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Ok we all have bad rolls , it's part of the game , but lets say you had played 5 games straight where you had lost all 5 games down to the worst rolling you have ever had .

This has happend to me . Now i dont mean at the point where its do or die or anything like that i mean every roll you roll is bad .

Take my last 5 games from turn 1 through to the last turn i have rolled more bad dice than i thought possible to ever roll .I have not enjoyed any of thoses games ,not because i lost but because nothing has worked .

I am in a rut, a bad one even a loss with avg rolls and some succes in the game even just killing a unit i make it my aim to kill in the game would be a welcome change .

So now i find myself wondering why i play when i dont enjoy it at all

I dont want to quit but i cant seem to motivate myself anymore and my tactics suffer due to expexcting bad rolls which i have had all to often .

So to the point of this post

I am sure i am not alone with having a very bad run of luck ,so can anyone out there tell me how they delt with it when they had it ,how they kept going on when they were so sure there dice would be bad everytime they rolled them ?

And just to let you have an idea of my last game i lost because i failed 4 LD test's in a row (LD9) and shot 6 strenght 9 shots at i uint of 3 guys and hit with 4 and then rolled 4 1's (NEEDING 2'S TO WOUND) the 4 units ran off the table having rolled 11, 12 ,10 and 11 for there fall back moves .

So how do i push through this bad patch and keep going ?

Arrange all your dice in a circle. Select one and place it in the center, where all the others can see it. Then proceed to make an example out of it for all the rest. Fire, drills, smothering in superglue, whatever you happen to have handy.

If the others refuse to learn their lesson, well, time for a new cube.

Luck is one thing I believe in. Sometimes you got it, sometimes you don't. However, sometimes entire armies are cursed. My Space Wolves, for instance, have a habit of failing 4 2+ armor saves when they're only called upon to make 5. This has been going on pretty much since the new codex dropped. I don't know why the dice gods frown upon my newish codex.

There is no way to get past it, the gods of the dice frown on you.

My first ever game of necromunda was like that, I didn't role a 6 the whole game. My heavy got shot at long range by a juve with a pisswilly lasgun, then rolled dead on the serious injury chart (lost all his expensive equipment) and my gang leader went down and suffered brain damage. It was so bad I just retired the gang and started again. These things happen...

But there is a phrase "Fortune favours the brave" and there is a lot of truth behind that. Eventually luck will smile on you, but you will never feel the benefit of it unless you are doing stuff that requires luck. If you play safe all the time you will only notice the bad luck. I suggest you live a bit more dangerously.

Dice stats are a law of nature unless your using loaded dice so the problem is likely in your head. Seriously rolling bad when it counts screws with your head sometimes so you "feel" like the dice are working against you. More likely you almost always roll average but the 5s or 6s don't stick out in your mind as much as the ones because things were going bad and your reinforcing that feeling by focusing on negatives. This makes it hard to win since if you convince yourself that the dice gods hate you your tactics tend to go to crap along with your mood. Trust that it all will even out in the end and work on your army list, deployment and in game tactics and go for things where the dice work for you like twin-linked weapons, armor values, redundant units or tons of shots/attacks.

That or by a new dice cube I don't know.

Maenus_Rajhana wrote:Arrange all your dice in a circle. Select one and place it in the center, where all the others can see it. Then proceed to make an example out of it for all the rest. Fire, drills, smothering in superglue, whatever you happen to have handy.

If the others refuse to learn their lesson, well, time for a new cube.

. . . it is time for the Purging to commence

BEAT LUCK. Outdo chance! Make your tactics so sound and thorough theres almost no point in rolling the dice.

Or just roll a number of dice in the 3-digit range instead.

I don't believe in luck I do believe in a failure to randomize. I see lots of people that just pickup their dice and drop them, the trend tends to be the same rolls over and over. Try shaking them up real good and then rolling them a decent horizontal distance.

There was a study some egghead collage prof did on rounded corner chessex dice. Where he thought he proved that they rolled 1's more often. What he really proved was that a 2x2x2 cube is not a sufficient enough space to properly randomize a die. They started all their dice with the 1 face up and ended up showing a something like a 30% likely hood to roll a 1 and 9% for a 6, the rest the numbers evened out. The egghead promptly published his results and test method. Others then discovered that you could simply follow his method and it favored the top oriented number. Failure to randomize is almost always the culprit.

Actually a manufacturer paid a statistician to study the randomness of the dice. They were using the most common mold design used for dice, something like 90% of the dice produced worldwide use the same design. They found that due to the way the edges and corners rounded off, one set of opposed sides on every dice would be "favoured" and both sides would face up 10% more often then the rest on that particular dice. He also found that the opposed pair most common to benefit was 6 & 1. I don't recall the company's name, but they posted a pdf of the report on their website.

If my dice continue to underpreform, I throw the old ones in the woods and buy a new cube.

Ah, gamers and their dice traditions, each more crazy than the last. (You may think that guy sacrificing dice to intimidate the others was joking, but he wasn't. That was dead serious.)

From my experience,that people that complain about dice rolls in a game really just have a problem with expectation. Your lascannon really can't be relied on killing that LR in a single shot, or even 3 or 4. There's an old saying: "Happiness is reality divided by expectations." You can't change reality, so, my best advice is to lower your expectations. When you go to make your dice rolls, don't expect anything amazing to happen. It usually won't, and, when it does, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

If this is just a streak of really bad luck, just play through it. If you get to the point where you want to ragequit 40k all together, take a break from playing for a bit. Get back into modeling, and take some time to cool off.

Bad dice rolls like that only come up during a close game. You know. When One squad of 10 marines is holding and objective.
They are forced to take 10 saves.
None pass. GAME.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/That's_How_I_Roll_-_A_Scientific_Analysis_of_Dice

This is the study, egghead professor. The problem with his study was the rolling cage. The other problem with his study is that he edits out data, even admits. It was in no way scientific. The other issue I had was that the Casino dice were dead on 16.67 percent. Having a BS in math I can tell your right now rolling 6 sided dice 1000 times is not nearlly enough to hit a "perfect spread". This is junk science at its finest. Randomize your dice shake them up roll them a fair distance bounce them off something (like the casion craps table).

Replace your dice because they're obviously tainted.

I feel your pain tho, because I have the same issue. Although, sometimes it's a matter of my forgetting rules such as melta-bombs being S8+2D6 to penatrate. :(

You think some of this is bad, look up "Pre-Rolling" in D&D. There are a few players out there who will make a dice roll, twenty or more times in a row, and not bring up a "1" and then place the dice in box where it can't jiggle or "roll itself" safe until the day they need to roll their death saves... Pre-Rolling means that you start with a lot of D20s, roll them, then remove all the die that rolled a 1, repeat until you're down to one dice.

On the Real Hustle BBC three. It shows you how con men are able to shake dice in a beaker and when they roll them out they get 5's and 6's each time.

nickmund wrote:There is no way to get past it, the gods of the dice frown on you.

This. its just blind luck. Which is why i love warhammer and 40k. The random factor.

nickmund wrote:On the Real Hustle BBC three. It shows you how con men are able to shake dice in a beaker and when they roll them out they get 5's and 6's each time.

You heard him OP, get a beaker and start hustling some nerds. Seriously though statistics for this kind of thing don't work out untill really high numbers so it's not impossible to have a slew of bad rolls.

Two common misconceptions here I want to clear up real quick.

The first is that there really is no such thing as "good rolls" and "bad rolls." There are statistical outliers. A perfect six-sided cube, when tossed and allowed to land on a flat face (hereafter referred to as "rolling") will, statistically speaking, land on each side one-sixth of the time. That's chance. It's how dice work. We do tend to discern patterns of bad rolls (or good rolls) even when there is no pattern, because that's what humans do.

The second is that dice are perfect cubes - not a single die in the world is a perfect cube. Some are closer to perfection than others, but most dice are tumbled to increase their longevity by avoiding brittle corners that can break and chip when rolled on hard surfaces. Tumbled dice are never perfectly symmetrical, therefore tumbled dice will ALWAYS favor one or more sides. In fact, depending on how they're tumbled, it is entirely possible for a tumbled die to statistically favor rolling sixes.

That's why you have to test your dice before you use them on the tabletop. I personally buy fifty or so dice at a time and roll each one about a hundred times. It's boring as hell, yes. I have no life. I know. But anyway, I essentially remove the dice that seem to roll a lot of ones and twos. I don't make tables or charts for this, I trust the innate human ability (propensity, in fact) to discern patterns. As a result, I believe I have weeded out most of the "bad" dice in my collection of two hundred or so dice.

The bottom line is that, OP, it is entirely possible that you have a batch of dice that were tumbled in such a way that they favor low rolls. Get some more dice, do some experimenting, and see what you can do to weed out the bad rollers.

I have horrible dice luck no matter the game I play. My last game of 40K (the first game for Amarie's Vertigo Tribe) my opponent was having a fit because of his poor dice rolls. During my next shooting phase, I pointed out to him that more than half of my "to hit" rolls were a "1" I still went on to win the game because I didn't panic, I stuck to my plan, and I already knew my dice rolling would suck. My Eldar army is all Dire Avengers, Warp Spiders, and Swooping Hawks. Why? They all roll multiple dice to shoot. But even with that, I have managed to miss every shot with Bladestorm even when using Guide. 42 1's and 2's in a row in the game before last.

Some days you're the pigeon, some days you're the statue.

gazelle wrote:
Some days you're the pigeon, some days you're the statue.

This, is the best way it has been said yet.

gazelle wrote:But even with that, I have managed to miss every shot with Bladestorm even when using Guide. 42 1's and 2's in a row in the game before last.

I'm sorry, but there's no way that happened.
Your probability of rolling a 1 or 2 on one die is 1/3.
On 2 dice: 1/9
On 3: 1/27
On 42: 1/100000000000000000000 (that's 20 zeros)

To put that in perspective, if you rolled 42 dice once a second, every second 24/7, you should expect to see that result once every 3 trillion years. The universe is only 13 billion years old, so you've got about 230 universe lifetimes until you'd see that roll.

Either someone was ing with you and replaced your dices with fakes with only 1 or 2 on all 6 sides, you are seriously exaggerating, or you're simply remembering what happened wrong.

so, I've found a few things to be true about 40k and luck over the years:

1.) luck only matters when it counts. I've had horribly wretched cover saves that resulted in a squad getting lost a turn or two too early... but it wasn't anywhere near the objective, and the unit that killed my squad didn't really do all that much for the rest of the game. Likewise, I've gotten amazing shooting, but against units that have little bearing on the ultimate result of the game.

The first thing to do when handling bad luck is to only care about the bad luck that ACTUALLY directly effects the end result of the game. The rest really doesn't matter, and you shouldn't get frustrated about it.

2.) bad luck can be mitigated with sound list building. If your army doesn't have redundancy and the one guy with the one chance with his one shot fails and then gets whomped and you're stuck with something big and scary roaming through your lines, then yes, you had bad luck, but your army REQUIRED good luck in order to come out well in the end. Proper list building including things like redundancy, synergy between units and taking stuff that gets rerolls will make it so that individual instances of bad luck won't actually seriously impact your ability to win. In my army list, for example I can still pull out at least a draw unless EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE of my luck is systematically bad (which has actually happened a few time).

3.) luck can be mitigated by sound movement and deployment. Like with list building, your strategy on the field can seriously mitigate the effects of bad luck. If you unnecessarily risk your forces, you will get vengefully punished if your risks fail. Playing tighter will help you greatly. Remember as well that this is also a relative thing. If you are equal in skill to your opponent, luck matters more (both ways) than if you are way better than your opponent, or the other way around.

So yeah, bad luck is bad. If you don't believe me, look at my battle reports where I have accurately and systematically documented how generally wretched my luck has been over my whole time playing (other people gripe. I gripe with science). Playing smart will definitely help.

@Grakmar: I rolled 21 dice for my seven Dire Avengers using Bladestorm. They all came up 1's and 2's. Because my squad had Guide, I picked up my 21 dice and rolled again: they all came up 1's and 2's again. Despite the mathematical odds, this does not surprise me. It has happened before, and will happen again, I am sure. I have had worse games, where I have never rolled a hit.

gazelle wrote:@Grakmar: I rolled 21 dice for my seven Dire Avengers using Bladestorm. They all came up 1's and 2's. Because my squad had Guide, I picked up my 21 dice and rolled again: they all came up 1's and 2's again. Despite the mathematical odds, this does not surprise me. It has happened before, and will happen again, I am sure. I have had worse games, where I have never rolled a hit.

His grasp of probability is so horribly bad that I'm simply ignoring his post. What you're suggesting happened is entirely possible, and more probable than he makes it sound.

He might actually be an idiot. I'm not certain.

SaintHazard wrote:
His grasp of probability is so horribly bad that I'm simply ignoring his post. What you're suggesting happened is entirely possible, and more probable than he makes it sound.

He might actually be an idiot. I'm not certain.

What am I calculating wrong?

The probability of a miss on one shot is 1/3, two misses on two shots (1/3)^2, three misses on three shots (1/3)^3. So, the probability of missing all of the first 21 shots is (1/3)^21. The dice are then all re-rolled and the probability of all those re-rolls missing is (1/3)^21. The probability of both those events happening is (1/3)^21*(1/3)^21 = (1/3)^42 = 1/(1.1*10^20).

Where's my error?

Grakmar wrote:

gazelle wrote:But even with that, I have managed to miss every shot with Bladestorm even when using Guide. 42 1's and 2's in a row in the game before last.

I'm sorry, but there's no way that happened.
Your probability of rolling a 1 or 2 on one die is 1/3.
On 2 dice: 1/9
On 3: 1/27
On 42: 1/100000000000000000000 (that's 20 zeros)

To put that in perspective, if you rolled 42 dice once a second, every second 24/7, you should expect to see that result once every 3 trillion years. The universe is only 13 billion years old, so you've got about 230 universe lifetimes until you'd see that roll.

Either someone was ing with you and replaced your dices with fakes with only 1 or 2 on all 6 sides, you are seriously exaggerating, or you're simply remembering what happened wrong.

^ that is still a chance. In more advanced statistics courses you will learn about independant trials, also remember dice are not truely random. Lets say our friend has set them all up with the 1 faceing up, or 1 and 2's up. A strange roll and they don't vary. Picks them up does the same thing again same result. I tought my friends how you can easily increase your odds of rolling a 2+ by placing the 1 on the side of the die then rolling in a single strait action (put the 1 and the 6 on the rolling axis. The dice would tumble and I could roll as many as 72 when organized correctly and not get more than 4 or 5 1's. When dealing with die roll oddities you need to remember that dice are not random, and then there is always the rules of independant trials.

Call me supersticious, but before I start a game I roll all my dice. Any that roll 4+ I use for the game and the rest I put back in the cube. If that's not neurotic enough, if anyone else touches a dice I isolate it from the others for at least a day.. lol