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How is it a dice-rolling contest? Me, my brother, and everyone else at our local game store could sit for hours talking about 40k strategy. I'm writing lists all the time (I play Orks if I want to win, and I play Eldar if I want an extremely challenging game [not to say Orks don't involve strategy, but there is more involved with Eldar. But that's another issue entirely]). There are so many ways you can approach the game when you play, and the most thought intensive thing is that unlike Magic the Gathering (a game you might be familiar with), every single army is completely different! Every game I play, so long as it isn't against a generic list, is completely different. It always ends up being strategy that wins, not dice-rolling, especially the larger that games get.

So, my question is, what's the problem that people have with 40k?

The game is dice based coupled with unbalanced armies. It is more luck based than simply dice based.

Well, all in all, realistically, it is a dice-rolling contest. You can have perfect strategy but if all you roll are ones, you're still going to lose.

I have only played a couple of games and the dice a really important. In some CMG you can minimize the dice factor to almost nill. I had a Star Wars Miniatures (SWM) army that I hardly needed the d20 for, it had so much auto-damage (damage that is automatic and that cannot be avoided) output that the dice for me were irrelevant. You can do things in this game too like modify armor saves and the like but it's still comes down to rolling a handful of dice on numerous occasions.

Also the strategy is there in 40k but the strategy will succeed or fail on the dice. Also with the 3 different game types it will drastically effect the style of play in 40k.

Lets go back to my SWM example. Was there strategy? Absolutely I had to be able to play on multiple maps successfully, counter hate squads and standard meta fair with it and with the amount of characters and abilities that game has available to it the strategy was very important with having to prioritize targets or how to move my units and how to use a map to my advantage or how to counter an opponents advantage over my squad, and in this particular army the dice was hardly a factor for me, again I had lots of auto-damage in it. Of course this was a squad based/character driven game so each character acted on their own working to help the group as a whole as opposed to the unit actions of 40K so if one character missed an attack there was another behind it that could engage.

I think this game can be divided into 3 separate factors at about the ratio of 50% 15% 35%. The 50% is a good army. If you have a good you stand a good chance of doing well. Most army lists pull to work in a specific way, the more an army list tries to do between it's unit types the weaker the build gets because of a loss of synergy and army cohesion (IMO, some armies are very diversified and still very good, but for the most part a player will try to accomplish too many different things hence weakening the overall build).

15% is strategy. After determining which of the 3 game variants your playing for with your army firmly prepared in your mind the strategy for it should be relatively simple to initiate. Overload, spread the field, deep strike, all should be prepared in advance with your list in mind. (It might be safe to say that your army list will determine the strategy you use.)

A note on deep strike not only does the position of the opponents army affect it so does the dice in the purpose of a mishap or when and how they arrive. Is it a flank that you want on the left short side but you roll and it ends up on the right side? Do you intend to drop but the scatter puts you into a group of the opponents units or worse off the opponents table edge?

35% The dice. The small example above shows how the dice can affect just a placement strategy. However once in combat you can minimize or strengthen the dice with the allocations of war-gear and what-not but in my short experience a 6 point hormagaunt with strength 4 can still kill a terminator if it hits both of it's attack and wound rolls and then the terminator fails it's save. And with it being a unit rolling and not an individual character that increases the power of the dice as well. A budy of mine and I tested a 30 character base hormagaunt squad initiating an assault on a 5 man terminator squad in close combat and hit with about half of their attacks and do just about the same with the to wound roll (so half of the 90 is 45 and half of 22 is 11, the gaunts unit had 3 rolls per model, 1 for initiating the assault and 2 built in attacks.) The Termies have 11 saves to make on 5 characters so 2 a piece and one with 3. The odds are good they will make most of those saves but all of them? In our test they ended up losing two of the models in the unit. Imagine if they had failed one more and were forced a moral check, what if they failed? The gaunts could easily pile in or if positioned properly cut them off and defeat the unit as it tries to withdraw all depending on the dice. By the same token if the termies initiate the assault the gaunts are by all odds doomed although they still lose the initiative because the gaunts have a 5 Initiative to there 4. But the gaunts have a weak save of 6, yet there are 30 of them the odds are good that they will save a few, and as long as the squad stays higher than 15 they don't have to worry about moral saves.

So once you get into combat it really is all about the dice. You can do a lot of things before hand but once your in a game it really does become a dice contest. Its as Napoleon Bonaparte is rumored to once have said "All war is a gamble, so let us cast the die." And this is something almost all games of this type have to some degree or another.

As skill increases, the factor of luck increases.

The better you and you opponent are, the more the dice influence the result of the game.

Depending on the armies the roll to see who goes first can be more important than anything else that happens in the game.

Strategy is important, but I could conceivably take an awful army list and play like I belong in a mental ward, but if my dice are hot that day I could still win. I won't say it's purely a dice rolling contest, but it's a deciding factor of the game. It's just a matter of getting the right dice in the right places against the right targets, and doing your best to keep the other guy from doing the same.

For most folks at one of the clubs i go to it IS a dice rolling contest, as they all seem to show up with the same netlist and army

For me it's more an experiment in the malignant nature of dice

To be fair, every game that uses dice as a mechanism of chance could be considered a 'dice rolling contest' in that if I am an absolutely crappy player I could potentially defeat someone who is a world above me in skill at the game. Which means that it provides a bit of a luck factor to a game of skill.

That being said, once you start getting games to a certain point of complexity, one of the biggest skills in such a game is to affect probability to the point that the likelihood of a game going completely in the wrong direction is significantly reduced, and who ever can do that better is likely to win the game. In other words, taking the likelihood of the dice going your way from 5/10 to 9/10 to 99/100. Granted you can still lose, but your overarching win factor will be such that your wins significantly outclass your losses.

Similar thing happens in card games (Poker and etc). The idea isn't to make it so you win one individual game, but so that you go from winning 5/10 to 6/10, or 5.5/10, or even 5.01/10. And then just play enough that the .01 becomes significant.

xpraider wrote:To be fair, every game that uses dice as a mechanism of chance could be considered a 'dice rolling contest' in that if I am an absolutely crappy player I could potentially defeat someone who is a world above me in skill at the game. Which means that it provides a bit of a luck factor to a game of skill.

That being said, once you start getting games to a certain point of complexity, one of the biggest skills in such a game is to affect probability to the point that the likelihood of a game going completely in the wrong direction is significantly reduced, and who ever can do that better is likely to win the game. In other words, taking the likelihood of the dice going your way from 5/10 to 9/10 to 99/100. Granted you can still lose, but your overarching win factor will be such that your wins significantly outclass your losses.

Similar thing happens in card games (Poker and etc). The idea isn't to make it so you win one individual game, but so that you go from winning 5/10 to 6/10, or 5.5/10, or even 5.01/10. And then just play enough that the .01 becomes significant.

Wow, this surmised my entire phone book sized post into 2 small paragraphs. Amazing. I wish I had this skill when making a point.

All games, period, require luck. Skill comes largely into play to decide how to maximize the odds in your favor. In 40K that comes down to positioning, and army building. With Magic the Gathering (And all card games) it comes down to not shoving crap into your deck, and making a theme that works with itself. If they call 40K a dice rolling game, then Magic is just a luck of the draw game.

It's all about the odds and how to better manipulate them

When push comes to shove? Yes, to an extent. Dice (Granted, extreme examples) mean that my squad of 10 lasgun guardsmen shoot down 30 marines in 3 turns and then get into CC with assault terminators, break them, and escort them off the board....but it can't make those lasguns penetrate that razorbacks AV11 or make their TLHB not chop through flak armor without a save, so your list and what you do with it can help maximize your odds.

In a more likely scenario, it may mean that I do everything perfectly one game, do exactly as I should in all the important situations, and roll 1s and 2s for my to hits, wounds, saves, and 5-6s for stat tests and leadership. Doesn't matter how good I am, I have still quite likely gotten my butt kicked.

OP:

Short answer, no - 40k is not a dice-rolling contest.

"I lost because of my dice" is a coping mechanism for incompetent generals to protect their damaged pride from having to consider the idea that they really aren't as good as they think they are.

It isn't a dice rolling contest.

There is luck in the game.

Sometimes the dice will let you down at the wrong moment, or give you a useful though unlikely bonus.

All human activites (aside from a few things like chess and go) contain some element of luck. Some contain more (lottories), and some contain far less (running).

40k is pretty solidly in the skill part. Luck plays a huge role, given the value of getting first (or occasionally second) turn, random game lengths, etc. Even between two skilled players, games can turn from defeats to draws, or even to wins based on a few late game dice rolls.

Some of that is just internal luck balance. If there are a dozen or so important dice rolls in a game (first turn, seize, a few few random game length rolls, a few morale checks, damage rolls on important vehicles, invulnerable saves against instant death, etc) Most of the time these go 50/50 or so, but sometimes they don't.

by no means is it purely dice rolling, however dice rolling is an important component.

I'd say strategy is more important to make sure when you roll you have the most opportunity to feasably do something. and due to law of averages over the long run you should end up some games where you roll great, and others where you roll badly, but overall you will have average rolls, and you will see you opponents generally doign the same so I'd say the chance factor is a factor, but not THE factor in 40k.

beardo wrote:How is it a dice-rolling contest? Me, my brother, and everyone else at our local game store could sit for hours talking about 40k strategy. I'm writing lists all the time (I play Orks if I want to win, and I play Eldar if I want an extremely challenging game [not to say Orks don't involve strategy, but there is more involved with Eldar. But that's another issue entirely]). There are so many ways you can approach the game when you play, and the most thought intensive thing is that unlike Magic the Gathering (a game you might be familiar with), every single army is completely different! Every game I play, so long as it isn't against a generic list, is completely different. It always ends up being strategy that wins, not dice-rolling, especially the larger that games get.

So, my question is, what's the problem that people have with 40k?

So many things I want to say, but we'll just leave it at, open your eyes. There is a great wide world out there.

Just as a quick and easy comparison, play EPIC. You'll see the difference, and thats just another GW game.

The luck of the dice will always be there, but what you can do through unit upgrades and strategic planning is try and reduce the chance of failing and use the dice rolling to your advantage.

Another point: the more dice you roll, the less role luck has. My ork army can chuck so many dice (120 cc attacks possible!) that luck is almost nonexistent. On the other hand, a gk paladin army will roll way fewer dice and a freak occurrence (say, a string of ones on armor saves) can wreck it much more easily.

I can understand the comment.

To the untrained eye which doesn't know the rules or the finer points of strategy, it looks like two players, lining all of their figs up on either side of the board, marching them towards each other and throwing dice at will. All while taking pieces off the board periodically.

Hence "dice-rolling contest".

You have to understand the game to know it's deeper than that.

Dice CAN easily play a role... if tactics are solid... then dice can cripple a good player.

that said... if its dice 4-5 games in a row.... it's probably not the dice...

I have trouble considering strategy as a factor whenever I roll 65+ dice for an Ork charge. The sheer volume of dice really lends the feeling that GW said "Hey, kids like rolling pounds and pounds of dice right? Let's add a whole bunch of that!"

Although I'm not a fan of them, this is a big reason why Eurogame boardgames are so popular: they remove basically any change or luck factor and leave it entirely up to skill/knowledge.

bosky wrote:I have trouble considering strategy as a factor whenever I roll 65+ dice for an Ork charge.

You won a strategic battle by getting that number of Orks in range to charge something.

I hate black/white polls because there are some things that just get stupid after a while. Like how a tank can tank a crapload of penetrating hits but survive from the penetrator rolling 1's and 2's.

This topic depends on how your community is playing warhammer. If you have guys throwing down land raiders with deathstars in them and they deploy their deathstars and go at it, yes, strategy takes a backseat. However, when people start blocking, using sacrificial units, and target priority, ect. Then it becomes less of a dice rolling game and goes to strategy.

The basic argument for WH40k being all about the dice I think is this:

Two players of absolutely equal skill, with equally powerful codex armies (optimized, of course), and playing on fair terrain will have their game decided by who rolls dice better that day. This is, of course, an extremely rare case and probably won't happen a significantly large portion of the time. But in that circumstance, where two opponents are absolute equals, the dice decide the day.

However, I am of the opinion that, in the end, warhammer is a game of probabilities. Much like poker. There is a large amount of skill involved, and that skill is all about increasing the probability of something happening in your favor. Making sure that a meltagunner is within 12" for the extra 2D6 is a move that increases your probability to destroy a tank and vehicle. Getting the charge with orks so that you get extra attacks, strength, and initiative is in the end, only increasing your chances of wiping out a unit, or at least winning combat.

So the strategy of warhammer comes in the way that you are increasing the probability of favorable results. A greater knowledge of the game, your army, your opponents army, the finer points of movement, and list building will all increase your chances of winning. But the final judge of all these moves will be a die.

Summation: No, Warhammer is not a dice rolling contest. I play dice rolling contests in Vegas. Not with expensive plastic miniatures and a huge rulebook.

Its a dice rolling contest in comparison to games like Chess / Checkers, or games that throw multiple D6 per roll. Its based on, essentially, a single d6 system where you can do nothing to adjust the bell curve. I've passed over 100 consecutive armor saves with terminators before against gaunts sheerly on the fact that the dice didn't want to roll 1s. There was nothing the Nid player could do, short of engaging with a MC, to modify the dice rolls in his favor.

When some plans involve hoping for lots of 6s, and hoping your opponent rolls 1s, I'd call that a dice rolling contest.

Have you ever tried playing 40K, D&D, etc without rolling dice? (Vampire LARP excepted of course) Sitting around and talking strategy and all that is what we do when we're not gaming. However, the coolest things can happen when randomness is in play. Just because something should happen, doesn't always mean it will.

I think some of the confusion stems from differing standards of just what constitutes "a dice-rolling contest".

For my money, that term only applies if the game is exclusively or primarily comprised of rolling dice and seeing who does better at rolling those dice. Yahtzee is a dice-rolling contest. Many other games involve dice as randomizers, but the dice are not the primary focus of the game or the only determinants of the outcome, which I think they have to be for it to be a pure "dice-rolling contest". Heck, even Craps isn't necessarily a dice-rolling contest, as the decisions of what bets to make add another major element to the game besides rolling the dice.

IME "dice-rolling contest" is used as a hyperbolic description for 40k, based purely on there being a lot of dice involved. Sometimes the person making the comment is comparing to games which have no or extremely little random element (like Chess, Checkers, or Diplomacy). Sometimes they're coming from a person whose preferred game just has FEWER dice being rolled, and thus feels viscerally that their game is less about dice than 40k is. This is, of course, a false notion. If you are rolling 1d6, any given side is as likely to come up as any other, so rolling a one is just as likely as a six, and you are more subject to the vagueries of chance. When a unit of Orks charges and you roll 60 dice, those rolls are usually going to fall very close to the bell curve and a normal statistical distribution, to a significant extent reducing the amount of luck involved.

Several people who have posted in this thread seem to have supported the idea that it's a dice rolling contest because in their opinion, all other factors (like player skill and army composition) being equal, the guy with the luckier dice wins. Or even that just because luck is involved, and sufficiently bad dice can cost even a great player the game, this means that it's all about the dice. These people have valid points, but have used them to leap to an IMO, very wrong conclusion.

Skill and army construction play a much larger part in this game than pure dice-rolling. I've won many games where my dice appeared, to my view and my opponent's, to have been worse than his. And in some cases lost games despite having better dice. Movement and deployment, use of terrain and remembering the mission, are much more important than dice rolls, in general. Sure, you can have a really terribly-unlucky game and lose despite having a stronger army and playing better. But the fact that this happens occasionally just makes the game more exciting and suspenseful (and to some extent truer to real life battles). If it always came down to who had the better dice, then this game would be a dice rolling contest.

I agree that 40k is not a dice-rolling contest. The poker comparison is perfect, since it's obvious that there is skill involved in poker, even if it is a game of luck.
In this way, 40k better represents actual battles, because as a general you can only influence your troops, not decide what actually ends up happening when they fight others. All you can do is equip them better, give them reinforcements, put them in the right place at the right time, etc.
Chess gets boring to me, because everyone knows who exactly is the best player, since there is no luck. There's no reason to play, because those lower than me I will beat, and those above me I will lose to. It's just much more fun when there's dice involved, holding your breath before an important armor save.
Also, I really like the variety at my gamestore. I don't want it to turn into a store that runs all net-lists. That's just boring, too.