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i was just reading the standard bearer for WD #352 (may 2009) and i thought it was a very cool article. it says that:

"[some players] are skilled at noticing or creating chance opportunities, they exploit any good luck that comes their way to the maximum, and they will ignore any bad luck and press on with their game plan come what may. The result is that the impact of their bad luck is minimized and therefore we think of them as lucky people."
I haven't been able to give it a try yet so, does it help to ignore the bad stuff and maximize the good stuff?

I don't care how skilled a player you are, an onslaught of 1s will ruin your plans any day of the week.

It's just a ploy by GW to emphasize the importance of skill in a game built around random factors. There are always going to be moments that could completely turn around a game based on luck, and there's no way to plan around that.

Fafnir wrote:I don't care how skilled a player you are, an onslaught of 1s will ruin your plans any day of the week.

It's just a ploy by GW to emphasize the importance of skill in a game built around random factors. There are always going to be moments that could completely turn around a game based on luck, and there's no way to plan around that.

Sure there are.

Redundancy in your list for example.

I meant more along the lines of once you've commited to an action. I'm talking more about tactics, rather than stratagy. List redundancy can definetly lower the chances of such things happening, but it never completely eliminates it.

I agree with fafnir (which I find my slelf doing alot lately), that no matter what your strategy it all comes down to tactics. Your strategy may be sound, but if you get beaten down by the god of luck (I swear sometimes that it's Loki the god of being a dick) when the tactics are employed then you will have a bad day. Now I'm not saying you can't win, cause you still can. However it does tend to make things difficult when you watch 5 Sanguinary Guard get eaten by 4 IG Vet's in CC with no special weapons what-so-ever. That is, as I said, Loki being a dick.

You can do things like redundancy as well as make your shots count or make your shots many. Elite armies minimize bad luck with heavy armor, rock hard infantry and high powered shots with good BS or twin linked weapons. Hoard armies can put out more bodies than you have bullets and roll so many dice that its hard to tell if you had a above/below average roll. This minimizes dice to an extent but there is only one constant factor in every list you play with and against and thats you. Bad/good dice works both ways and both players will have bad/good rolls and it is up to good generals to capitalize when your opponent makes some bad rolls and to serious damage control when it happens to you which comes down more often than not to maneuvering. Higher points values and not running crazy death stars helps too since the effect of bad/good dice is far less pronounced with MSU and 1750+ games.

The easiest way to minimize luck in your games is to reduce the number of important rolls.

If you have an army built around a handful of super expensive single-shot mega-weapons then it only takes a few below-average rolls to put a crimp in things.

An army with hundreds of smaller weapons is going to need staggeringly bad dice to be effected.

Example - if your core anti-tank is from six vanquishers then those six rolls are crucial. But the odds of getting six misses isn't staggeringly high (1/64).
On the other hand, four triple melta vet squads would need 12 misses to hit nothing (1/4096)
When you start looking at orks armies that can realistically be rolling over 500 dice on the charge and the probability of fluffing it badly is incredibly low.

Right, good list building, good deployment, and good movement can all mitigate the effects of bad luck, trust me. Meanwhile, good luck can only mitigate the problems of bad planning.

As for luck in general, I'm of the opinion that it only really counts if it actually matters to the end result of a game. Rolling really terribly for my cover saves against bolt pistols right before an assault marine squad EATS a 6-man special weapons squad is just splitting hairs: they would have been dead anyway.

Not to say I haven't had luck so bad that it HAS caused me to lose games before.