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Ailaros wrote:

scuddman wrote:Oh, well, if he's doing money matches, then his skill level will be higher than most others.

Why?

Why does the amount of money you wager on a game have any impact on how much luck is the determiner of a game? Moreover, why does wagering more necessarily imply more skill?

Were this true, craps or roulette would be an absolute science, rather than a game of chance...

There's nothing TO craps other than rolling dice. And perhaps the amount of money you wager on a game has an impact on how much luck is the determiner of the game because the players *wagering* the money are at a skill level high enough not to believe that the earth is flat, that voodoo works, or that luck has much to do with determining the winner of a 40k match.

In 40k, rolling the dice is the smallest piece of it.

Why?

Why does the amount of money you wager on a game have any impact on how much luck is the determiner of a game? Moreover, why does wagering more necessarily imply more skill?

Were this true, craps or roulette would be an absolute science, rather than a game of chance...

Because of a financial concept called risk aversion. And I'm not talking about luck, I'm talking about skill.

scuddman wrote:Because of a financial concept called risk aversion. And I'm not talking about luck, I'm talking about skill.

Right, and I'm saying a high threshold for risk is not the same as skill.

And saying that, if you played him, he'd take your money. Risk aversion is not a high threshold for risk. It is that you are only willing to take risk when the RETURN is at a certain threshold. If you aren't certain you're gonna get a return, you wouldn't do it.

Dashofpepper wrote:
I'm a gamer first, an unwilling hobbyist, and a chance collector.

Hence the difference.

Dashofpepper wrote:

The only thing keeping people from going pro with 40k is the naive belief that luck has anything to do with this game.

Well, no. The fact that there's no viable spectator market or big money interested in funding such a thing is what keeps 40K from going pro. And there are good reasons why a game like 40K should not have such things, not the least of which is that it's not that deep a game.

I get that you're a good 40K player. I understand that you win a lot of matches. But believing that luck (ie. randomness) has nothing to do with victory in anything competitive, much less 40K, is hubris. Random events are a factor in competitive sports at the highest of levels. People who compete in the hardest, toughest, most competitive environments on the planet understand this. People who sacrifice their lives, their health, their sanity on the altar of victory understand this. These people train every day, live, breathe and eat their chosen sport, to minimise these random events. They contort their minds and cripple their bodies so that their skills will be unparalleled, so that they can step onto the stage with the greatest in the world, sometimes the greatest in history. I know these people. I have competed against these people, trained them, and been one of them. Even these people know that sometimes, gak happens. Pretending that there's no such thing as luck is folly.

I have no doubt you understand things about 40K the rest of us don't, and that you believe that in the rarefied air you breathe only your pure, untrammeled skill separates you from the mere peons who scrabble in the muck and dare to say they play the same game as you. Props for your skill, dude. Seriously. But believe me, it's really not that deep a game. By comparison, there aren't that many points in it where skill can come into play. And randomness is a significant part of it.

Furthermore, it seems a little strange to me that one would say that luck has nothing to do with the game when the primary mechanic of the game is rolling dice....

scuddman wrote:And saying that, if you played him, he'd take your money.

So?

Anyways, I'd like to thank everybody for their input here. Some of it was extremely useful in hammering things out. My findings on the matter are recorded here.

Thanks again!

Ailaros wrote:

scuddman wrote:Oh, well, if he's doing money matches, then his skill level will be higher than most others.

Why?

Why does the amount of money you wager on a game have any impact on how much luck is the determiner of a game? Moreover, why does wagering more necessarily imply more skill?

Were this true, craps or roulette would be an absolute science, rather than a game of chance...

There's incentive for you to do it. When there's something at stake, people will tend to play to win, regardless of fluff or whatever. And isn't craps and roulette purely luck-based? If it needs a certain degree of skill, I'm sure there would be professionals who would play it. There are professional poker players after all.

It's also about security. If you are going to earn money to support yourself or even more while playing the game, you can afford to spend more time to play the game more. It stops being a hobby and it becomes a job. It's the difference between someone who's hobby is to paint portraits and someone's who is paid to paint portraits: sure some hobby guy might be really good, but the tendency is that the professionals are more skilled, since they spend more time to it.

Have none of you "it's all luck" chaps ever read _A Player of Games_, by Iain M. Banks? The assumption that games that include a random element involve less skill than completely non-random games is characteristic of pre-hyperspace societies.

Let's assume that chess requires skill, at a high level of play.

Now let's compare 40K to chess.

In chess, if you know the rules, you can look at the board at any stage, and see a finite number of possible moves that the next player can make. You can put a number on that number, quite easily. Look 2 moves ahead, and you can put a bigger number on the set of possible moves that can be made.

In 40K that is not really true any more. It's less inherently predictable, less definable as a number. There's an infinite number of possible moves that any one infantry squad can make with its 6" move allowance (a bounded infinity, admittedly, like the infinity of numbers between the number 1 and the number 2, but an infinity nontheless). The board is analogue, rather than digital.

Add in the effects of the dice -- the fact that you have to allow not just for every possible combination of moves that you and your opponent can make on each turn (every *infiinite* but bounded combination of moves), but also every possible combination of every result of every die that is thrown as part of a turn.

And you still have to win. You have to allow for all of those things, and know that even allowing for all of those things, your army and skill level and awareness of game-state and flow combine to give you the victory. Whatever your opponent does.

I'm not at that level yet. Nowhere near. But I get better every time I play, because I recognize that that level exists, because I see how complex and skilled this game can be. If you assume it's all about throwing dice, you'll never get much better -- not because you're not a good enough player, but because you don't believe it's possible to be a good enough player.

40K? Just about rolling dice? Sure, the same way that Street Fighter II is just about pushing buttons.

Dash if you feel like addressing any of the points I've made, knock yourself out. Repeating yourself a few times? Like I already said you were? And ignoring people's points? Like I pointed out? Not so relevant, sorry. I know you think you're the world's best upscaled tic-tac-toe player, and that this game is some massive infinite well of skill inputs, and that anyone that disputes that is inherently incorrect, but you have yet to really demonstrate anything to the contrary (as several people you've ignored have pointed out to you on multiple occasions) All I've seen so far is that you have the disposable income to go get ranked at these tournaments and still have enough left over to throw at a game of 40k. Merry Christmas to you! That unfortunately means nothing in a discussion regarding skill inputs!

As for Ian, you are correct in that any given unit can do what appears to be a near infinite variety of moves, but in reality those moves all create a small set of binary conditions - so just because a unit of Scouts can go 6 inches in a circle doesn't mean that there are an absolutely infinite number of game positions that will result from these infinite potential movements i.e. most movements will either be "In shooting range of x without fear of counter shooting" or "In shooting range of x without fear of assault from Y" - you can expand on this to be "In shooting range of x without fear of assault from Y and able to contest objective z by turn N" or whatever you feel like adding and you still wind up with a managable list of relatively binary inputs from movement.

Fighting games make a bad comparison for a couple reasons: the (literally) hundreds of skill inputs made in a given 30-second match, compared to the 30+ decisions between movement, target selection, and launching assaults in a given game of 40k are going to provide for a much higher skill variance as well as the fact that the skills are directly tied to execution in a fighting game - you don't (barring obvious extreme edge cases like GG Faust throwing literally random crap in the air) roll dice to see how much damage you do to an opponent with a given combo - if a character went to Perfect Guard a mistimed Inferno Divider, but then "WHOOPS I ROLLED A 1" and got launched anyway, fighting games would be considerably different .

It's also more fun to watch.

Anyways, last thing I want to point out is this idea of true mitigation.

I think in his article, Ailaros said that he had a game where everything was shaken.

What about the event that you go first and you're able to get everything that your opponent has that is shooty into hth?

This is true mitigation that your opponent cannot get around, barring weird rules like hit and run or combat tactics.

Is that considered a luck based or a skill based event?


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Fighting games make a bad comparison for a couple reasons: the (literally) hundreds of skill inputs made in a given 30-second match, compared to the 30+ decisions between movement, target selection, and launching assaults in a given game of 40k are going to provide for a much higher skill variance as well as the fact that the skills are directly tied to execution in a fighting game - you don't (barring obvious extreme edge cases like GG Faust throwing literally random crap in the air) roll dice to see how much damage you do to an opponent with a given combo - if a character went to Perfect Guard a mistimed Inferno Divider, but then "WHOOPS I ROLLED A 1" and got launched anyway, fighting games would be considerably different .

There is randomness in fighting games, it's just not tied to dice. You put people into situations and they have to guess. You see it all the time when someone gets knocked down and has to guess what to do on wakeup. The thing that skews this is risk vs. reward. Sometimes the correct counter is difficult and doesn't do very much return damage, so putting your opponent into that situation is a huge advantage. It's still random though...

scuddman wrote:It's also more fun to watch.

Anyways, last thing I want to point out is this idea of true mitigation.

I think in his article, Ailaros said that he had a game where everything was shaken.

What about the event that you go first and you're able to get everything that your opponent has that is shooty into hth?

This is true mitigation that your opponent cannot get around, barring weird rules like hit and run or combat tactics.

Is that considered a luck based or a skill based event?

I would say if a list had the ability to completely shut another list down, then:

If ''Scissors list" performed as well against the unwashed masses as "Paper list" then it's a bad matchup, and that is largely luck-based, unless your metagame is such that bringing Scissors List will make you as likely to get to the top table as Paper list, in which case it would be skill based - you chose to bring Paper even though you were likely to put yourself in a position to be defeated by Scissors without any gain vs. the market as a whole.


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scuddman wrote:There is randomness in fighting games, it's just not tied to dice. You put people into situations and they have to guess. You see it all the time when someone gets knocked down and has to guess what to do on wakeup. The thing that skews this is risk vs. reward. Sometimes the correct counter is difficult and doesn't do very much return damage, so putting your opponent into that situation is a huge advantage. It's still random though...

You're correct in that luck also rears it's head in fighting games as well, I wasn't really trying to say fighting games don't compare to 40k because of luck, but because of the massive variance in skill inputs as well as the fact that the very execution is completely different - you force a hidden guessing game on your opponent with something like playing wakeup, where in 40k there's nothing really behind the scenes like that.

Isn't that why everyone is meching up, though? A friend of mine pointed out that vehicles were like rings in sonic the hedgehog. As long as you have one ring left, it doesn't really matter that the vehicle is killed; the contents inside are going to be okay.

Another thing was as a perfect counter to lash. You also don't have to take leadership tests while inside a transport, completely invalidating a lot of very powerful things (like pbs or fear of the darkness or whatever)

You could say this is a form of true luck mitigation, right?

MikeMcSomething wrote:Dash if you feel like addressing any of the points I've made, knock yourself out.

Points have *been* addressed. Sorry that you didn't get the answers you wanted the way you wanted them, but when your presentation involves ridiculing the person you're trying to get to answer you, you get dismissed.

Forum 101.

scuddman wrote:What about the event that you go first and you're able to get everything that your opponent has that is shooty into hth?

Is that considered a luck based or a skill based event?

Luck. Specifically, the roll to determine who goes first.

As for other games, like chess, poker, and street fighter, there are very serious differences between those games and 40k that only make comparisons so valid.

And there is no such thing as "perfect mitigation". The only way that losing something would make NO difference when it was gone is if it made NO difference if it was still there.

Such a unit, I'd assume, would cost zero points...

Also, the idea of "perfect mitigation" is silly. For every amount that you are able to mitigate the effects of luck, so your opponent is able to exploit the effects of luck. As such, you really have to compare perfect mitigation against your opponent's perfect exploitation. If they're not the same level of perfection, then that skill difference will matter (in relation to their difference), if they're equal, they won't.

Which is what I've been saying this whole time...

scuddman wrote:Isn't that why everyone is meching up, though? A friend of mine pointed out that vehicles were like rings in sonic the hedgehog. As long as you have one ring left, it doesn't really matter that the vehicle is killed; the contents inside are going to be okay.

Another thing was as a perfect counter to lash. You also don't have to take leadership tests while inside a transport, completely invalidating a lot of very powerful things (like pbs or fear of the darkness or whatever)

You could say this is a form of true luck mitigation, right?

You can do things in 40k that completely eliminate a given small variable (like you can not take psykers to avoid having to lose your HQ 1 in every 1000 matches or so to multiple perils of the warp rolls) but once both players have done that, if their lists are equal, and they aren't moving their vehicles ass-first into AT guns all day, and they shoot the dangerous stuff first, with the correct amount of their stuff, then at the end of the day a huge chunk of how the game is resolved comes down to how the dice fall.


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Dashofpepper wrote:

MikeMcSomething wrote:Dash if you feel like addressing any of the points I've made, knock yourself out.

Points have *been* addressed. -

If they were addressed by someone, it certainly wasn't you! But nice try anyway!

I would agree with the people that say luck is only a small part in it. Good players create their own luck, give opponents opportunities to depend on luck (and lose b/c their luck is bad) and adapt to situations where your luck is bad.

This reminds me of a game I had on Vassal yesterday. My nids, an experimental and weak list took on daemons. The other guy took risks with his deep striking that ultimately caused him to lose a whole unit of bloodletters to scattering off the table. I mopped up his crushers and herald.

He conceded and blamed the dice for his demise. If he hadn't scattered, who knows what would have happened. But I know this much, he took a chance and it didn't pay off. He set his stuff down 8 inches from the side of the table, where he said '7 is the average roll' and scattered off. Dice don't do what you expect them to.

bucheonman wrote: Good players create their own luck

The only way this would be true is if player skill determined the outcome of the die.

In more technical parlance, that's called "cheating".

bucheonman wrote:I would agree with the people that say luck is only a small part in it. Good players create their own luck, give opponents opportunities to depend on luck (and lose b/c their luck is bad) and adapt to situations where your luck is bad.

This reminds me of a game I had on Vassal yesterday. My nids, an experimental and weak list took on daemons. The other guy took risks with his deep striking that ultimately caused him to lose a whole unit of bloodletters to scattering off the table. I mopped up his crushers and herald.

He conceded and blamed the dice for his demise. If he hadn't scattered, who knows what would have happened. But I know this much, he took a chance and it didn't pay off. He set his stuff down 8 inches from the side of the table, where he said '7 is the average roll' and scattered off. Dice don't do what you expect them to.

Thing is, everyone here knows you create/mitigate your own luck - the discussion hinges on the actual boundaries of how much luck you can write out of the game.

Okay, I guess I can see that to an extent.

In chess, it is a slight advantage to play white (who always goes first).

If we assume infinite skill and perfect play, then who would win would come down to whoever won the roll to play white.

But we discussed this already. This assume perfect game breakdown, which 40k hasn't reached.

I'd like to hear why you say, "As for other games, like chess, poker, and street fighter, there are very serious differences between those games and 40k that only make comparisons so valid."

scuddman wrote:I'd like to hear why you say, "As for other games, like chess, poker, and street fighter, there are very serious differences between those games and 40k that only make comparisons so valid."

In chess, the SOLE determiner of which pieces are taken off the board is movement. In 40k, you can move stuff and attack your opponent's pieces, but whether you are successful is determined by a die roll, not by where you moved your units.

In poker, the random element is hidden from your opponent. The random element only matters at the end, if your opponent calls. In 40k, it matters at the beginning and all the way through the game.

In street fighter, once again, the damage you do is based on when you press a button. If a punch is successful, it's because you pressed a certain button at a certain time while your character was a certain distance away. In 40k, if your punch was successful is determined by the roll of a die.

You don't need to break down 40k all the way in order to realise that 40k is a different game from other games.

In 40k, you can move stuff and attack your opponent's pieces, but whether you are successful is determined by a die roll, not by where you moved your units.

I don't see how the distinctions between poker and street fighter set them apart so that luck means more in 40k than in those games. Or any game, really. If anything, 40k's randomness is more quantifiable because it's defined as a die roll.

I don't agree with the above either. If you aren't within 12 inches of an enemy unit, your charge will ALWAYS fail. If your lascannon is 49" away from the tank, the shot will ALWAYS fail. Movement and range are NOT RANDOM and are not trivial, and they play as big if not a bigger role in taking a piece than in rolling the dice. Once again, it's possible to win without taking a single piece from your opponent.

This goes back to my argument about position being importnat, that I feel you glossed over.

I think the thought is that, if you shoot at my tank and you get lucky, it dies and you can't mitigate that. But you can!

Here's an excessive example...ninja Tau in a tournament setting with limited time. My scoring unit comes on the board at the end of the game (as I make sure they don't come in until time is almost called). Opponent never gets to shoot. Or do anything really. It's also not very fun, but that's neither here nor there.

Or what if swooping hawks were scoring and I always deepstruck so conservatively that they wouldn't mishap? The rubber hawk thing completely mitigates shooting

scuddman wrote:I don't agree with the above either. If you aren't within 12 inches of an enemy unit, your charge will ALWAYS fail. If your lascannon is 49" away from the tank, the shot will ALWAYS fail. Movement and range are NOT RANDOM and are not trivial, and they play as big if not a bigger role in taking a piece than in rolling the dice. Once again, it's possible to win without taking a single piece from your opponent.

This goes back to my argument about position being importnat, that I feel you glossed over.

At no point have I said that 40k is ONLY a game of luck. My point has only been that other things determine the outcome of the game less than luck the more they are controlled for.

If you believe that luck isn't a factor, on the other hand, that seems strange to me, what with the fact that we roll dice and all.

And for the record, the only way you could win against an opponent in 40k without destroying a single one of their units is if the skill difference between the two of you is phenomenally huge. If you play against an opponent as skilled as you, you can't win a game without destroying stuff.

... or, you know, you play kill points missions...

but whether you are successful is determined by a die roll, not by where you moved your units.

This is plain wrong. If it were true, I would cancel every tactical experience I made and just play into nowhere hoping my dice would secure my victory.

My theory is:

If you are equally skilled, then luck impacts equally on your result.

If you are low skilled, luck has a high impact, because you dont have tactical plans and randomness will rule the game.

If you are high skilled, luck has a very low impact (yes it has an impact, but most of the time not a decisive one) because you plan your game.

So equally high skilled games will end in a draw.
Equally low skilled games will end in a random result determined by dice.


Of course I had games where I was extremely lucky and turned a normally clear defeat into a massacre victory (against a better player! I made a stupid mistake, I did not see a single mistake from my enemy), and I have been very unlucky and lost a game almost with a massacre instead of winning it easily (against a slightly worse player).

Both results werent decided by dice rolls, they were decided by lists that were vulnerable against absurd dice.
If you field two landraiders as a main striking force and only have 4 twin lascannons you should be aware of the possibility to lose a killpoint game vs an MSU army.
If you field 2 big seer councils you are doomed against an IG if your guys retreat even though you have a LD10 rerollable.

Both lists are yay or nay setups. So you are dependant on the success of your "deathstars" (which is their big weakness). This is a matter of skill, not a matter of luck.

MikeMcSomething wrote:As for Ian, you are correct in that any given unit can do what appears to be a near infinite variety of moves, but in reality those moves all create a small set of binary conditions - so just because a unit of Scouts can go 6 inches in a circle doesn't mean that there are an absolutely infinite number of game positions that will result from these infinite potential movements i.e. most movements will either be "In shooting range of x without fear of counter shooting" or "In shooting range of x without fear of assault from Y" - you can expand on this to be "In shooting range of x without fear of assault from Y and able to contest objective z by turn N" or whatever you feel like adding and you still wind up with a managable list of relatively binary inputs from movement.

A manageable list of relatively binary inputs from movement? When you also factor in the different options for placing each individual scout in that unit, and factor in every other unit, and their positions, and their assorted movement options (including movement options outside the movement phase), in every turn (including the potential turns 6 and 7, if you happen to live in a universe in which that particular atom decays and that particular cat dies), and terrain? I think that gets quite far beyond a manageable list, at least to the vast majority of players.

The fully random factors -- die-rolling -- add a major element of risk management to the game. If you know all the charts pretty well, and all the unit and weapon stats, you have a pretty good idea of what the possibilities are, but there's a huge yomi side here too which is *highly* reminiscent of SFII or real-world combat sports, in that the particular risk management style a particular player is known for could become significant in the way you manage your own risk. For example, we know from other posts that Dash (though we might believe him to be mildly reckless on the issues of drunken 40K and/or 40K with thousands of dollars to play for) takes very few risks when he plays: ISTR he mentioned that he doesn't ever expose a unit with the expectation that it will be destroyed after doing its job. Another high-end player might well take more of a "go big or go home" approach, willing to lose 90% of his army as long as you lose 100% of yours. Observing the top players' different approaches would absolutely lead to a new understanding and a new depth of play which 40K rarely sees, since few players, even the best players, get to regularly, systematically play against and observe (even second-hand, on video) other top players outside their own area in the way that SFII or judo champs can.

I was playing Eldar in a KillTeam game last week, my Pathfinders failed to wound for three rounds, that was 20 to wound rolls showing 3 or less... but that's not why I lost the game, it was because I should have deployed the rest of my guys behind the pathfinders... why didn't I? I was rushing to teach a guy how to play and didn't think about the implications, I just wanted stuff in combat quickly to help with the demonstration.

Tactical decisions will always have a bigger effect on the game than die. To use the SAG as an extreme example, to even have the chance to roll 6,6 one must first decide to take it.

scuddman wrote:

I don't see how the distinctions between poker and street fighter set them apart so that luck means more in 40k than in those games. Or any game, really. If anything, 40k's randomness is more quantifiable because it's defined as a die roll.

The difference is that 40k is more transparent and has a far lower execution threshold than both of those games.

In 40k you know -- or should know -- exactly what your opponent is fielding and its location, and all of its abilities and capabilities, at any time. Although there's a variable outcome for any one action, it's a fairly predictable variable being constrained to a d6 in the majority of circumstances. Execution also tends to be perfect (in terms of, my models will move exactly where I want them to move, when I want them to, barring minority circumstances like immobilization or dangerous terrain and rough terrain. Even then you can opt to not go through terrain, and circumvent the risk entirely.

In Poker, the d6 is a d47; you know only your own hand (or your own hand plus the flop), and the 'skill' aspect is in managing the risk:reward payoff and in reading your opponent's behavior to attempt to determine the likelihood that you can 'roll' higher on the d46 than s/he can.

In Street Fighter, there is less ambiguity than in poker because again you should know your opponent's character and abilities, but the execution threshold is far, far higher than in 40k. If I spend 10 seconds deciding that my best course of action is to turbo boost my Vendetta, I measure out 24 inches and pick up my base and do so. If I want to counter an enemy ability, I have to first identify the ability being used, and in the split second window of opportunity I have to hit the exact combo of buttons necessary to do so correctly. That's a time constraint, memory/knowledge constraint, and a tactile constraint (ability to hit buttons within the window of opportunity).

How many of us can walk up to a table, look at the units and layout, and predict where a unit is going to be in 1-2 turns fairly reliably? Probably all of us. Can we say the same about where the chips will go in the next hand of poker? Or which player will land the first blow when a SF game starts? That's much harder to do.

If after discards both players knew both hands in poker and were betting on which hand was going to win as the turn and river are revealed, poker would be more similar to 40k.

-Nazdreg- wrote:

but whether you are successful is determined by a die roll, not by where you moved your units.

This is plain wrong. If it were true, I would cancel every tactical experience I made and just play into nowhere hoping my dice would secure my victory.

It's only wrong if you take my quote entirely out of context.

The point I was making was comparing 40k to chess. In chess, the ONLY determiner of which enemy pieces are removed is how you move your own. In 40k, you still need to move your pieces (seriously, I never said 40k does not have a skill component), but the only thing that movement plays in 40k, with regards to if an enemy unit is destroyed or not, is if you get the chance to roll to see if the unit was destroyed or not. The actual destruction of a vehicle requires you to roll a vehicle destroyed result, not move a meltagun on top of a vehicle (like chess).

-Nazdreg- wrote:If you are equally skilled, then luck impacts equally on your result.

So equally high skilled games will end in a draw.

This would only be true if both players rolled equally well.

Really, if both players are equally skilled, they will be able to mitigate and exploit luck equally, which means there is no net effect of skill on luck, not that there is no net effect of luck on the game.

This would only be true if both players rolled equally well.

OK I should add "most likely". But it is not required to roll exactly equal.
But how do you explain guys who dont lose most of the time? Are they lucky per se? Are they more skilled than the whole community?

Really, if both players are equally skilled, they will be able to mitigate and exploit luck equally, which means there is no net effect of skill on luck, not that there is no net effect of luck on the game.

The problem is, mitigating happens before exploiting.

So if someone can exploit anything, something wrong must have happened before.
If someone mitigates, the wrong is not wrong anymore, so there is nothing to exploit.
And normally you dont rely on things that will not normally happen. So preexploiting will just result in an unnecessary high risk.

In addition there are many things in 40k that dont involve luck at all:

Distances
terrain shape
model shape
physical presence
mission objectives

and so on

its a long list. Highly skilled players will concentrate on those factors, so dice rolling becomes less and less important.

If I am 25" away from an enemy he will not fire a single boltgunshot on me next turn, even though he may roll only 6es.
If I am totally behind terrain/my models, I will not get shot unless the opponent has a barrage weapon. No dice needed.
If I confront a unit with 2 of mine, one of mine will survive the encounter for one turn. (Given that multicharge is impossible and this unit wont be able to split fire) -> local superiority
If I have a vehicle in front of my opponents way not a single infantry model will pass through it.

low skill players dont care about those things. They may happen accidentally but not on purpose, so they will have to rely on dice.

-Nazdreg- wrote:how do you explain guys who dont lose most of the time? Are they lucky per se? Are they more skilled than the whole community?

Both of those explanations are just fine examples.

-Nazdreg- wrote:The problem is, mitigating happens before exploiting.

Actually, no it always doesn't. On the one hand, you can exploit before your opponent mitigates. Have you ever had an opponent move something back away from a unit with a meltagun or with close combat upgrades? You haven't even rolled the dice yet. If your opponent is mitigating BEFORE the event, then what they are doing is taking actions to lengthen their odds of ruin, your own actions on your own turn are done precisely to shorten them.

Secondly, you can exploit luck during your own turn. Have you ever shot a transport with one weapon and then fired at the guys who got out with another? Your opponent didn't have a chance to do anything before you were able to exploit the luck of rolling well on a vehicle damage chart.

-Nazdreg- wrote:In addition there are many things in 40k that dont involve luck at all
...

its a long list. Highly skilled players will concentrate on those factors, so dice rolling becomes less and less important.

Taking all of those things into account falls under player skill. Highly skilled players will be able to manipulate those things, but all those factors are still rolled into skill.

Terrain has no bearing on die rolls. None of those things you listed do. They don't effect luck at all.

Skill doesn't make die rolling less important by itself. It only makes it less important relative to the skill gap of the players.