits. Hell, cover saves alone in 5th edition are nuts. I can put the cheapest unit ever behind a steel wall and get a 3+ cover save.

Crom wrote:

This type of tactic forces a player like DashofPepper to weave his open top skimmers in his DE army to avoid being shot down by big guns (ideally of course). Thus limiting his options and forcing him to get creative, or have him take the chance of getting destroyed by my heavy firepower. At the same time I can also use this tactic to hopefully force him into moving into a particular position where I can put him between a rock and a hard place.

.

Oh, I'm coming down the middle of the table for you mofo. =D

Dashofpepper wrote:

Crom wrote:

This type of tactic forces a player like DashofPepper to weave his open top skimmers in his DE army to avoid being shot down by big guns (ideally of course). Thus limiting his options and forcing him to get creative, or have him take the chance of getting destroyed by my heavy firepower. At the same time I can also use this tactic to hopefully force him into moving into a particular position where I can put him between a rock and a hard place.

.

Oh, I'm coming down the middle of the table for you mofo. =D

better hope your cover saves from going flat out hold up then Which is what in all honesty I would most likely do to if I had fast transport vehicles. Though against you I would deploy on my table edge making it 30+ inches away from your nearest unit so I would get my first volley of shots in before your fast vehicles could drop off your troops for an assault. That is assuming we have played each other several times and I got a feel for how you play. I know that lots of assault troops and fast vehicles is what the DE are all about from reading up on them but I have yet to play against them.

Crom wrote:If I am playing imperial guard and I got all my big guns pointed down the center of the table, are you going to just come down the center of the table and take the chance of all my big guns killing you?

I wouldn't do that, personally, because I don't like those odds.

Crom wrote: You CAN win with out rolling dice and table position does in fact change the outcome of what your opponent will do.

Firstly, I never said skill didn't matter at all. At least, not unless players are exactly of equal skill level, which I don't assume ever actually happens.

Secondly, I'd really like to see a game where someone won without rolling a single die.

Deleted

Considering you roll for sides and turns, it would be impossible to win a game (let alone play a game) with out rolling dice. Though I am sure if you did a horde army, and just seized nothing but objectives and went to ground and held your own you could possibly win with minimal dice rolls.

Nurglitch wrote:As has been pointed out Warhammer 40,000 is full of instances where the outcome of player decisions are not determined by dice.

Yes, I agree, it's called skill. I devote a big chunk of the theory to skill.

Nurglitch wrote:Now it seems you would say: "Yeah, but moving 6" forward where I can shoot the unit means that the successfulness of moving 6" was determined by dice: my shooting dice." Actually no, the success of that action depends on both the decision of the first player to move, and the second player to fire. After all, if the second player decides not to fire, no dice even need to be rolled...

Right, when there is no random element, then you are always successful. I wasn't implying that skill IS luck, or that skill requires randomness.

What I'm implying is that there are non-random skill elements, and that there are random luck elements (and, well, non-random luck elements, but that's beside the point).

Yes, if you move 6", then you move 6", end of. The thing is, though, what does movement actually matter? What does skill actually matter? With two exceptions (moving onto an empty objective onto an objective mission, or moving to contest an objective), the only thing that movement does is to increase the odds that you kill something (or decrease the odds that something of yours is destroyed. Or, as Crom mentioned, trying to influence your OPPONENT'S decision of how to play the odds, but that's a matter of psychology...).

Skill exists to mess with luck, to play odds better, etc.

I'd really like to see a game where someone won without rolling a single die.

This is impossible, because you dont even start before you rolled the first die (the die for deployment and turn order)
Apart from that, yes I did see this game.

Tau with many kroot vs enemy without tanks or skimmers/jetbikes having first turn and the enemy reserving everything.
I myself scored a tie with about every roll backfiring which is almost the same as rolling nothing (The problem was, the opponent had two rhinos on the table and it was an objective game with 3 objectives and I was only able to contest one rather than killing a single rhino... Ah yes and my Manticore killed my own executioner instead of a single TWC...).
And I scored a victory where my dice were unimportant. (vs 2/9 pinning him in a quarter and then marching on 2 objectives while holding my own objectives having material present)

Nurglitch wrote:

Ailaros wrote:Players make decisions based on the odds that they want to play, and the dice actually determine the success or failure of their decisions.

Okay, so what we have here is a failure to communicate. You're using a special definition of the term "determine". The dice specifically do not determine the success or failure of the player's decisions, what with being random and all. The players determine the success or failure of their actions by making decisions.

As has been pointed out Warhammer 40,000 is full of instances where the outcome of player decisions are not determined by dice.

Now it seems you would say: "Yeah, but moving 6" forward where I can shoot the unit means that the successfulness of moving 6" was determined by dice: my shooting dice." Actually no, the success of that action depends on both the decision of the first player to move, and the second player to fire. After all, if the second player decides not to fire, no dice even need to be rolled...

Nurglitch - really not trying to be nasty here, but are you sure you're not using a special meaning of determine?

Courtesy of Dictionary.com...

Dictionary.com wrote:1.to settle or decide (a dispute, question, etc.) by an authoritative or conclusive decision.
2.to conclude or ascertain, as after reasoning, observation, etc.
3.Geometry . to fix the position of.
4.to cause, affect, or control; fix or decide causally: Demand for a product usually determines supply.

I grabbed the first 4, because 4 is the only one relevant to the discussion (I brought 1-3 in for completeness' sake, and feel free to look up the other meanings yourself).

"To cause, affect, or control" - Ailaros is right. The Dice control the outcome of several of the most important events in the game - did my guardsmen hit you, did my bolters wound you, did my Dire Avengers make their armor save? Dice decide all that. I don't say my Marines shoot your Guardsmen and we both just go "Oh, OK. I guess 4 would die then, or something."

Now, you are also right in that the player's non-random choices (how to move prior to shooting), caused the marines to be able to fire in the first place (by moving them into range) but whether or not they hit, wound, or you make saves are all determined by dice. If you had 5 armor, and went into cover the previous turn, that's skill. Whether or not the cover saves you is luck.

Ailaros - for all these people late to the thread, I suggest you go ahead and make a point at the top of your Original Post to link to your new, revised theory.

Nurglitch wrote:The dice specifically do not determine the success or failure of the player's decisions

that is exactly what the dice do in warhammer 40,000

-Nazdreg- wrote:I myself scored a tie

Oh, right, if you and your opponent agreed never to roll a die, then the result would always be a draw.

-Nazdreg- wrote:And I scored a victory where my dice were unimportant.

Sure, and I've won games with bad luck too. That's part of the theory, after all, that at some point of skill inequality skill matters more than luck.

TheRedArmy wrote:Now, you are also right in that the player's non-random choices (how to move prior to shooting), caused the marines to be able to fire in the first place (by moving them into range) but whether or not they hit, wound, or you make saves are all determined by dice. If you had 5 armor, and went into cover the previous turn, that's skill. Whether or not the cover saves you is luck.

Exactly. When weapons are out of range of something, they have a 0% chance to do damage. When you move them into range, you greatly shorten those odds. Just moving into range, though, just gives you the chance, it doesn't actually guarantee that you will do any damage at all.

TheRedArmy wrote:Ailaros - for all these people late to the thread, I suggest you go ahead and make a point at the top of your Original Post to link to your new, revised theory.

I did, actually.

MikeMcSomething wrote:

Nurglitch wrote:The dice specifically do not determine the success or failure of the player's decisions

that is exactly what the dice do in warhammer 40,000

I think a more accurate description would be:

The dice sometimes determine the success or failure of a player's decisions.

Nurglitch wrote:

One interesting case in point was a battle report DashofPepper posted, which I'm sure anyone interested can look up in the Battle Report forum. Basically DashofPepper's opponent had noticed that in trying to win, they would get ground up and spat out by DashofPepper, so instead of mirroring DashofPepper's strategy and losing horribly, he went for a tie and...tied, which was better than losing, and apparently knobbled DashofPepper in that tournament. It's pretty interesting reading and people should look it up.

In that game, I think the only dice I rolled were for dangerous terrain?

My daemon opponent deep-struck as far away from me as he could without risking falling off the board, then ran away from me. The game ended in a draw, with me never actually getting to him. Battlewagons can move 12" per turn, but if your enemy is suddenly at a 45 degree angle to your direction, it takes a turn of movement to realign the battlewagons in that direction.

imweasel wrote:

MikeMcSomething wrote:

Nurglitch wrote:The dice specifically do not determine the success or failure of the player's decisions

that is exactly what the dice do in warhammer 40,000

I think a more accurate description would be:

The dice sometimes determine the success or failure of a player's decisions.

Any situation where dice are being rolled, they are being rolled because a player decided to create a situation wherein a player would roll dice, and they are determining the success/failure of that decision. What imweasel said was not correct in any context where dice are involved in 40k.

As you mentioned, I read through your new "theory" because you claimed it addresses 'many of my points'. It in fact addresses none of them, while adding heaps of text discussing extremely obvious things. Why would you write a whole paragraph about how a more skilled player will win more? Did you think that if you filled most of your writing with statements no one could actually disagree with that you could just sneak in your flawed theory right at the end of it? We all know that luck and tactics are both a part of 40k, no one is in disagreement on this, but I really think what you wrote has to be put out in the open so that you can take a look at what everyone is reading:

This theory, then, means that the more one advances in skill at playing 40k, the less they will see their games determined by their increase in skill, and the more that they will see their games determined by luck.

I don't know what you actually are meaning to say, but you just told everyone that the more skill they get, the less it gets used. I can assure you that I use 100% of my gained skills in every game I play. More specifically, you are stoically refusing to acknowledge that your theory is based on false premises, namely the two I have listed out for you:

Fearspect wrote:First off, you have an issue with you hypothesis:

Ailaros wrote:The theory, in brief, is that 40k is actually a tactically limited game, and once you achieve a certain level of skill, your skill becomes relatively insignificant compared to luck.

So, to break it down, one of the things that's important to know is that this is relative. The outcome of any given game is determined by factors that are relative to each other between the players. For example, if you and your opponent both brought the same lists, then list-building errors are extremely unlikely to be a determining factor in the outcome of your list. In this case, things like how the two players use the list, or how the dice roll are far more likely to be determinant, as the lists are relatively insignificant, being equal to each other.

First off, you come out with this theory, but it is not based on anything other than your own opinion. You then go on from this as your springboard with a whole lot of conjecture that only works if your original theory is true. This is backward. A theory needs to derive from observable evidence, not the other way around.

Ailaros wrote:So, I'm working on a theory that's been mulled over in my most recent battle report, and I wanted to drag my net of input wider than just my regular readers.

I read the report. Dice rolling was not as large of a factor as you believe it was. You were playing against a list with significant advantages against your own. Among them: mobility and resilience to damage. Higher end tactics in this game revolve around the use of reserves and outflanking, neither of which you used (he didn't either, but at least he had access to them). These are important to mitigate concepts like an 'alpha strike'. You purposely chose to leave yourself open to a known strategy with your list choices.

Ailaros wrote:The better a player gets at 40k, the smaller their mistakes are. Their lists are good, so any list-building errors are going to be very small. Their movement is good, so any movement errors are going to be small. The smaller the errors are, the less likely they are to effect the outcome of a game relative to other factors. For example, forgetting to bring any anti AV14 is much more likely to impact the game than if you accidentally drove a piece of AV14 within 48" of a model armed with a missile launcher.

Here is another part where you made a statement, and have used that throughout your posts as if it were true. First off, I would say that skill would not change whether mistakes are large or small (did we even properly define how small 'small' is?). Skill would directly correlate to the number of mistakes you make. The relative size of them would be determined by your opponent's skill in exploiting them. A bunch of 'small' mistakes will lose you the game.

Ailaros wrote:How the dice roll is always going to be random (unless you're cheating), but even though they are not predictable in any given roll, they are still constrained (it's not possible to roll a 13 on 2D6), and they are controlled (it's not possible to get better at luck). This means that the relative luck between the two players is going to produce a set advantage to one player or another in any particular game. Now, if everyone always rolled exactly on average, this would be a relatively insignificant factor (such as the significance of luck in chess), but as it is, that's not the case in 40k.

You start off correct here, but quickly veer off course. Dice rolls will be random, but luck is definitely not linear across skill levels. You are forgetting a key factor that comes with skill: effective list writing. When you build redundancies into your list, you ensure a measurable outcome. The example opponent you played had a single Manticore, a model that directly counters a significant amount of your army. Yes, he could have rolled only a single missile each shot, and had wild scatters, but what happens when you bring three? Suddenly, the entire impact of these choices will greatly change the game, most notably because of the limited size of the table (meaning only so many shots are required to cover your army). On another note, the fact that it was not deployed directly behind a piece of terrain and firing indirectly the whole time is another impact (in this case player skill comes in with tactical analysis). If he has a single unit that will reliably destroy yours, he should make every effort to ensure that all four rounds of potential shooting occur. End of the day, this is just a single example, but I think you can see how that could extend to others and to the game at large. Dashofpepper's example of various numbers of Orks assaulting 10 Space Marines is another example of this. Build your list right, and luck actually stops being a factor (yes, it exists, but it is so ridiculously mitigated that it can be ignored).

So you see from here, two imperfect sub-theories were chosen by yourself as the fundamental building blocks of 'luck becomes the determining factor':

1) The incorrect belief that luck and its effect on a game is linear across skill levels.
2) The concept that the better you are, the smaller your mistakes become.

I look forward to you actually responding.

Fearspect wrote: but you just told everyone that the more skill they get, the less it gets used

This has actually never been his point.

His point is the same it always was, but that is the language he is now busy linking everyone to.

Fearspect wrote:I don't know what you actually are meaning to say, but you just told everyone that the more skill they get, the less it gets used.

Actually, what I said was that the more skilled you get, the less your skill determines the outcome of the game. I am actually assuming that players are playing to the 100% maximum possible skill level in any game (although were this not true, the theory also handles that).

Fearspect wrote: you are stoically refusing to acknowledge that your theory is based on false premises, namely the two I have listed out for you:

Alright, let's see how false these premises are...

Fearspect wrote:it is not based on anything other than your own opinion.

All hypothesis are based on opinion.

Fearspect wrote:You then go on from this as your springboard with a whole lot of conjecture that only works if your original theory is true.

It's not a real theory if it's not predictive.

Fearspect wrote: This is backward. A theory needs to derive from observable evidence, not the other way around.

Only when you use induction. Did Einstein have data points before he crafted the theory of relativity? No, he posited the theory, and only LATER did people come up with data points that corroborated it. In fact, there are some parts of relativity that we STILL don't have data points for, going a century on after the fact.

If you want some data to bicker over, I can link you to some of my battle reports again, but I doubt anything useful will be gained from such arguing.

Fearspect wrote: Higher end tactics in this game revolve around the use of reserves and outflanking

That's a matter of discussion of skill. I don't believe high skilled players need to use reserves, nor is failing to use reserves the sign of a poor player. Lots of people win lots of games without putting anything in reserve.

Fearspect wrote: I would say that skill would not change whether mistakes are large or small (did we even properly define how small 'small' is?). Skill would directly correlate to the number of mistakes you make. The relative size of them would be determined by your opponent's skill in exploiting them. A bunch of 'small' mistakes will lose you the game.

Actually, the theory v.2 doesn't use the word "mistake" once. It was too vague of a concept that was too poorly defined. All it did was confuse people, which is why it was stripped from the theory.

Fearspect wrote: Dice rolls will be random, but luck is definitely not linear across skill levels. You are forgetting a key factor that comes with skill: effective list writing... When you build redundancies into your list, you ensure a measurable outcome.

You're not ensuring anything, you're only shortening the odds of any particular event occurring.

Fearspect wrote:On another note, the fact that it was not deployed directly behind a piece of terrain and firing indirectly the whole time is another impact (in this case player skill comes in with tactical analysis). If he has a single unit that will reliably destroy yours, he should make every effort to ensure that all four rounds of potential shooting occur.

Once again, you're talking about skill. You can play the odds in any way you want, but this doesn't eliminate the fact that you're still playing the odds of random die rolls.

Fearspect wrote:1) The incorrect belief that luck and its effect on a game is linear across skill levels.

I've yet to see why this shouldn't be true. No amount of skill will make you a luckier player. In fact, if skill had an impact on the results of your die rolls (your luck), I'd call you a cheater for fixing your die rolls.

Fearspect wrote:2) The concept that the better you are, the smaller your mistakes become.

I no longer make this claim, because I no longer recognize "mistakes".

If your only two argument about this theory stem from something that isn't in the theory, and that player skill influences which numbers come up on your die, you'll have to excuse me if I fail to see how this theory needs to be changed.

Fearspect wrote:I look forward to you actually responding.

If you've been feeling ignored, it's because what you're saying isn't relevant. Having to break down every irrelevant argument that's been made so far is much beyond my patience. Consider yourself lucky that I bothered with you.

Ailaros wrote:
Actually, what I said was that the more skilled you get, the less your skill determines the outcome of the game.

Before we get too depressed about this , please note that this is only true in the short run, when you haven't rolled enough dice.

Let's say that Alice is a great player, in the top 5 percentile, while Bob is ranked only in the top 10.
Assume that Alice has a 60% chance of winning a single game because of her skills.

Given an infinite amount of games the chance of Alice winning the majority of them would still approach 1.
The random factors in the game only increase the variance of the distribution but not the expected value.

The more dice you roll, the less chance you have that one side will have significantly favorable dice rolls.

The questions are:

A) Do you roll enough dice in a single 40K game?

B) Given current popular tournament formats, what are the chances of Bob (the weaker player) scoring higher in a tournament than Alice?

in theory/paper this does look correct.

But for game purposes? There probably is just to many factors to really prove this. The concept of chance in the dice is what makes any random based game appealing.

A example of this in action and as close as it gets when it comes to dice being a major factor is this vid

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alOGaDsQZao
@2:04

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Ailoros, would you take your theory to the extreme and say that players that have demonstrated that they are the most skilled should simply show up to a major tournament, then dice off to determine a winner (since it's all about luck) rather than playing the game?

Heffling wrote:Ailoros, would you take your theory to the extreme and say that players that have demonstrated that they are the most skilled should simply show up to a major tournament, then dice off to determine a winner (since it's all about luck) rather than playing the game?

That is essentially what the theory is, and also where it works best (at the utmost fringe). In a scenario between two players with perfect execution and identical armies, dice should be the determining factor, if not the only factor.

In a scenario between a player with perfect execution and a player with perfectly imperfect execution, dice should be irrelevant.

Because those scenarios rarely (never) arise, that's where the debate about its usefulness in everyday life is sparked.

My bad, Aileros. I did not realize I was dealing with the Einstein of 40k. Still... there is measurable math to this to create datapoints from, so I am not sure why you feel induction is not the way you should be coming about a theory. Specifically, there is an entire branch of mathematics dedicated to calculating game-theory concepts.

My problem is that you are completely marginalizing skill in the game to support what you are saying. Skill will shorten the odds, but the way you mention it, you make it sound like a minimal impact. By building in redundancies, you can completely negate luck's involvement in the game, just the same as I can reliably tell someone with a lottery ticket that they will not win the jackpot. Can it happen? Sure. Will it? 1/(49c6) is the chance it will.

I drive up with Vet meltas against a rhino. Can they all miss? Sure, but only 1/27 times will they all do that. That is one squad, so then, bring three or four. With proper list building, and the tactical acumen to bring weapons to the proper locations, luck completely stops mattering.

I posit that those who cry bad luck do not consider the countless bad decisions that led them to have their victory or loss decided by a single die roll, be it a vehicle pen, or the decision for the game to continue another turn.

Furthermore, you completely misunderstand my discussion of reserve manipulation as a skill. This is one that relates directly to listbuilding, and should be self-evident: The more tactical options (deployment or combat elements) you have, the better you have the possibility of doing. Coming in with a single plan is self-defeating because when you are matched against a list that does everything you do, but better (outshoots your shooting, or outcombats your cc list), you have an option to not make the game an auto-loss.

sourclams wrote:

Heffling wrote:Ailoros, would you take your theory to the extreme and say that players that have demonstrated that they are the most skilled should simply show up to a major tournament, then dice off to determine a winner (since it's all about luck) rather than playing the game?

That is essentially what the theory is, and also where it works best (at the utmost fringe). In a scenario between two players with perfect execution and identical armies, dice should be the determining factor, if not the only factor.

In a scenario between a player with perfect execution and a player with perfectly imperfect execution, dice should be irrelevant.

Because those scenarios rarely (never) arise, that's where the debate about its usefulness in everyday life is sparked.

Exactly. The theory essentially tells us what we already know. Yes, if you set all variables other than luck to being equal, guess what the player with better luck will win. How is this new or useful? However, the assertion that this level where skill is trumped by luck is not a level that is seen in play - the other variables are never even enough for this to take place.

Heffling wrote:Ailoros, would you take your theory to the extreme and say that players that have demonstrated that they are the most skilled should simply show up to a major tournament, then dice off to determine a winner (since it's all about luck) rather than playing the game?

Who ever said that the top rated players are near perfect? Why do you assume that they'd be close enough in skill level to make luck surface as the factor? You have some assumptions of your own to acknowledge and explain.

nyenyec wrote:note that this is only true in the short run, when you haven't rolled enough dice.

Right, this theory is looking at what determines the outcome of a single game, not the outcome of an infinite game between two static players. Over the incredibly long term, luck starts becoming controlled.

Nurglitch wrote:I'm going to leave this here though, just in case someone feels like learning themselves a book:

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/topics/GameTheory.html

Well, it's not that I don't get game theory (I took enough International Relations classes...), it's that game theory has a limited scope. Specifically, the scope of game theory is limited to the skill half of this theory.

In order for it to affect the luck side of the theory, then playing "hawk" alone would be able to immobilize a land raider going through cover (when, in fact, only a die roll can determine this).

If you want to talk more about skill using ideas like game theory, that's fine, but it ultimately has little relevance to a theory that compares skill and luck against each other.

+1 for the link to wolfram, though

Heffling wrote:Ailoros, would you take your theory to the extreme and say that players that have demonstrated that they are the most skilled should simply show up to a major tournament, then dice off to determine a winner (since it's all about luck) rather than playing the game?

As El Cheezus notes, not all players who enter a tournament are of even remotely the same skill level. Even if they were, that doesn't necessarily mean you don't play in tournaments (or games of 40k at all for that matter). People like playing games of 40k, including in tournaments.

I mean, people also like playing craps, which has VERY little skill in it. That doesn't mean it's not fun.

Fearspect wrote: Specifically, there is an entire branch of mathematics dedicated to calculating game-theory concepts.

Well, if you think you can use "more math" to make a better theory, I'd like to see it.

Fearspect wrote: My problem is that you are completely marginalizing skill in the game to support what you are saying. Skill will shorten the odds, but the way you mention it, you make it sound like a minimal impact. By building in redundancies, you can completely negate luck's involvement in the game, just the same as I can reliably tell someone with a lottery ticket that they will not win the jackpot. Can it happen? Sure. Will it? 1/(49c6) is the chance it will.

Actually, you can NEVER negate luck, no matter HOW redundant you are. You are still rolling dice. You are still playing odds.

Also, as the theory mentions, short odds are not necessarily the best odds. When you shorten your odds somewhere, you have to lengthen them somewhere else. Every decision has a cost.

Fearspect wrote:I posit that those who cry bad luck do not consider the countless bad decisions that led them to have their victory or loss decided by a single die roll, be it a vehicle pen, or the decision for the game to continue another turn.

Whether the game is determined by a single die roll or many, it's still luck that's the determiner.

Are you saying that those people who played certain odds and failed made the wrong decision? Would their decision have been correct if they had succeeded? You can't use the results of a random roll to determine if a decision was correct or not, post-facto.

Fearspect wrote:Furthermore, you completely misunderstand my discussion of reserve manipulation as a skill. This is one that relates directly to listbuilding, and should be self-evident: The more tactical options (deployment or combat elements) you have, the better you have the possibility of doing.

Yes, the stronger your list, and the better skilled you are at using it, the more you can actually play the odds exactly as you intend to.

Dracos wrote: However, the assertion that this level where skill is trumped by luck is not a level that is seen in play - the other variables are never even enough for this to take place.

Wait, how does one's ability to play the odds they want ever actually trump the actual result of the die roll for any given event?

Really, the question is the opposite, at what level of odds-playing inequality does the inequality of the odds-playing make a difference in the game?

Here's a question, how did you determine where the "luck" line goes in the graph? Seems pretty arbitrary to me. Not only that, but the chart is saying that luck will have the same influence regardless of the disparity in skill levels.

Where the luck line exists on the chart will change where it intersects the skill line, and the fact that luck has a constant value across all differences of skill levels makes your graph inaccurate and useless.

Not only that, but you havn't even offered proof that the other line is accurate either. What evidence do you have that player skill similarity has the relationship described by the graph?

Your theory is pretty much just a bunch of obvious facts that don't add up to the conclusion you want. You have oversimplified the game, made conclusions not supported by any facts and are attempting to make everything fit to your conclusion.

Dracos wrote:Here's a question, how did you determine where the "luck" line goes in the graph? Seems pretty arbitrary to me.

That's because it is.

I don't actually know where luck and skill cross, I only theorize that at some point they do. Furthermore, thinking about the lines on the graph may be a bit misleading. Perhaps if you thought of them as really fat lines, or intersecting fields, a more clearer picture could be created.

Dracos wrote:What evidence do you have that player skill similarity has the relationship described by the graph?

This comes from the idea that changing odds has diminishing return. Going from a 1:1 chance of something happening to a 2:1 chance is huge. Going from a 100:1 to 101: is not. The same size increase matters less the further you go.

It's actually a truism of controlled variables in general. The more you control for a variable, the harder it is to control for that variable more.

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Nurglitch wrote:
Duel
The game of Duel is the nearest we are going to get to a military application. Alice and Bob walk towards each other armed with pistols loaded with just one bullet. The probability of either hitting the other increases the nearer the two approach. The payoff to each player is the probability of surviving.

How close should Alice get to Bob before firing? This is literally a question of life and death because, if she fires and misses, Bob will be able to advance to point-blank range with fatal consequences for Alice. Since someone dies in each possible outcome of the game, the payoffs therefore always sum to one.

The conclusion is obvious. It can't be a Nash equilibrium for one payer to plan to fire sooner than the other, because it would be a better reply for the player who is planning to fire first to wait a tiny bit longer. But how close will they be when they simultaneously open fire?

The minimax theorum gives the answer right away. Duel is unit-sum rather than zero-sum, but the minimax theorem still applies (provided the payoffs still sum to one when the players fire simultaneously). The only difference is that the players' maximin payoffs now add up to one instead of zero. So if Alice is always twice as likely to hit Bob as he is to hit her, they will both fire at whatever distance makes Alice hit Bob two-thirds of the time and Bob hit Alice one-third of the time.

Right, this is a great example of skill. Two players are calculating their odds based off of what another is doing, and what their chances of their desired result happening are (relative to whatever risk thresholds they have). This is totally what skill in 40k looks like.

The problem is that it has nothing to do with the luck side of the theory. The winner of the duel is determined by who hit the other person, not by who shot first, or who played the odds more exactly to what they desired than the other.

If both duelers were perfect duelers - they always shot exactly when they got to exactly the odds of hitting that they desired - that would not make the duel a draw, or, in fact, in any way determine the result of the duel. The result is determined by who hit, and if you hit or not is determined by random elements.

Thus, the winner of the duel is the one whose luck had them hit their opponent, regardless of the odds they played.

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I just realized that this thread reminds me of communism. Great theory, unachievable because of the human element involved.

What purpose does a theory serve when the conditions for its utility are impossible?

MikeMcSomething wrote:

imweasel wrote:

MikeMcSomething wrote:

Nurglitch wrote:The dice specifically do not determine the success or failure of the player's decisions

that is exactly what the dice do in warhammer 40,000

I think a more accurate description would be:

The dice sometimes determine the success or failure of a player's decisions.

Any situation where dice are being rolled, they are being rolled because a player decided to create a situation wherein a player would roll dice, and they are determining the success/failure of that decision. What imweasel said was not correct in any context where dice are involved in 40k.

Except it can be. If I move a unit to cause my opponent to respond by move something in defense, I would say that the dice did not determine the success or failure of that decision.

No dice involved. My decision was successful. I'm sure you have a point in there somewhere I may be missing. I don't think nurglitch was refering to every single decision in 40k. You threw in 'when dice are rolled'.

I think we are talking in circles. Did we not all agree that all games are decided mostly by skill and dice rolls can only really make a small impact at best? With the exception of a game changing die roll, but if you are taking a die roll that the outcome would change the game you probably messed up to put yourself in that situation to begin with.

I just realized that this thread reminds me of communism. Great theory, unachievable because of the human element involved.

What purpose does a theory serve when the conditions for its utility are impossible? - Dash

blowing minds?

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Nurglitch kinda reinforces a point there.

1+1 on paper =2 there is no denying that

now you lay out 1 stone, and before you can add the other stone to the pile a random guy jacks it from you, leaving you with a 1, when you intended to do a 2. Thats how warhammer 40k works.

chance of a outcome can easily be manipulated to any side favor rather its adding a extra dice to roll, or a modifier in the game. So in essence the luck on your graph couldn't be consistent as the chance of a dice roll rather you need a 4+ or a 2+ varies that chance dynamically.

I think what could help you is ask your opponents to write a battle report as well as you. You might find one situation from your prospective completely different from his.

Nurglitch wrote:No, communism is likewise not a great, or even good theory. It's unachievable by a race of super-beings, and incoherent in its theoretical apparatus.

Sorry, pet-peeve for the "Well, it looked good on paper!" crowd. Inevitably anything that looked good on paper but worked badly in practice would have also worked badly in theory if the paper hadn't overlooked relevant details, not made silent assumptions, and not made subtle leaps of logic.

I agree, communism is not that good, even in theory. It puts power into a single group of people (oligarchy) which is never a good idea. I never bought into Communism or Marxism. At best I could say that some concepts of such a form of government may look good on paper, but overall it is not good.

Crom wrote:Did we not all agree that all games are decided mostly by skill and dice rolls can only really make a small impact at best?

Actually, not exactly. My position is that, because events that determine victory are themselves determined by dice, luck is the prime determiner of the game. Skill also makes an impact in that it lets you mess with luck, but as both players get closer in skill level to each other, this impact of messing with luck decreases relative to other factors.

xlightscreen wrote:chance of a outcome can easily be manipulated to any side favor rather its adding a extra dice to roll, or a modifier in the game. So in essence the luck on your graph couldn't be consistent as the chance of a dice roll rather you need a 4+ or a 2+ varies that chance dynamically.

I think we're using different definitions of "luck" here. With the way I'm using this word, I'm talking about the uncontrollable elements of the game (like the die rolls). Yes, you can shorten your odds of success for any given thing, at the cost of lengthening them for something else. This is what skill is.

By calling luck constant, I'm not saying that it's constant FOR THAT DIE ROLL, as the odds of any one thing being successful can be heavily influenced by decisions both players make. What I'm saying is that across the entire game, the die rolls will always fall within a certain band (you can't roll a 13 on 2D6), and that the die rolls themselves are unaffected by player skill (unless you're cheating).

How much luck impacts a game is, of course, determined by the specific of the luck. If I couldn't roll lower than a 6 with every roll I made, then luck would probably be a pretty huge factor that game, for example. In the end, I can't control luck, however,thus it's relative increase to other things the more that the other things are being controlled.

Ailaros wrote:I don't actually know where luck and skill cross, I only theorize that at some point they do. Furthermore, thinking about the lines on the graph may be a bit misleading. Perhaps if you thought of them as really fat lines, or intersecting fields, a more clearer picture could be created.

Ailaros wrote:This comes from the idea that changing odds has diminishing return. Going from a 1:1 chance of something happening to a 2:1 chance is huge. Going from a 100:1 to 101: is not. The same size increase matters less the further you go.

It's actually a truism of controlled variables in general. The more you control for a variable, the harder it is to control for that variable more.

And what are you using to determine that there is no relationship between skill disparity and the degree that luck affects the result of the game? You have made too many assumption that support your theory. I would have to say that Luck is not a constant in terms of its impact on the game when related to disparity in skill.

While this thread was kind of interesting at first, your theory is neither
A) well formulated or
B) reflected of empirical evidence.

We can all agree that where every other variable is equal, luck will be the determining factor.

However, you hypothesize that there is only one factor other than luck, which is skill. Skill is actually an amalgamation of many different things, which in reality are never equal. Since these other variables are not going to be equal, your theory is useless to real-world application. It only tells us what we already know.

I agree that 40k is not a superbly tactical simulation, you'll have to stick to archaic hex-and-chit WW2 games for that. I think "tactical" is in fact the wrong word to use for 40k. I prefer "controlling variables". For example you can try to control whether your Land Raider is visible or not, but there is nothing tactically genius or stunning about moving to get a cover save. You can try to control your Ork Boyz reaching the Eldar gunline, but "move forward!" isn't strategically mind-blowing. When I think tactics I think feints, pincer moves, misdirection, flanks, ambushes, etc. but because of all the different units and stats and variables in 40k those overarching tactical/strategic ideas can't actually be executed.
In a totally fabricated scenario where the players are playing exact armies and have exactly perfect tactics, then yes, skill is removed as a factor and the ONLY remaining variable is dice. But that is true of any game with dice (or other ways of simulating randomness). However since such a scenario doesn't occur on a game to game basis, luck does not have the monumental importance you are implying. Why can't such a scenario occur? Player fatigue, mistakes, misjudgements, miscommunication, and every other small error that adds up to change the course of a game.
That is why Chess and other luck-less games are considered by some to be superior to those with random factors: because they are a truer measure of player skill, knowledge, and fortitude.

Dracos wrote:And what are you using to determine that there is no relationship between skill disparity and the degree that luck affects the result of the game?

Actually, I'm claiming that there IS a relationship between skill disparity and the degree that luck affects the game. Its kind of central to the theory

Dracos wrote:We can all agree that where every other variable is equal, luck will be the determining factor.

However, you hypothesize that there is only one factor other than luck, which is skill. Skill is actually an amalgamation of many different things, which in reality are never equal. Since these other variables are not going to be equal, your theory is useless to real-world application. It only tells us what we already know.

bosky wrote:In a totally fabricated scenario where the players are playing exact armies and have exactly perfect tactics, then yes, skill is removed as a factor and the ONLY remaining variable is dice. But that is true of any game with dice (or other ways of simulating randomness). However since such a scenario doesn't occur on a game to game basis, luck does not have the monumental importance you are implying. Why can't such a scenario occur? Player fatigue, mistakes, misjudgements, miscommunication, and every other small error that adds up to change the course of a game.

Man, why is this so confusing to people? What could I say that would end the seemingly endless stream of people that are saying that this theory only works when the players are of exactly equal skill? Seriously, this is come up over a dozen times in this thread.

While this theory is saying that IF the two players are EXACTLY equal, then the ONLY thing that will matter is luck. The theory is also saying that AS the players become UNEQUAL, the skill disparity will matter MORE, relative to the disparity.

Ailaros wrote:
Man, why is this so confusing to people? What could I say that would end the seemingly endless stream of people that are saying that this theory only works when the players are of exactly equal skill? Seriously, this is come up over a dozen times in this thread.

While this theory is saying that IF the two players are EXACTLY equal, then the ONLY thing that will matter is luck. The theory is also saying that AS the players become UNEQUAL, the skill disparity will matter MORE, relative to the disparity.

Probably because the thread is 16 pages and most people are reading your version 2 summary and then replying? That and a lot of people have set views and won't really budge based on forum posts.

Ailaros wrote:Actually, I'm claiming that there IS a relationship between skill disparity and the degree that luck affects the game. Its kind of central to the theory

Your graph says otherwise.

Dracos wrote:

Ailaros wrote:Actually, I'm claiming that there IS a relationship between skill disparity and the degree that luck affects the game. Its kind of central to the theory

Your graph says otherwise.

Well, let's take a look at that graph here



So you see the Y axis? The higher up something on the Y axis, the more that thing determines the outcome of the game. Now, see the X axis? That show skill disparity. The further to the left you are, the more disparate the player's skill levels are.

Now, watch the magic here - You see how the further left you go on the X axis, the higher up the little red skill line goes up compared to the blue one? That means that when skill disparity is really high, the skill element of the game affects the outcome of the game more. Now, look over to the right. Notice how luck and skill are different relative to each other.

I'm pretty certain that this graph shows a relation between luck and skill, and that the purpose is to show how luck and skill affect the game.

Actually that is not true. The graph shows that Luck has value Y given any point on the X axis, meaning that for any given value of disparity in skill, Luck still has the same value Y on the "Determiner of Result" scale. So Y=L for all values X, meaning there is no relationship between Y and X.

edit: One thing to note is that the quote above in my post is questioning skill disparity, and you were talking about skill in your last post. Perhaps that is where your confusion comes from.

bosky wrote:When I think tactics I think feints, pincer moves, misdirection, flanks, ambushes, etc. but because of all the different units and stats and variables in 40k those overarching tactical/strategic ideas can't actually be executed.

..........................

You must play a different version of 40k than me.

[End Post]

Dashofpepper wrote:

bosky wrote:When I think tactics I think feints, pincer moves, misdirection, flanks, ambushes, etc. but because of all the different units and stats and variables in 40k those overarching tactical/strategic ideas can't actually be executed.

..........................

You must play a different version of 40k than me.

[End Post]

He plays the same one you do, it's just harder to hoot and yell like some iteration of 40k's Muhammad Ali when you're able to tell yourself the game isn't some superbly layered series of surprises.

Deleted

MikeMcSomething wrote:

Dashofpepper wrote:

bosky wrote:When I think tactics I think feints, pincer moves, misdirection, flanks, ambushes, etc. but because of all the different units and stats and variables in 40k those overarching tactical/strategic ideas can't actually be executed.

..........................

You must play a different version of 40k than me.

[End Post]

He plays the same one you do, it's just harder to hoot and yell like some iteration of 40k's Muhammad Ali when you're able to tell yourself the game isn't some superbly layered series of surprises.

No need to be peevish. But if you don't think that feints, pincer moves, misdirection, flanks, ambushes.....and even psychological warfare are parts of 40k, you must not play the same version I do either.

Nurglitch wrote:

Dracos wrote:Actually that is not true. The graph shows that Luck has value Y given any point on the X axis, meaning that for any given value of disparity in skill, Luck still has the same value Y on the "Determiner of Result" scale. So Y=L for all values X, meaning there is no relationship between Y and X.

Quoted for EMPHASIS.

First off, that's a graph thrown together quickly to illustrate a point, I think, and not one that is meant to be perfect. Hence the lack of markings and values.

Second, I think what you guys are after is an illustration that the effect of luck decreases based on *absolute* skill instead of relative skill. So basically a 3rd axis or a different graph.

Ailaros wrote:Actually, I'm claiming that there IS a relationship between skill disparity and the degree that luck affects the game. Its kind of central to the theory

This is what he claimed. I told him his graph did not say this. He posted the graph as proof of this. I debunked his claim about the graph. That's all.

edit: Oh, and he did it in a rather condescending manner, which was actually funny considering that he was incorrect.

At this point, we're just hashing over exactly how an example graph is displayed.

Here: on the far right of the graph, luck is about 90% of how things are decided. On the far left, luck is about 33%. The Y axis is how much effect skill or luck has. Luck is held constant to reinforce the fact that it's not controlled based on the disparity of the skills.

The "degree that luck affects the game" is not the same as how much of an effect luck has. The former is relative, the latter is absolute. At a certain skill level, luck may have a huge effect, but skill disparity matters more (left side). Or, at a higher absolute skill level, it could have smaller effect but the difference in skills is small enough to matter even less than luck (right side).

He stated the graph shows the former. It does. The graph would perform the way you expect if you convert it so that the Y-axis is "degree of effect". In that case, the sum of blue and red would be a constant (100%). If we did that, the blue line would start low and go higher, again supporting his statement.

Things get a bit mucky when there's a lot of switching back and forth between relative and absolute terms, and there's been a number of people getting it backwards. Ultimately, he made the graph to illustrate exactly the point he's making, and he's not a complete idiot. The illustration may not be perfectly clear, but this discussion would work a lot better if people avoided starting from the assumption that their detractors are completely slowed.

Okay, I have put a little thought into your theory, and how you are replying to people speaking against it, and I think I understand what is going on here.

Basically, I think a lot of people are reading your theory and making the incorrect conclusion that luck is the only determiner in games, while skill quickly means less when you play someone with the same skillset you have.

This is incorrect. All you are stating is that a game involving dice has a luck element that cannot be removed completely from the equation. No one can prove you wrong on this theory because it is a fact (let's just call it a law?). I do not fully understand why this concept needed to be posted. It would be like posting a theory that, "Armies with at least one HQ choice tend to win more games of 40k than those without any HQ", or, "The ability to measure 6" in your turn directly correlates to moving your units correctly".

Regardless of the number of detractors, you can adamantly stand by your theory because regardless of how people challenge your definition of skill, you just fall back on, "Dice are involved, so there is always a luck element."

Now that we have this out of the way, I think you should reconsider your graph. Consider a theoretical, extremely skilled player, A. He sets up to play against another extremely skilled player, B. Skill in this little example will obviously have to cover all aspects, such as listbuilding, decision-making, meta-analysis of the situation, etc.

Now, in the course of the game, A notices that B made a minor mistake. Here is where your graph completely stops working. A, being extremely skilled at exploiting an advantage can use that one mistake to push the game completely in his favour. B, being equal in skill to A, cannot make back the disadvantage A put him into because he then has less opportunity (with fewer models or lacking position) to capitalize on any of A's future mistakes. This is not a ridiculous notion, this is what happens in wargaming. How is this scenario accounted for by your graph? Surely skill played a large role in this scenario, and an individual with much less skill at exploiting a mistakes would have missed a possible opportunity to win the game.

So, what I've learned from the past 3 pages is that I should just take the graph out of the footnotes. All it's doing is confusing people.

Consider it gone.

Fearspect wrote:Now, in the course of the game, A notices that B made a minor mistake. Here is where your graph completely stops working. A, being extremely skilled at exploiting an advantage can use that one mistake to push the game completely in his favour. B, being equal in skill to A, cannot make back the disadvantage A put him into because he then has less opportunity (with fewer models or lacking position) to capitalize on any of A's future mistakes. This is not a ridiculous notion, this is what happens in wargaming. How is this scenario accounted for by your graph? Surely skill played a large role in this scenario, and an individual with much less skill at exploiting a mistakes would have missed a possible opportunity to win the game.

This is part of my theory. Skill matters in relation to the difference in skill level. If one person is better than the other, they will be able to apply more of their combat power in certain ways to play the smartest odds. Call it "capitalizing" if you will, it's still a part of skill.

What the important thing to remember here is that it is the relative skill level between players which is important to this all.

Actually, not exactly. My position is that, because events that determine victory are themselves determined by dice, luck is the prime determiner of the game. Skill also makes an impact in that it lets you mess with luck, but as both players get closer in skill level to each other, this impact of messing with luck decreases relative to other factors.

That is not always the cause though. You can have horrid dice rolls and still win the game, if you are playing missions where objective points are the key focus. Luck is also not a constant, you mitigate bad rolls but utilizing the framework of the rules. I got guys with 5+ armor saves, I put them in cover, I use terrain.


If anything, WHFB is way more reliant on luck than it is skill. For one the winds of magic is pure dice rolls. In 40K you get mission objectives, you get transport vehicles, you get to build an army to a specific tactic. In other gaming systems you don't always get that luxury. I do think one of the best gaming systems I played was the first edition of Warzone. It was based on action points. Every unit had a set number of action points and each action point would allow you to perform 1 action of a unit. Players took turns activating and executing actions 1 unit at a time, so going first wasn't an advantage. So if a unit had 3 action points it could move 3 times, or move once and shoot twice, and so forth.

40K has it's flaws, like any game. However, I would say out of every gaming system I have ever played (all GW games, Warzone, historical, L5R, and others I forget I even played) 40K doesn't live and die by dice rolling. I am sure there are plenty of victory stories floating around to people that had bad dice rolls. The fact that in 40K you can manage odds at dice rolls with so many different things means that it is even less of a risk. If a unit is leadership 10 from a character and that character has war gear that allows for rerolling leadership tests, they are pretty much like 99% never going to fail a leadership test. The only time you might break them would be from an assault that beat them with a high enough combat resolution. Then you have armies like Marines, that have They Shall Know No Fear, which means even if they do break, they will automatically regroup.

I said something like this earlier and I will say it again as far as luck and skill go.

Skill allows a player to give him better opportunities to be 'lucky' and helps mitigate his 'bad luck' or his opponents 'good luck'.

Ailaros wrote:So, what I've learned from the past 3 pages is that I should just take the graph out of the footnotes. All it's doing is confusing people.

I like how instead of admitting that its not saying what you want it to say you are just passing it off like people don't understand.

Ailaros wrote:This is part of my theory. Skill matters in relation to the difference in skill level. If one person is better than the other, they will be able to apply more of their combat power in certain ways to play the smartest odds. Call it "capitalizing" if you will, it's still a part of skill.

What the important thing to remember here is that it is the relative skill level between players which is important to this all.

Anything else there captain obvious?

Crom wrote:That is not always the cause though. You can have horrid dice rolls and still win the game, if you are playing missions where objective points are the key focus. Luck is also not a constant, you mitigate bad rolls but utilizing the framework of the rules.

Both of these points have already been addressed dozens of times in the past 16 pages. I'd go back and read more of the thread.

Dracos wrote:

Ailaros wrote:So, what I've learned from the past 3 pages is that I should just take the graph out of the footnotes. All it's doing is confusing people.

I like how instead of admitting that its not saying what you want it to say you are just passing it off like people don't understand.

I've been bending over backwards to try and help people understand what I'm trying to say. There have been some people that have disagreed, but have been positive contributors. Their opinions and ideas were much appreciated, and helped make the theory better. There have also been some people who misread things and then make statements saying that I'm saying something I'm not. Some of these people, like yourself, form the opinion that this must be wrong, la la la, I'm not listening.

I'm just getting tired of people who come on and spend several pages hoping to convince me of something by sheer weight of assertion while making snide comments at me personally. I do actually feel kind of foolish for not just ignoring you outright this whole time, but I was operating in good faith that you actually wanted to contribute something to the conversation other than just persistent derisiveness.

Lesson learned. I'll just return to ignoring commenters until they start saying things that are relevant.

Both of these points have already been addressed dozens of times in the past 16 pages. I'd go back and read more of the thread.

I have read, and I still disagree that luck has that large of an impact.

@Ailaros

OK let me jump at your side a bit.

I believe you have the point concerning this:

You divide 40k into 2 parts

1. skill
2. luck

no further definition needed.

given that skill is exactly equal, then luck MUST be the decisive factor.
This is simple and logical.

You can also say:



But what do you consider decisive?

lets have the following calculation:



This is why I think luck impact will be reduced if the skill raises, but of course as the difference in skill between the opposing players decreases the luck impact increases.

Crom wrote:

Both of these points have already been addressed dozens of times in the past 16 pages. I'd go back and read more of the thread.

I have read, and I still disagree that luck has that large of an impact.

Why? To me, I have read the theory (both 1 and 2), and agree with most of Ailaros is saying. It's fine if you don't agree, but tell us why you don't agree.

I can say that I don't believe the sun is the reason for the Earth's heat, but unless I argue my point some no-one is going to believe me.

TheRedArmy wrote:

Crom wrote:

Both of these points have already been addressed dozens of times in the past 16 pages. I'd go back and read more of the thread.

I have read, and I still disagree that luck has that large of an impact.

Why? To me, I have read the theory (both 1 and 2), and agree with most of Ailaros is saying. It's fine if you don't agree, but tell us why you don't agree.

I can say that I don't believe the sun is the reason for the Earth's heat, but unless I argue my point some no-one is going to believe me.

My whole point is, that yes luck does matter in 40K, but only to a certain extent. Out of every war gaming system I have played, 40K seems to have more opportunities to control/mitigate bad dice rolls. There are plenty of war gear and configurations you can do to mitigate it down to a very small issue. Twink linked weapons, war gear that allows rerolls, and cover saves all help mitigate what would normally be determined by bad dice rolls. Your actions make a much larger impact on a win than dice rolls do. There are also so many things you can do that do not involve dice rolls to win a game.

If two players are equal skill/experience that doesn't mean they won't make a mistake, or be baited into making a mistake. You capitalize more of mistakes than you do dice rolls. Plus with 5th edition being a mission based game more so than total annihilation (depending on the mission) means you can win by hold objectives, and even if you have bad dice rolls.

In other gaming systems, like WHFB for example, whole turns can rely on dice rolls. The Winds of Magic in the Magic Phase can really kill an army if you roll crap for the amount of power dice. Especially when your strategy or army's strength is in magic.

I think dice rolls do have an impact, but I think if you put yourself in a situation in 40K where dice rolls matter to the extent of costing you the game you probably either took a large risk, or played your tactics wrong. Sometimes you do have to take a risk, because your opponent can put you in a situation where you need to take a risk, so it is not like it doesn't happen. Also Luck is never a constant, you can have both good and bad luck in the same game.

Crom wrote:My whole point is, that yes luck does matter in 40K, but only to a certain extent. Out of every war gaming system I have played, 40K seems to have more opportunities to control/mitigate bad dice rolls. There are plenty of war gear and configurations you can do to mitigate it down to a very small issue. Twink linked weapons, war gear that allows rerolls, and cover saves all help mitigate what would normally be determined by bad dice rolls. Your actions make a much larger impact on a win than dice rolls do. There are also so many things you can do that do not involve dice rolls to win a game.

Actually, the dice are everything. Yes, 40K gives several opportunities to help turn the luck in your favor. That doesn't mean it goes away. 3 Broadsides with Markerlight support (twin-linked BS5 shots) will almost certainly hit with all their attacks, but that doesn't mean they do. I can still miss with all of them. Despite setting up Markerlights and Broadsides for an ideal shot, I still miss. There's nothing to be done about it either, I just rolled bad. I don't see my actions, despite putting me in a good situation, doing much to make up for that Broadside missing.

If two players are equal skill/experience that doesn't mean they won't make a mistake, or be baited into making a mistake. You capitalize more of mistakes than you do dice rolls. Plus with 5th edition being a mission based game more so than total annihilation (depending on the mission) means you can win by hold objectives, and even if you have bad dice rolls.

Except that if you rolled poorly, it's likely that either your units are dead (you can't control), their units are not dead (they can contest), or more likely, some combination of both. The only action in an objective match that could not be determined by dice is moving onto an objective out of terrain with no enemies around, granting you control. That's skill, but it's either an action your opponent anticipated (if closely skilled) or didn't (if large differences in skill are present). Either way, it's accounted for in the theory. If that's the reason you won the game, you skill overcame the luck. If not, then the luck still has a large factor, since the other objectives are likely being contested or controlled by the opponent, and you need to roll some dice to destroy/remove those units from those objectives.

I think dice rolls do have an impact, but I think if you put yourself in a situation in 40K where dice rolls matter to the extent of costing you the game you probably either took a large risk, or played your tactics wrong. Sometimes you do have to take a risk, because your opponent can put you in a situation where you need to take a risk, so it is not like it doesn't happen. Also Luck is never a constant, you can have both good and bad luck in the same game.

I don't get where this idea of a game coming down to a few rolls means it was a bad game on your part. I just consider it an even match then. If, on turn 7, I've put myself in a position to win and I only need a few rolls to work in order for me to win, I consider that game a well-fought game, regardless of the mistakes I may have made. If I haven't been swept off the table by 7, I obviously did something right, and if I still have a chance to win, I'd say I did a fair bit right.

And yeah, sometimes luck is nice to you (like when the Tau beat my Sisters in CC - nice to my opponent), or bad to you (like when 2 Eldar Jetbikes with fortune and 4+ invulnerable saves die to dangerous terrain, of all things). But in the end the dice affect everything of real consequence in the game. I don't shoot without dice, I don't wound without dice, you don't save without dice. You move into cover, which is an act of skill. Whether or not the cover saves you from my guns is a matter of luck. No matter how skilled you are, you have to roll to succeed at almost anything. And if the dice don't feel like working with you, you'll fail at things you should succeed at (like penetrating armor 12 within Melta range - happened to me about 5 times in 3 turns, and about 12 shots). When you're good enough to overcome bad luck, the skill difference is large. If not, the skill difference is less. This is the basis of the theory.

I don't get where this idea of a game coming down to a few rolls means it was a bad game on your part. I just consider it an even match then. If, on turn 7, I've put myself in a position to win and I only need a few rolls to work in order for me to win, I consider that game a well-fought game, regardless of the mistakes I may have made. If I haven't been swept off the table by 7, I obviously did something right, and if I still have a chance to win, I'd say I did a fair bit right.

Yes, this is a well fought game. But you are referring to a described situation, where you lose due to a few rolls, which is very bad playing. Why does the opponent need only some bad rolls on your part to win?

And yeah, sometimes luck is nice to you (like when the Tau beat my Sisters in CC - nice to my opponent), or bad to you (like when 2 Eldar Jetbikes with fortune and 4+ invulnerable saves die to dangerous terrain, of all things). But in the end the dice affect everything of real consequence in the game. I don't shoot without dice, I don't wound without dice, you don't save without dice. You move into cover, which is an act of skill. Whether or not the cover saves you from my guns is a matter of luck. No matter how skilled you are, you have to roll to succeed at almost anything. And if the dice don't feel like working with you, you'll fail at things you should succeed at (like penetrating armor 12 within Melta range - happened to me about 5 times in 3 turns, and about 12 shots). When you're good enough to overcome bad luck, the skill difference is large. If not, the skill difference is less. This is the basis of the theory.

Yes, this is of course correct.
But still, luck does not get more important the more skilled you are. The theory makes one suggest that (although this is not, what the theory is saying as I understand it), but It gets less important. That is the problem with the theory.

-Nazdreg- wrote:But still, luck does not get more important the more skilled you are.

No, that's not what the theory is saying...

Look at it another way. You go to a tournament. Your skill is a constant. Your opponent's skill changes from game to game.

Round one, you draw a ten-year-old opponent who is playing his very first 40k game with a borrowed army made up from the contents of a battleforce. It is not optimized, and the kid doesn't know the rules, even if it was.

Luck has almost nothing to do with who will win the game. (Although, in a more meta-sense, luck has everything to do with having you play this kid in the first round of a tournament). You, who has been playing for a few years, who posts on tactics threads online, know enough to bait this opponent with distractions, to throw up screens that he doesn't know how to avoid, and can probably use his lack of knowledge to ensure that he can't even get good shots on anything you have that's valuable. You can win this game without needing to roll the dice, because your opponent has very little skill.

Game two, you mess your pants cause you have to play DashOfPepper. Luck has very little to do with this game either. He sees through all your feints, ignores all your bluffs, and systematically destroys your army while rolling nothing higher than than a two.

Game three, with on massacre, and one massacred result, you face off against a player who has played about as long as you have. They also read dakka, and got advice from the army list forums, possibly even from the same posters who commented when you posted your list.

Do you think that luck (read as any variable outside the control of either player) will have an impact in this game? Will the matchup between their army and your army be a factor? Will winning first-turn choice matter? Will the terrain available on the table, and how it is laid out, impact the result?


Higher skill matters, because as your skill increases, fewer of your opponents will have the same level of skill, so you will be able to defeat more people without luck being a factor. This theory does not say that higher skill is pointless, or that higher skill = more luck. What it says is that when skill levels are equal, or nearly equal, that's when luck matters.

and even psychological warfare are parts of 40k, you must not play the same version I do either.

I dunno, I can't really get behind the psychological warfare, deception, feints and trickery angle of 40K. In my experience, it's not really about fooling the other guy, it's about understanding the most efficient way to beat him, then doing it.

In real life warfare, there are real things you can do to trick your enemy. You can make a bunch of fake inflatable tanks, and put them where is recon aircraft can see. You can drive trucks around in the desert so the sand plumes up and looks like lots of tanks. In 40K, he knows exactly how big your force is (the same size as his). He knows exactly what your models stats and capabilities are. There is extremely minimal room to "fool" anybody.

As far as the central point of this thread, I've started similar threads myself. I am always hearing about people (some folks seem to view DashOfPepper in this light), that can be anybody, any time, all the time, and not lose a model, and roll all 1s. I've never met such a person in real 40K life.

Some players are certainly better than others, will win with greater consistency, but I've never seen a player as good as some of the descriptions suggest.

For example, nobody is so good at 40K that they're going to beat a "good player" without losing a fair number of models doing it. Perhaps 25%...

Nobody is so good at 40K that they're going to go against a "bad beat" list, something that just happens to really work against their list, and win against a "good player."

Nobody is so good at 40K that they're going to have awful luck all game and still beat a "good player."

I don't think luck is ever the ONLY factor, but I agree with the core sentiment, which is that as players progress, the more list matchups (which is a form of luck) and dice rolls factor into the result.

40K is not just roulette. It's not just pure luck. There is a significant component of skill to it, and the best players will win much more often than even the "good players."

BUT... It's not chess. A grand master will beat me EVERY SINGLE TIME in chess. It's not basketball. An NBA caliber player will beat me EVERY SINGLE TIME in basketball.

I tend to think that if I played against the best 40K players in the world (and could take the list I wanted, without the limitation of having to paint it all up), I think I could beat those players (a guess) 20-30% of the time. I might even win more than 50% if I happened to choose a list that worked very well against theirs.

And that's not because I think I'm so great, it's just because it seems to me that luck factors much, much more prominently in 40K than it does in other competitions.

Phryxis, where do you live? If you lived nearby LA, I'd like to take you up on that.

One of the major differences I see behind chess and basketball compared to video games and 40k is accessibility. One of the things that's unfortunate about basketball is you need a certain level of athleticism to be able to compete.

Athleticism and talent are not skill, imo.

40k and video games are accessible because they have lower entry barriers...that means most anyone can play.

Oh about the chess thing...If I had 10 months to put you through a chess camp and you seriously studied and you knew which grand master you were playing against...I could get you about a 10-20% chance of winning. You'd still get owned, but out of 10 games you'd draw at least 5 of them.

TheRedArmy wrote:
Actually, the dice are everything. Yes, 40K gives several opportunities to help turn the luck in your favor. That doesn't mean it goes away. 3 Broadsides with Markerlight support (twin-linked BS5 shots) will almost certainly hit with all their attacks, but that doesn't mean they do. I can still miss with all of them. Despite setting up Markerlights and Broadsides for an ideal shot, I still miss. There's nothing to be done about it either, I just rolled bad. I don't see my actions, despite putting me in a good situation, doing much to make up for that Broadside missing.

Yes, but your chances and odds can be very much controlled in 40K. Unlike other gaming systems.

Except that if you rolled poorly, it's likely that either your units are dead (you can't control), their units are not dead (they can contest), or more likely, some combination of both. The only action in an objective match that could not be determined by dice is moving onto an objective out of terrain with no enemies around, granting you control. That's skill, but it's either an action your opponent anticipated (if closely skilled) or didn't (if large differences in skill are present). Either way, it's accounted for in the theory. If that's the reason you won the game, you skill overcame the luck. If not, then the luck still has a large factor, since the other objectives are likely being contested or controlled by the opponent, and you need to roll some dice to destroy/remove those units from those objectives.

Again, you can control your odds in 40K. I have a horde army of tons of units with no armor, I use cover and now have a 4+ save. So, I went from having no save at all to a 50% chance of saving against any attack with exception of those that ignore cover. I am controlling my odds, using them to my advantage.

I don't get where this idea of a game coming down to a few rolls means it was a bad game on your part. I just consider it an even match then. If, on turn 7, I've put myself in a position to win and I only need a few rolls to work in order for me to win, I consider that game a well-fought game, regardless of the mistakes I may have made. If I haven't been swept off the table by 7, I obviously did something right, and if I still have a chance to win, I'd say I did a fair bit right.

And yeah, sometimes luck is nice to you (like when the Tau beat my Sisters in CC - nice to my opponent), or bad to you (like when 2 Eldar Jetbikes with fortune and 4+ invulnerable saves die to dangerous terrain, of all things). But in the end the dice affect everything of real consequence in the game. I don't shoot without dice, I don't wound without dice, you don't save without dice. You move into cover, which is an act of skill. Whether or not the cover saves you from my guns is a matter of luck. No matter how skilled you are, you have to roll to succeed at almost anything. And if the dice don't feel like working with you, you'll fail at things you should succeed at (like penetrating armor 12 within Melta range - happened to me about 5 times in 3 turns, and about 12 shots). When you're good enough to overcome bad luck, the skill difference is large. If not, the skill difference is less. This is the basis of the theory.

Yes, I don't and never disagreed with this. I just started an Ork army. All my models are BS 2, which means 5+ on a D6 to hit. However, I built my army in a fashion where I am rolling (2250 points) over 100 shooting dice a turn, and with a 33% chance of getting a 5+ on a D6. I also know that almost all my army has a 6+ save, which means anything AP6 or greater is instant death on a wound. So I use cover to my advantage. I also load all the boyz up in trucks so they are on fast vehicles and can move flat out. Then I got big meks with KFF giving the vehicles a permanent obscurity save. Also in this build I got 30 bikes, all with twin linked big shootas I am heavily weighing my odds.

I never said dice rolls don't count, and a stream of bad luck can change a game. I am saying that in 40K you can heavily mitigate your luck with your Army List. Which is why I think your Army List is probably the number 1 factor if you win or lose, tactics play a close second and dice rolls come in third. I have had terrible dice rolls and still forced a draw, where in other gaming systems I would have lost big time. I use my Army List, my skill, the terrain, and everything else in my power to always give me the better odds on the dice. 9 times out of 10 the better odds usually pan out, and yes a stream of extreme bad luck can wipe out a lot of stuff. So, it is my opinion that since you can do all sorts of things to mitigate odds on dice and put them in your favor that dice rolls don't have as big as impact as Army List choice and tactics, because if you make really poor decisions in your Army List and on the table in the game, all the luck in the world probably won't save you.

No, that's not what the theory is saying...

Look at it another way. You go to a tournament. Your skill is a constant. Your opponent's skill changes from game to game.

Round one, you draw a ten-year-old opponent who is playing his very first 40k game with a borrowed army made up from the contents of a battleforce. It is not optimized, and the kid doesn't know the rules, even if it was.

Luck has almost nothing to do with who will win the game. (Although, in a more meta-sense, luck has everything to do with having you play this kid in the first round of a tournament). You, who has been playing for a few years, who posts on tactics threads online, know enough to bait this opponent with distractions, to throw up screens that he doesn't know how to avoid, and can probably use his lack of knowledge to ensure that he can't even get good shots on anything you have that's valuable. You can win this game without needing to roll the dice, because your opponent has very little skill.

Game two, you mess your pants cause you have to play DashOfPepper. Luck has very little to do with this game either. He sees through all your feints, ignores all your bluffs, and systematically destroys your army while rolling nothing higher than than a two.

Game three, with on massacre, and one massacred result, you face off against a player who has played about as long as you have. They also read dakka, and got advice from the army list forums, possibly even from the same posters who commented when you posted your list.

Do you think that luck (read as any variable outside the control of either player) will have an impact in this game? Will the matchup between their army and your army be a factor? Will winning first-turn choice matter? Will the terrain available on the table, and how it is laid out, impact the result?


Higher skill matters, because as your skill increases, fewer of your opponents will have the same level of skill, so you will be able to defeat more people without luck being a factor. This theory does not say that higher skill is pointless, or that higher skill = more luck. What it says is that when skill levels are equal, or nearly equal, that's when luck matters.

This is of course perfectly correct, and I never denied this. (Although there is a problem with the tournament pairing, because I would actually like to draw Dash, because my 10th wants revenge, and concerning luck being a factor in this game: Depends on the matchup. It will be a challenging game.)
The thing I don't like, is, that the wording was like:

Well, you just can get to a certain level of skill, and if you are almost there, it is pointless to improve, because luck is the bigger factor anyways.

That sounds a bit like:

Why do you want to improve at any form when you are dependant on luck?

And this is a statement I can not accept.

Redbeard wrote:
Game two, you mess your pants cause you have to play DashOfPepper. Luck has very little to do with this game either. He sees through all your feints, ignores all your bluffs, and systematically destroys your army while rolling nothing higher than than a two.

If my signature block wasn't already spoken for, this would be it. =p

I lost a game this weekend. Game 3 of a local RTT against a mechanized BA player who crowed that he had brought his list specifically to beat me. He won the roll to go first, I reserved up, and two hours later, he had slowplayed his way to victory with half my army only being on the board for one turn (and some of it still in reserves) before he put up his hands and said, "We don't have time for another turn!!"

I lost by two killpoints. I congratulated him, and found the whole thing kind of funny; doubly so because he registered on Dakka afterwards SPECIFICALLY to mail me and ask about the Nova Invitational - because beating me means he gets to play in the Invitational right? I had a good laugh about that. I explained what a GT was, where some are that are coming up, and what slow-playing is and why it might get him in trouble at a big event.

Look at the definitions the author utilizes:

LUCK

For the purpose of this theory, luck is a catchword for all of the uncontrollable variables in a game of 40k.

SKILL

Just as luck is the overarching idea of uncontrollable variables, so is skill the idea that represents all controllable variables.

Given that luck is the primary mover in the game, skill's role is entirely devoted to altering luck. Its role is predominantly to shorten your own odds of success, while lengthening the odds that your opponent succeeds.

Note the logical fallacy given above. The author defines what constitutes luck and what constitutes skill, and immediately under his definition of skill, he states that luck is “the primary mover in the game”. That is, he is defining luck to be the more important of the two.

The author goes on to say:

Skill allows you to change the odds of luck in an attempt to control the effect of luck.

Followed later by:

This means that luck is an independent variable of skill...

If skill modified luck, then luck must be a dependant variable of skill.

This theory, then, means that the more one advances in skill at playing 40k, the less they will see their games determined by their increase in skill, and the more that they will see their games determined by luck.

I have to disagree. Let's say that someone plays enough games (X) in a time period (Y) such that a statistical equilibrium is reached. This can be 100 games in a month or a million games in a second. If, over a series of time periods, the players win/loss percentage continues to increase, this increase would be attributed to skill and not to luck. Luck can't be controlled, skill can.

In the short tun, someone may have a very bad run of luck, but in the long run it should average out.

At a very highly competative level, very small differences in player skill make a very large difference. In many cases, I would expect that two top skilled players playing each other could point to a single moment in the game where the losing player made a poor decision, costing him the game.

Part of skill is risk management, which means understanding and accounting for the effects of luck. This means that they control luck, not that it controls them.

Chess is a game with no luck involved, and the best players are the most skilled.

Poker is a game with a high degree of luck, and the best players are the most skilled.

Simply because luck is a factor in a game like 40k doesn't make it the "prime mover".

Athleticism and talent are not skill, imo.

Well, is intellect, memory, attention span, etc. also not skill?

I'm just saying, it seems to me that any competition has a set of traits that, when a person possesses them, will predispose that person to success in that competition. I'm not sure it's entirely relevant how a person arrives at their results, whether it's genetic gifts or hard earned practice, winning is winning.

40k and video games are accessible because they have lower entry barriers...that means most anyone can play.

Anybody can play basketball, as well. Just because somebody is bad at it, that doesn't mean they can't play.

Oh about the chess thing...If I had 10 months to put you through a chess camp and you seriously studied and you knew which grand master you were playing against...I could get you about a 10-20% chance of winning.

I don't know enough about chess to dispute this, but I'd also point out that (as I'm sure you know), chess is generally played as a series of matches, so a couple draws, and even a win or two, is sorta like getting a lucky shot to go in against the NBA player. I'm sure I'd periodically be able to score on that player, but in the end the outcome will always be the same. He will win the final score.

I think that the outcome in 40K would be much more even.

Poker is a game with a high degree of luck, and the best players are the most skilled.

For me, this is exactly what it comes down to.

There are dice in 40K, and some rolls are extremely important (for example, roll for turn, mission type). This means that luck IS a factor. How big of a factor is it? That can be debated all day... But we know it's a factor, and if the two players are of similar skill levels, it's certainly a relevant factor.

In many cases, I would expect that two top skilled players playing each other could point to a single moment in the game where the losing player made a poor decision, costing him the game.

I'm sure in many cases this is true...

But, on the other hand, I'm sure everyone can point to things that happened in games that totally changed the game, and which could not have been predicted. I once had a guy assault a 150 point Sisters squad with about 350 points of Nobs coming out of a Battlewagon. I had made a movement error to even allow it to happen... And the Sisters held up, rolled ridiculous, and broke and swept the Orks. The other guy did EXACTLY what he was supposed to do, I made a MISTAKE, an it all went against him.

Everyone has these sorts of stories, and they happen more often than one might imagine they should.

I have a story that I hope will make a good contribution to this thread.

My Dark Eldar took on Dark Angels last night. Six units of terminators, mostly with TH/SS, a cyclone launcher in each unit, apothecary for the command squad, two units of three ravenwing attack bikes, a multi-melta bike in each (that split off).

Basically 2,000 points of terminators + 6 bikes + 2 multi-melta bikes.

Normally, I'd take on this challenge with something fluffy; my Necrons would enjoy this fight. However, my opponent is a GT player and has an apparently flawless record of beating the crap out of Dark Eldar. Pitched Battle, annihilation, he won the roll and elected to deploy and go first. I reserved everything. Now, it was a fun game, there were interesting moments, we both rolled pretty terrible, but I want to focus on one unit: My beastmasters.

My beast unit moved onto the board in line with a unit of 3 bikes. I did some visual guesstimation and it looked like I'd be able to get them with a 12" charge. They moved on 6", I ran them, and they only got 1". When I went to assault, they were LITERALLY 12.1" away from me. I couldn't make it. I asked my opponent, "Do you have mad skillz, or did you just get lucky?" He said that it was luck at this point.

Factors affecting the beasts here:

It was SKILL that determined where I put them on the table.
It was LUCK that determined that they only got to run 1".
It was luck AND skill that determined where my opponent's bikes were in relation to my ability to move on and assault them.

From where my beasts were...they were not in cover. They were also packed in closely and vulnerable to missile templates:

It was SKILL (or lack of it) that resulted in my beast unit being lumped together. I thought for sure that I would get the assault, and didn't bother spacing myself out to avoid getting nuked by missiles.
It was SKILL that determined where my beasts came onto the board - I didn't make it into assault, but the angle of attack and where I put them was a calculated move; there were only two terminator units with LOS to my beast unit to drop templates on them - itself a calculated move because I also had transports exposed to those two units.
It was SKILL that determined the interaction between his units and mine - when I moved the beastmasters onto the board, knowing that his terminators aren't fleet, I did some mental chess - if I go here, he's going to go there with this unit, do this action - my thought process *always* presumes that my opponent is going to make the action that is *least* favorable to me.
It was LUCK that determined that the interactions I was predicting between our units (assault, counterassault - one terminator unit making it and one not based on where I was going to assault, my ability to consolidate 1-2" away from his other terminators) didn't take place.


Fast Forward a Turn. As expected, my beast unit gets lit up by the two units of terminators I was expecting to light them up. I allocate 11 wounds with no cover saves the best that I can from the first unit. I take some casualties.

It was SKILL that made my opponent exploit a unit in the open without cover instead of shooting at something else.
It was LUCK that determined where the scatter dice would land and how many casualties it would cause.
It was SKILL that determined which casualties I removed from the clump - to minimize damage from the blast markers I was expecting to come in next - but now unable to hit as many models.

And fast forward back to my turn.

His bikes are still within potential assault range. I move up 6", spread out a bit, maximize assault coverage, but stay northerly - I want to assault in such a way that I can hit his unit without having to swing around towards his terminators and open myself up to an easier counterassault. I multi-assault his bikes: My beasts from one side, my baron from the other (not with the beasts), wipe out his bikes and consolidate 4".

It was SKILL that spread out my beasts to avoid next turn firing casualties - whether they would get fired on or not, I should have done that in the first place.
It was SKILL that ultimately was the deciding factor in where his bikes were in relation to my beasts - since he moved them there.
It was LUCK that determined my assault range with 2D6 to get to the bikes in the first place.
It was SKILL that placed my beasts at a range where a 3+ on either dice (x2 with beasts) would put me into assault - mitigating the impact of that luck.
It was LUCK that determined that I rolled enough dice to wound and kill his two bikes.
It was SKILL that put enough dice there to BE rolled that *not* killing those two bikes was a statistical improbability.
It was LUCK that determined that I got a 4" consolidate.
It was SKILL that used that 4" consolidate to spread out and make as unattractive of a shooting target (and attempted assault target) as possible.

This is the important part.

My opponent's turn. He moves a unit of terminators up to the edge of cover, doesn't shoot at my beasts. He's going to need 5+ to assault them because of my positioning. He rolls to assault, makes 6", gets into assault with me. Belial, Apothecary, +4 more terminators. I kill two terminators at I6 and I5, but then lose combat - I get away but he's within 6" of me, so I run off the board. Luck had very little to do with that.

It was LUCK that determined how many wounds I did to his terminators.
It was LUCK that determined that his Apothecary died instead of a TH/SS.
It was SKILL that got my full 6" reaction to still leave Belial + a terminator out of assault range - so that he only had two models to strike me back with.
It was LUCK that determined that he wounded me back three times.

At this point, some more chess moves took place in my head. I'm winning by two, I have three wounds to allocate. I can put all three on khymerae and take 4+ invulnerable saves - doing so will mean I probably pass 1-2, tie or win combat and stay locked. He'll have to make a fearless armour save, but its on a 2+. Then he'll pile in and Belial and the other terminator will get their attacks too. I'm still half in reserves. On the flip side, he can't chase me if I fail combat, and I'm far enough from the board edge not be unlikely to run off, and since I'm beasts, I've got a 3d6 run move. I piled into combat intentionally stacking up on my board edge side, so that I don't really have to run through him on my way out.

I chose to take those three wounds on two beastmasters and a razorwing flock. All three automatically die to thunderhammers.
It was SKILL that determined which models I lost. Beastmasters have little utility except leadership, but losing all three would be unfavorable if I try regrouping next turn. Losing a single razorwing flock stacked on another 5 wounds lost, making me lose by 7 when I could either would have won, or lost by 1 at worst.
It was LUCK that determined my run distance: 9" on 3D6 towards my table edge.
It was SKILL that did the odds in my head of this venture succeeding.
It was LUCK that determined my opponent's consolidate distance.

After all was said and done, I didn't run far enough and he was 5.8" away from me. Beginning of the next turn, I ran off the board. Bad luck all around, eh?

It was LUCK that primarily affected this unit negatively throughout the game.
It was SKILL that presented them as a credible threat to my opponent.
It was SKILL that determined that ultimately - whatever happened to my beast unit and however unlucky I got with them was irrelevant to the outcome of the game.
It was SKILL that weighed and decided that the beasts running off the board was preferable to his terminators being in combat with them.

At the start of my next turn, the beasts ran off the board. Then a raider full of wyches zipped up to them - the wyches got out the front to go assault some other terminators, and the haemonculi got out the back with his shattershard. He rolled a 1, 4 and 6. The 6 was for Belial. Poof, Belial vanished from the board. Trueborn blasters finished off the unit.

At the end of the game (annihilation), I won - my only lost killpoint was my beast unit, which I voluntarily ran off the board. Calculated risk.

This has been my point through this entire thread.
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Luck dictates the actions of individual units. Skill makes the consequences of luck by and large irrelevant.
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Luck dictates the actions of individual units. Skill makes the consequences of luck by and large irrelevant.

I'm not entirely sure I see that in your battle report...

I think that battle report is very illuminating, and if one had enough such reports it would help in assessing the value of luck vs. skill in the game, but I'm not sure I see it proving your point.

One thing I see a lot of, is people talking about "40K 101." Stuff like: knowing when you want to lose a combat and fall back (against Terminators, for example), when you want to spread out (against blasts), when it's ok to lose a unit, etc. etc.

These are all things you did in your game, and they exhibit game skill. But they're also stuff that people consider "fundamentals." The people who talk about the "fundamentals" always talk about the "advanced tactics" that come next, but they never really explain what those are. I tend to think that's because they don't know what they are, and they may not exist at all, but these guys need them to exist in order to rationalize their worldview of "super great players."

So, to me, what your battle report is showing is that a lot (or all) of the SKILL points of the game are pretty straightforward, and will be understood by any good player, while a lot of the LUCK points have major impact. For example, you rolled a 1 on your Fleet move for your Beasts. That could have cost you the whole unit, and it all came down to a roll that you had a 5/6 chance of getting done. You'd be foolish not to count on 5/6 odds, but if you roll that 1, you just took a major setback in the battle.

I don't care how skilled somebody is, if they do the statistically correct thing and it backfires on them, there's no accounting for that. If they have that happen several times in a game against a competent player who avoids major mistakes, they're probably going to lose. And having several key moments of bad luck is FAR from uncommon in 40K.

I'm not sure there are more advanced skills than what you'd call the fundamentals.

That doesn't mean that better players aren't more skilled. I think that better players simply do a better job of keeping track of more fundamentals. Knowing where each unit is, where each objective is, who can charge/multi-charge what, and what the odds of any given action are- all at the same time- is what a good 40k player needs to do.

In my personal experience, I think the best possible "training" for becoming a better 40k player is to go and play a game like Warmachine/Hordes where generally the game forces you to think 2-3 turns ahead and have most/all units working together to generate the greatest synergy in an over-arching plan. If you don't, you lose, and the game ends, immediately.

40k is so simplistic that even when you're losing, badly (for example, 0/5 objectives with your opponent on 3), you can feel like you're still playing the game and having fun rolling dice killing models. And that's fine, and not disparaging to 40k as a game system, but I really believe that it allows poorer players to stay poor players because they can still have fun while making 0 progress towards becoming a better gamer (or increasing their skill).

Phryxis wrote:
So, to me, what your battle report is showing is that a lot (or all) of the SKILL points of the game are pretty straightforward, and will be understood by any good player, while a lot of the LUCK points have major impact. For example, you rolled a 1 on your Fleet move for your Beasts. That could have cost you the whole unit, and it all came down to a roll that you had a 5/6 chance of getting done. You'd be foolish not to count on 5/6 odds, but if you roll that 1, you just took a major setback in the battle.
.

Then you're missing my point.

Those rolls, the consequences that entailed from them, and the factor that luck played in their success and failure was significant to that unit's performance. That unit's performance is insignificant to the battle. My point is that rolling a 1 and not getting the beasts into assault is NOT a major setback because a player's skill determines how important of a role luck has in your game. I didn't hinge my game on one unit and its ability to get into assault. Instead, that unit played a minor role in the overall battle, which *was* my point.

I took a single unit, and detailed what it did, why I had it do what it did; far from a battle report.

More importantly, you say that everything I talked about was fundamental skills. Bear in mind that I'm only talking about a single unit and its role in a complex operation.

Positioning that unit to draw fire away from vulnerable transports, while presenting a potentially unrewarding assault that pulls his unit towards a more threatening unit...in a situation that is win/likely win for me (either I kill terminators and lose a couple beasts and get away cleanly while subjecting him to devastating counterattack, or I kill terminators (or don't), and don't get away cleanly, and subject him to devastating counter-attack). Those beasts *positioned* me to acquire 3 killpoints regardless of their performance. Every unit in my army is working together like that, in the same "1-2 turns ahead" mentality.

Put another way, I am literally making my opponent's decisions for them. In a game against me, every decision you make - every move you make, every target you select and fire at...is one of three things:
1. What I expected you to do, in which case it is the least disadvantageous to me that I could make it.
2. What I didn't expect you to do because #1 would have been more beneficial to you in some strategic respect.
3. What I didn't expect you to do because I missed it, and therefore made a mistake.

If someone ever does something I'm NOT expecting, one of us made a mistake. If you think that's fundamental 40k skills - more power to you! I don't think that it is. In my experience (which is pretty widely sampled), better players get to the level of "The actions I'm taking will probably generate the best series of outcomes. They play good, solid poker: They play the cards in their hand.

In 40k, the good players play their opponents, and know what their opponent's cards are too.

sourclams wrote:In my personal experience, I think the best possible "training" for becoming a better 40k player is to go and play a game like Warmachine/Hordes where generally the game forces you to think 2-3 turns ahead and have most/all units working together to generate the greatest synergy in an over-arching plan. If you don't, you lose, and the game ends, immediately.

40k is so simplistic that even when you're losing, badly (for example, 0/5 objectives with your opponent on 3), you can feel like you're still playing the game and having fun rolling dice killing models. And that's fine, and not disparaging to 40k as a game system, but I really believe that it allows poorer players to stay poor players because they can still have fun while making 0 progress towards becoming a better gamer (or increasing their skill).

I think that's an absolutely terrific suggestion. Warmachine does force you to see combos and tit/tat options in future turns.


Also, generally speaking, the more game systems a player is exposed to----the better player he becomes.

scuddman wrote:Oh about the chess thing...If I had 10 months to put you through a chess camp and you seriously studied and you knew which grand master you were playing against...I could get you about a 10-20% chance of winning. You'd still get owned, but out of 10 games you'd draw at least 5 of them.

I can't stress how inaccurate this is. There is no way that a beginner could play against a GM after even 10 months of solid studying and stand a chance at that high of a draw rate. Maybe you could pull out one draw. Maybe.

I'm curious, what made you make that claim? You must be a player so I'm curious as to your rating.

Dash,

You took calculated risks, and I bet if you replayed the same game, with the same Army Lists and mission, you would not have had that issue. Rolling a 1 on your run roll (assuming you had fleet of foot to assault even if running) was a calculated risk you took, which had a very small margin of error. You had an 83% chance at success, so it was really just bad luck. However, given the context of the situation, you probably already knew this, and therefore it was your skill that dictated the decision. I think obviously if the situation had been different, say 20 inches away you would not have attempted such an action.

Luck and skill are not interchangeable in the sense that you obviously have common sense and enough skill to take a low risk move such as your failed assault. 99 times out of 100 that would probably pan out in your favor (or 83 times out of 100 since it is an 83% chance at success) and someone who had less skill would try an even higher risk maneuver. A lot of times when I win a game, it is not always because my tactics were superior but more so my opponent tried to get cute and tries to execute a risky move, and when that risky move failed I capitalize on it.

So, luck had an impact on your game in that instance. However, you took the measures and precautions to minimize your margin of error with luck. 40K is all about that. I cannot think of any other gaming system I have ever played that allowed to you weigh your odds on dice rolls as much as I have in 40K.

Now, had you moved with in 18 inches, then decided you were going to move via fleet of foot to try to assault you are banking on a 16% chance at success (1 out of 6) to roll that 6 to make that happen. Then I would consider that bush league type stuff and say that you were banking off ridiculous odds and hoping for the best of luck. If you pulled that 6 off and was able to assault 18 inches that turn with fleet of foot, then that would be epic luck.

Even though you claim that your dice rolls were horrid you will won by victory/kill points. So again, luck had somewhat an influence on the outcome but your tactical decisions ultimately won the game.

I think at this point I am just going to reiterate my opinion on the matter, and yes this is just an opinion. It is not the gospel. I also admit I have been out of the gaming circle for years but at one point in time played competitively over a wide variety of games. I even managed to win some tournaments, cash prizes, limited edition models, etc. in my time. I think my theory still stands though for all of these war games. Any war games that uses a points system, and you build an army list follows this hierarchy. The best decision you can make is in your army list, a close second is your on table skills and tactics, and last comes in dice rolls. Like I stated earlier. You can have the best dice rolls ever in 40K but with a crappy army list and poor tactics you probably still will not win many games. Army list and skills play into it more than dice rolls. Though on occasion, you will see dice rolls do some crazy stuff, and that is what makes the game fun. I am still competitive, but only mildly compared how I used to be. I used to have to win every game. Now that I am getting back into it, I play for fun and I constantly tweak my army list and try new stuff out. Sometimes it throws my opponent for a loop and I win, and other times I pay for my mistakes.

I think we all agree if skill is equal, then luck HAS to be the determining factor. Yes, as player skill gets closer to equal, luck also becomes a greater factor (but not the greatest).

However, the important part here, and I think this is the point Dash is trying to make, is that even as skill approaches equality (high level of play), skill is still far more important than luck. Sure, luck is more influential than it was at lower skill levels, but skill is what is largely determining the outcome of the game.

I've played in many serious tournaments in my day and most of those can be pinpointed to a tactical misstep. If dice "won the game," it was largely because a mistake was made to allow it to come down to that dice roll. Nevertheless, luck will always play some part. 10%, 20%? Who knows exactly. There's nothing you can do if all of your reserves come on turn 5, or you do actually only roll 1's for wounds / fail ALL your armor saves / whatever extreme you want to come up with.

Because I believe that even ONE tactical mistake will lose someone the game, skill is largely the determining factor even at high levels of play. Sure, if players were truly equal in skill, luck would be the only determinate. But in practice, that will NEVER happen and, thus, it is skill which determines our fates!

My point is that rolling a 1 and not getting the beasts into assault is NOT a major setback because a player's skill determines how important of a role luck has in your game.

I think I know what you're saying, I'm just not sure I find it all that convincing, and parts of it just aren't accurate.

For example, it doesn't matter how skilled you are, you can't just decide to take luck out of the game. You can play in such a fashion that you're prepared for back luck, and quickly mitigate its effects with smart play, but you can't just eliminate luck.

So, to paraphrase what I THINK you're saying, "good players can bounce back from bad luck." That, I can buy.

But it doesn't change my point, which is that luck is a significant factor in 40K. How much? Less than poker, but more than chess or basketball. IMO it's enough of a factor that it causes me to disbelieve the stories I hear of dominating players who never lose, and instead win every game by massacre.

I think we can agree that no matter how good a player somebody is, if they've got 200 points of models, and the other guy has 2000, they're probably going to get beaten. We might even agree that no matter how good a player somebody is, they're going to regularly lose to an "average player" when they've got 1500 points and the average player has 2000. Or, whatever, move the points around until it works for you.

So, now, take the Beastmasters. You had a 5/6 chance to get the assault with them, you rolled a 1. Let's pretend they then got wiped out. Let's pretend they were a 200 point unit. You're now looking at a 1800 vs 2000 point game. A couple other examples of early bad luck, and you could be looking at a 1500 vs 2000 point game.

Now, again, I understand that a great player is not going to let that bad luck fluster them, they're going to have a gameplan that can recover, and they're going to try to make a game of it... But the fact is, luck is a factor, and no amount of player skill will completely remove it as a factor.

More importantly, you say that everything I talked about was fundamental skills.

I didn't mean to disparage your abilities, I meant it more as Polonius does... That there really are no "advanced tactics," it's really just fundamental skills being carefully and thoroughly exercised.

The reason I think that's relevant is because I want to refute the notion that "great players" are doing something so brilliant that it can't really be explained to laymen, but it TOTALLY eliminates luck from the game. Great players aren't doing anything magic, they're just doing the same thing as average players, only more quickly, thoroughly and accurately.

Those beasts *positioned* me to acquire 3 killpoints regardless of their performance.

I think we all recognize that sacrifice of a unit is frequently an acceptable outcome if it leads to larger success. I'm not suggesting that you were just fumbling around, making mistakes with your models, I'm just trying to point out that eventually the game comes down to making rolls, and no matter how intelligently thought out your plans are, if your units simply don't do what they're supposed to do, it can't always be overcome.

Put another way, I am literally making my opponent's decisions for them.

I think I understand the sentiment. When I play the game, I try to guess what the other guy will do with each of his units, and to the extent that he doesn't do that, I consider it a failure/mistake on my part. I always assume that what he's going to do is use his army to the best advantage. I think that's along the lines of what you're saying.

All of that is fine.

But consider the role of dice in all of this. You're looking to set up a "devastating counter-attack" with the positioning your Beastmasters. That's the goal, and that's the result a great player gets, because they planned it that way. Only what happens when you lure the guy into your trap, counter-attack, and your assault unit loses combat and gets swept? The outcome is that your unit got punked, the same way it would (only more often) in the hands of a poor player. Only for that particular game, the dice have made your outcomes the same as that poor player.

However, the important part here, and I think this is the point Dash is trying to make, is that even as skill approaches equality (high level of play), skill is still far more important than luck.

Unfortunately, that's not really how math works. You said (and I fully agree) that in a game between two equal players, luck is the determining factor. It's really the only factor. So, as difference in skill approaches zero, impact of luck approaches infinity. And infinity is a big number. It's not like it's a non-factor and then BAM right when skill levels match up it pegs at infinity. It's going to diminish as the skill levels deviate from one another, but it won't ever go away completely.

We also know that even the best player will lose to the worst player if their luck is sufficiently bad (they roll all 1s), so luck is never NOT a factor. Chart it. Influence of luck is nonzero in all cases, it diminishes in proportion to the disparity in skill, and it's infinitely high when skills are equal. That strongly suggests that it remains a relevant variable in virtually all 40K games.

Because I believe that even ONE tactical mistake will lose someone the game, skill is largely the determining factor even at high levels of play.

I would agree that skill is going to be rewarded far more often than any other factor, but I would point out that "luck" comes up in a lot of ways. It's not just bad rolls. In a lot of ways, 40K has a certain "rocks-paper-scissor" element to it. A given army gets hot, people build lists to take it on, that list gets hot, etc. etc. etc. If you show up with a given list, and just happen to draw matches against exactly the types of armies your list is best against, you got lucky. Sure, you might also play well, but there might be another guy at the event, a guy who's actually a better player, who got bad beats every round, and ended up taking 5th.

It's not just about "will a C- player ever beat an A+ player?" It's also about "will the A+ player win ever single 32 man tourney when playing against A- players?" I'd say he won't. He won't even win half.

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree then. You disbelieve the stories you hear of dominating players who win every game by massacre.....each of the links in my signature isn't a single batrep, its a link to the series of batreps for the tournament I'm batrepping. In virtually all the games that I win, I table my opponent.

Nuke 'em from orbit. Its the only way to be sure.

In virtually all the games that I win, I table my opponent.

Ok, but how many large events have you played at? And of those large events, how many did you take first at?

You could click on the links in his signature...

Dracos wrote:There is no way that a beginner could play against a GM after even 10 months of solid studying and stand a chance at that high of a draw rate.

ORLY?

Derren Brown snatched out an overall win when he played 9 pro or semi-pro chess players simultaneously:

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=1610

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/5578835/14649389

Admittedly he kind of cheated on 8 of those matches. But he won the 9th due to getting some decent coaching against that specific opponent, according to most observers.

That article describes him cheating in every single game, and only 4 of 9 were GMs. Furthermore the 9th opponent was not a GM, and he won because he was being given his moves...

This holds no meaning, and has no parallels with teaching a beginner how to achieve draws in a match against a GM.

Also, this whole line is kinda OT, so I apologize for the digression

While repeating LUCK SKILL LUCK LUCK SKILL SKILL COMBO BREAKER must look like it's pretty authoritative, the argument "I rolled a 1 over here a couple times! And I didn't lose! So luck doesn't matter!" is not really convincing.

What we should see from this thread is two lists that optimally have a roughly 50% chance vs each other played by two equally skilled players on a tabletop (or vassal) that has terrain that was set up by a third party in a manner everyone can agree is fair, and then watch the players play 20 or 30 games over the course of a couple weeks. Vassal would be great for this, and the results would add alot more to the discussion than Dash attempting to use the weight of his own internet self-importance in lieu of actual data for the 30th time.