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Hi everyone.

Lately, I've been thinking about game balance and random elements.
Amongst other factors, I've been thinking about this as pertains to the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game, 5th and 6th editions.

Part of this comes from Ailaros' recent series of battle reports, "The Hand of the King" which can be found on his website.
He, and others I've heard, suggests that Warhammer 40,000 is a game without any tactical element to speak of because of the dice.

David Sirlin, fairly popular writer on the subject of game design, has this to say on games with random elements and high-level competitive balance... (Excerpt taken from his most popular work, the book "Playing to Win")

"On the one hand, the more random a game is, the worse it probably is for serious competitive play. But randomness can add “fun” to a game. Usually, though, there is only one meaningful way to answer this complaint: examine whether the same players can consistently win at it. One could make a strong argument that the card game Magic: The Gathering is “too random,” yet the same players are able to win national and international tournaments over and over. Kai Budde, the best player in the world as of this writing, routinely shows up to tournaments with the exact same deck as his teammates—yet Kai wins. Apparently the game isn’t “too random.” "

Warhammer 40,000 has many random elements, but part of the skill of a general is - at least in theory - understanding and limiting the impact of that randomness, either through choices inherent in the army list, or by choices made on the tabletop.
I have found that when I go up against the same opponent multiple times, even with different lists and even switching armies at times, the results uniformly stay about even (I usually come out ahead by a good margin against some players, or I usually end up pulling draws and barely gasping by wins against others). At a cursory glance based purely on my personal experience, the game would not fall under what David Sirlin calls "too random" based on the criteria that I can with fair consistency predict the results of a match based on past events against the same player.

So, my question for you all is twofold.
The first portion, personal experience: When going against the same opponent multiple times, do you tend to find that the results remain the same because one of you is plain better, or are they always wildly unpredictable and up to the whims of the die gods?
The second portion, in both local and grand tournaments, do the same people tend to end up in the top scoring spots (say the top 5-10 spots depending on tournament size) as far as the combat results go?

in both local and grand tournaments, do the same people tend to end up in the top scoring spots (say the top 5-10 spots depending on tournament size) as far as the combat results go?

I haven't been involved in many tourneys in the past few years but I remember the same players topping the charts at my FLGS.

However, I think there are far too many factors to say that someone is "winning consistantly" as there is just as many "losing consistantly".

Some people (myself now included) just play for fun but Tourneys are a great way to get a bunch of games in in a limited time.

My Ork army is a terrible mess. No synergy at all. Heck, they're even Speed Freeks... on foot!

People like me will float near the middle or bottom of the ranks but that doesn't mean we couldn't reform our lists to actually contend for the top spot.

DeffDred wrote:

in both local and grand tournaments, do the same people tend to end up in the top scoring spots (say the top 5-10 spots depending on tournament size) as far as the combat results go?

I haven't been involved in many tourneys in the past few years but I remember the same players topping the charts at my FLGS.

However, I think there are far too many factors to say that someone is "winning consistantly" as there is just as many "losing consistantly".

Some people (myself now included) just play for fun but Tourneys are a great way to get a bunch of games in in a limited time.

My Ork army is a terrible mess. No synergy at all. Heck, they're even Speed Freeks... on foot!

People like me will float near the middle or bottom of the ranks but that doesn't mean we couldn't reform our lists to actually contend for the top spot.

The point he's trying to make is that IF the game is too random, then the winner of any tournament will also be random.

Instead, based on my local club scene and the national tournament scene, some players are consistently winning. Which indicates that the level of randomness in the game is not significantly and repeatedly influencing the outcome.

The game is incredibly random, but like the OP says, it is all about limiting the effect of the randomness. Fire at things that will be less randomly effected, use this against that because X is more likely to kill Y.

Meltagun and Lasgun both are killing a Marine up to a random dice-throw, but the Meltagun has a higher chance. This is what makes up the games we play.

Really I find Warhammer to be much like paintball or airsoft, generally superior tactics and equipment will win, but if you pissed off lady luck, good luck with winning.

The person who I played constantly in 5th, still consistently beats me in 6th.

mynamelegend wrote:Part of this comes from Ailaros' recent series of battle reports, "The Hand of the King" which can be found on his website.
He, and others I've heard, suggests that Warhammer 40,000 is a game without any tactical element to speak of because of the dice.

Well, just to interject a quick clarification here. A lot of what I've said recently has been rehashing an old article I wrote (part 1 and part 2).

The point here isn't that there is no skill whatsoever in a game of 40k, so there. The point is that 40k is a game that is difficult to learn and easy to master. Once you hit the point of general mastery, the difference between skill falls off sharply, and the impact of player skill on the game relatively greatly decreases.

The analogy I really like to use for 40k is blackjack. It's a game of knowing odds and playing them correctly. If a person plays really terrible odds, then they will lose, in the large scale more consistantly, than someone who plays the odds right. Once you get to a certain point (which I maintain is rather low in the case of both blackjack and 40k), being able to play odds slightly better stops having a noticeable impact on any given game. If you were 1% better than someone else, you should notice that extra win only once in every 100 games. For the rest of them, the player skill difference would have an impact that's not noticeable, especially when the actual, concrete results of die rolls are what actually determines a game, rather than the abstract idea of playing the odds (which, as mentioned, only makes a difference in the long term).

As such, if you only look at a single game while considering player skill, it's like looking at a single die roll while considering statistics. The math will never tell you how any one particular roll is going to be. Likewise, after a certain level of mastery is reached, player skill won't tell you how one particular game is going to go, and who is going to win, and by how much.

Basically, player skill gets lost in a coarse, random system.

mynamelegend wrote:Usually, though, there is only one meaningful way to answer this complaint: examine whether the same players can consistently win at it.

I don't buy it. Induction is a terrible way to attempt to make sense out of randomness. People see patterns where they want to see patterns. People want to make sense out of randomness when there isn't actual sense to the randomness.

It would be much more meaningful to take data by comparing statistical averages to the actual results of die rolls. What we need is objective deduction, not a clumsy attempt at explaining randomness with induction.

Because there's one thing that this entirely fails to grasp: some people are just lucky. A lucky person will win more consistently in a random system than an unlucky person will. It is a non-sequitur to assume that he is somehow better at the game.

mynamelegend wrote:The first portion, personal experience: When going against the same opponent multiple times, do you tend to find that the results remain the same because one of you is plain better, or are they always wildly unpredictable and up to the whims of the die gods?

Which brings me to this. The people I consistently lose against are the people who are consistently luckier than I am. Sometimes it's that my luck is awful (well, it's usually that), and sometimes it's because my opponent's dice only start on fire when they're facing off against myself.

That said, there is one main exception to this. There are a few people at my FLGS that I have consistently beaten the pants off of. This, however can be easily blamed on my opponent failing to have a basic mastery of the game. Just because relative player skill matters less once you become good at the game doesn't mean a total noob with an awful list, wretched deployment, and making a ton of huge mistakes isn't going to be reliably run over by a veteran player.

Once again, to blackjack, it's like that scene in Austin Powers. Hitting on an 18 is living dangerously. Staying on a 7 isn't.

I'd echo others on this. Yes the game is random, but yes the same people place at the top in local tourneys and tend to win games... even with Tau or vanilla marines against Grey Knights or the like.

Is the game balanced? No

Will the better general win most of the games most of the time? Yes

Are there mismatches where the way better general gets a bad pairing (list wise) with a poor player who luck smiles upon and therefor loses? Yes... but the more experienced player can soften that loss and still earn some tourney points,

Ailaros wrote:The point here isn't that there is no skill whatsoever in a game of 40k, so there. The point is that 40k is a game that is difficult to learn and easy to master. Once you hit the point of general mastery, the difference between skill falls off sharply, and the impact of player skill on the game relatively greatly decreases.

[citation needed]

Ailaros wrote:The analogy I really like to use for 40k is blackjack. It's a game of knowing odds and playing them correctly. If a person plays really terrible odds, then they will lose, in the large scale more consistantly, than someone who plays the odds right. Once you get to a certain point (which I maintain is rather low in the case of both blackjack and 40k), being able to play odds slightly better stops having a noticeable impact on any given game. If you were 1% better than someone else, you should notice that extra win only once in every 100 games. For the rest of them, the player skill difference would have an impact that's not noticeable, especially when the actual, concrete results of die rolls are what actually determines a game, rather than the abstract idea of playing the odds (which, as mentioned, only makes a difference in the long term).

Conveniently enough, 40k is a very long game, occurring over the course of hundreds of die rolls and usually hours of gameplay. Even within a single game, the law of large numbers has more than enough time to come into play.

Ailaros wrote:As such, if you only look at a single game while considering player skill, it's like looking at a single die roll while considering statistics. The math will never tell you how any one particular roll is going to be. Likewise, after a certain level of mastery is reached, player skill won't tell you how one particular game is going to go, and who is going to win, and by how much.

If that were actually true, we wouldn't see a consistent pattern of success from the top players in the hobby. We do see that pattern, so we must conclude that the game isn't nearly so random as you would like to believe.

Ailaros wrote:Basically, player skill gets lost in a coarse, random system.

One of the key elements of a player's skill is coping with those random elements, minimizing their impact when they aren't favorable, and capitalizing on the opportunities they provide when things do roll your way.

Ailaros wrote:I don't buy it. Induction is a terrible way to attempt to make sense out of randomness. People see patterns where they want to see patterns. People want to make sense out of randomness when there isn't actual sense to the randomness.

This is rather amusing, coming from someone with such a strong confirmation bias.

Ailaros wrote:It would be much more meaningful to take data by comparing statistical averages to the actual results of die rolls. What we need is objective deduction, not a clumsy attempt at explaining randomness with induction.

Because there's one thing that this entirely fails to grasp: some people are just lucky. A lucky person will win more consistently in a random system than an unlucky person will. It is a non-sequitur to assume that he is somehow better at the game.

And when a player loses, they are presented with two choices. They can either make excuses, or make an attempt to improve.

One could suggest that a "clumsy attempt at explaining randomness with induction" by trying to see if there are people who consistently win and NOT automatically assuming that all of these people are just all lucky all the time is superior to a clumsy attempt to portray blatant excuses and inferiority complex over ones own repeated failures as objective deduction.

There has to come a point where if I win 95% of all the tournaments I enter, and I enter several GTs with hundreds of players, it becomes more likely that I am more skilled than it is that I am just the luckiest person to have ever lived.
If we see many players who consistently win or score very well in a sufficiently large number of games, we can start to at least question the rather unsubstantiated and illogical assumption that player skill becomes irrelevant in the face of the dice gods (now THERE'S some induction for ya).

Corollax wrote:

Ailaros wrote:The point here isn't that there is no skill whatsoever in a game of 40k, so there. The point is that 40k is a game that is difficult to learn and easy to master. Once you hit the point of general mastery, the difference between skill falls off sharply, and the impact of player skill on the game relatively greatly decreases.

[citation needed]

here and here

Corollax wrote:Conveniently enough, 40k is a very long game, occurring over the course of hundreds of die rolls and usually hours of gameplay. Even within a single game, the law of large numbers has more than enough time to come into play.

Not all die rolls have the same impact on the result of the game. For example, the roll to determine who goes first is much, much more likely to determine the outcome of a game, than any random guardsman shooting a lasgun.

You can't just look at ALL die rolls, you have to look at the die rolls where the outcome is actually significant. Far from falling into the world of large numbers, there are generally a very small number of rolls that make or break a game.

Corollax wrote:

Ailaros wrote:As such, if you only look at a single game while considering player skill, it's like looking at a single die roll while considering statistics. The math will never tell you how any one particular roll is going to be. Likewise, after a certain level of mastery is reached, player skill won't tell you how one particular game is going to go, and who is going to win, and by how much.

If that were actually true, we wouldn't see a consistent pattern of success from the top players in the hobby. We do see that pattern, so we must conclude that the game isn't nearly so random as you would like to believe.

You missed my point. You could say that there would be a consistent pattern of success by the best players. You could just as easily say that there would be a consistent pattern of success by the luckiest players.

Corollax wrote:

Ailaros wrote:Basically, player skill gets lost in a coarse, random system.

One of the key elements of a player's skill is coping with those random elements, minimizing their impact when they aren't favorable, and capitalizing on the opportunities they provide when things do roll your way.

And how do you "cope"? You alter things to that you can roll dice in a different way than you would have otherwise. You change from playing one set of odds to playing a different set of odds. The only way that "coping" makes things less random is if your choices mean that you roll fewer dice as a result of your actions.

Corollax wrote:And when a player loses, they are presented with two choices. They can either make excuses, or make an attempt to improve.

Look, it's not about whipping it out on the table and seeing whose is larger. A machismo attitude will never change your circumstances, especially when the outcomes of your actions are based solely on luck... like they are in a dice game like 40k.

mynamelegend wrote:One could suggest that a "clumsy attempt at explaining randomness with induction" by trying to see if there are people who consistently win and NOT automatically assuming that all of these people are just all lucky all the time is superior to a clumsy attempt to portray blatant excuses and inferiority complex over ones own repeated failures as objective deduction.

I'll direct you to what I just said here. You can be insulting to people you disagree with all you want, but it won't change the fact that the results of any given event (and thus the aggregation thereof) are determined by dice.

If I have to defend objectivity ONCE AGAIN in the face of people who believe their opinion is better because it's based on anecdotal experience, then I will, but I will warn you now that you'll just be made to feel foolish.

If you can't be objective, you can't communicate your opinions properly.

mynamelegend wrote:There has to come a point where if I win 95% of all the tournaments I enter, and I enter several GTs with hundreds of players, it becomes more likely that I am more skilled than it is that I am just the luckiest person to have ever lived.

Why? For what reason? Why can't a person just be lucky at the few tournaments they go to in any given year? I'd also note that a person winning 95% of the tournaments they enter has never happened, empirically speaking.

But that misses the point. How can you tell if you're lucky? You say you're not, but how do you know for sure?

One way, for example, would be to meticulously record everything that happens during all of your games (like I made an attempt to do in 5th edition, and even then, it was a poor attempt not recording every single die roll), and then compare your luck to statistical models. Have you done this? Ever?

Or are you just vaguely thinking back to a spotty memory and saying "nah, I bet I probably wasn't that lucky." Without data, without rigor, without science, any theory you put forward based on your personal experience has no value.

For smaller armies with less dependent events and random variables skill does trump luck to an extent. Which is why the Space Marine armies have always been so attractive, they are statically better than non-MEQ and more forgiving towards failures or bad rolls. Where something like my mono Slaanesh Chaos Daemons against my friends Green Tide Orks, there is nothing strategic or clever about how we play. It is just scooting 20 or so of your models into a hostile group of 20 or so models and pray to the dice god for better rolls.

ntin wrote:For smaller armies with less dependent events and random variables skill does trump luck to an extent.

But this doesn't make any sense.

What IS skill? Skill, in this case, is determining what dice you will roll at what odds. The idea of skill trumping luck doesn't make any sense.

If skill is how you choose to roll your dice, having more skill won't change the result of your die rolls. In fact, skill has no direct control over said results, so how could it possibly trump it?

Defending one of two interpretations of an outcome does not in itself make you objective.
I am putting forth a hypothesis (that Warhammer 40,000 is not too random to be a viable competitive game), offering one suggestion of a way to show this as a possibility to explore (consistent victories for a small number of people), and asking for data points.
I've not said that I am making a gilded, 100% guarantee that if only a small number of players end up topping all the charts, they're all skilled and not lucky.
I'm simply saying that we should not automatically assume that they're lucky, but explore the possibility that their skills actually contributed sufficiently to their victories that if nothing else they were more able to capitalize on their luck than we were on ours, that they were more able to minimize the repercussions of bad luck than we were on ours, and that they in short won in part because of their skill.

In fact, for anyone interested in still answering the original questions, I'd like to add a third question.
1: When going against the same opponent multiple times, do you tend to find that the results remain the same because one of you is plain better, or are they always wildly unpredictable and up to the whims of the die gods?
2: In both local and grand tournaments, do the same people tend to end up in the top scoring spots (say the top 5-10 spots depending on tournament size) as far as the combat results go?
3: In what number of these tournament victories was luck the clear deciding factor in a way that all parties involved can agree to, and not just the one that happens to lose?

I've so far conducted this as some sort of socratic dialogue, but I'm going to briefly address you personally and directly, Ailaros: When the outcomes are "he outplayed me" and "the dice screwed me over", and you consistently, repeatedly, loudly and exclusively choose the one that ensures that you need not cop to personal shortcomings or failures, you end up coming across as anything but objective. The fact that what you appear to believe is simple objective mathematical fact is anything but universally agreed upon can in itself of course be interpreted in two ways: You could be wrong (Stating that one *COULD BE*, not *IS* or *IS NOT* wrong, is objective), or that everyone else are just stupid sheeple who don't realize how right you are (this is not being objective).


And since you asked instead of making assumptions, which was very nice of you, I've kept records of past combat. I kept frankly unnecessarily strict records of mine and one opponent's every rolls for something like a dozen games because he was so goddamned sure he was the unluckiest sod ever and that I only kept winning because I was lucky. Over the course of these many games I could see lucky and unlucky dice on both sides, but the majority fell somewhere within the realms of statistical normalcy, and I could thus simply prove with mathematical certainty that he was not, in these twelve games, less lucky than me. I won ten. Thankfully this managed to mollify his dice-paranoia and without a convenient fallback to cling onto to explain why he kept losing he could go on to improve as a wargamer and cease to be such a, and I hate to use this word, scrub.
So if I have personally gathered statistics to prove that over a large enough number of rolls, the dice will eventually average out, and you have personally gathered statistics saying "my missile launcher HWTs keep missing all the time", what do we have? We do not have objective proof that luck is the only factor worthy of notice, and thus you are not on the side of objectivity. We do not, in fact, have conclusive evidence at all. We have two separate theories that sadly happen to be mutually exclusive.
This thread was started less an attempt to piss on yours, and more as an attempt to present mine and gather data for it.

Arguing about an individual being consistently lucky is equivalent to saying that someone constantly wins the lottery.
Statistically speaking it is possible but very unlikely.

IF tournaments are consistently won by the same people I can only say that statistically speaking very very unlikely it is due to just luck.

But I do agree that skill level only reaches a certain level and tapers off and then luck becomes a larger factor. But that is only if the skill level even reaches the same tier.

In a tournament with different tiers of skill levels the top tiered players obviously should consistently win. Hence leading to a result of a group of people consistently winning.

The thing that is being argued here instead is assuming that the skill tier differentiation is very small. At a differentiation of 1% I have to admit that it is more based on luck than anything else. But the truth is it is hard to say whether or not it is a small difference.

Furthermore, it is hard to compare at what difference of skill level will luck take place much more heavily than skill.

People have been passing off luck as skill since time immorial. 40k is no different. There is not such thing as skill .

I think tourny armies, from my very limited knowledge, is about stacking the odds, a lot of the lists ive seen on here are min/max, max heavy support or fast attack min troops as required for the weaker troops etc max armour etc (as HS or DT).

So, I've been playing at least a PvP game a week for almost a year, and I haven't lost one. I went several weeks without losing a unit. Clearly I must be lucky?

Didn't someone say 'the more I practice the luckier I play' or some such.

There is an inherent level of luck in all games involving dice (repeatedly rolling 1's in 40k means you will likely lose) but mitigating this and putting the other person in the process of rolling more dice that can damage him will help you.

I treat it like a card game or even gambling; with mastery and understanding comes a much higher chance or things going your way and there's plenty of proof and design in the game itself for this to ring true. The great thing is also that one is not guarenteed to win even if you are a great player with a fantastically set up army, giving even a slight chance to a novice. To give so much credit to 'luck' is a bit foolish and a total buzzkill, man.

Lobukia wrote:So, I've been playing at least a PvP game a week for almost a year, and I haven't lost one. I went several weeks without losing a unit. Clearly I must be lucky?

Or more likely you understand your army and tactics as well as your opponents and you defeat them accordingly.

I played a game last night against a kid who I play regularly. (He is pretty good he came in second in our last store tournament.) However i know he runs a deathcompany heavy BA list with a dante sanguinary guard bomb also i deployed so he would have to run across a field of fire. I won because of a combination of smart tactics and good rollign for me against bad rolling for him.

I think people are confusing luck with odds. One is uncontrollable, the other is fairly reliable, given large and similar numbers. That's why good tourney lists are redundant... it lessens the random factor and makes playing odds more predictable.

If you think 40k is luck, then youve been playing long odds... probably paid off big a few times, probably bit you big a few times too. It's like poker, if you think it's luck, it's because you're either taking silly risks, gambling instead of playing, or you just aren't very good.

I have yet to play my first game, but in pretty much every other game I've ever played, I've found that I, at least, either always lose or always win, depending on the game or who I'm playing, excepting extraordinarily good or bad luck.

I have noticed some people claim that certain things are luck, when they are not.

For example:

Player: "Whew, I made the cover save on that last Troop model, thank goodness."
Opponent: "Yeah, well, that's just luck."

Actually it really isn't. There is, of course, some measure of luck, but if the Player's model stood in area terrain and went to ground to save the hit, then that's two actions right there that went from "model dies with no save" to a 67% chance of survival.

In line with the original topic, it's worth noting that the methodology of tournament scoring actually obscures these results as well. You'd have to look at best general awards more than best overall, and the structure of battle points also rewards a good player who stomped a bad one over an excellent player that edged out the win over a strong one. And of course, not every tournament uses identical victory conditions, further obscuring the ability to define whether the results of a tournament are useful to determine who is good.

That said, it's my understanding that there are some names that consistently crop up near the top of US events that they attend. The much-maligned Dashofpepper, for one.

For my local scene, there are also a small number of players that tend to win consistently.

Ailaros wrote:
But that misses the point. How can you tell if you're lucky? You say you're not, but how do you know for sure?

One way, for example, would be to meticulously record everything that happens during all of your games (like I made an attempt to do in 5th edition, and even then, it was a poor attempt not recording every single die roll), and then compare your luck to statistical models. Have you done this? Ever?

Or are you just vaguely thinking back to a spotty memory and saying "nah, I bet I probably wasn't that lucky." Without data, without rigor, without science, any theory you put forward based on your personal experience has no value.

I found this part quite funny, because, I did record a whole match (only value rolled, not which unit roll what) again a friend in 5th. We did this because I always say I'm quite unlucky, and he wanted to prove me wrong.

Match was Eldar again Dark Eldar, 1500 pts. End of the game :
- Dark Eldar : one ravager and a squad of wyches lost
- Eldar : Tabbled...

After game conversation (roughly) :

(him) You really are as unlucky as you said, you needed 2 turn of guided War walkers with Scatter Laser just to destroy one ravager! your tanks did next to nothing and dropped like flies!
(me, looking at the data) ...
(him) Is there a problem?
(me) Yes, my rolls were indeed not statistic...
(him) Sure!
(me) ... I rolled more 6 than anything else!
(him) WTF?


And that it... Large number don't work when you make different rolls with different probability in a row.
You don't care when you roll 3/4 of 6 when you need a 2+, and most of the time you don't even notice.
But it is really painful to roll a couple of 1 on the vehicule damage table...


Conclusion?

Like Ailaros said, I think It a game that is hard to learn, but once mastered, Luck is what won the game for you.
I can win a lot of games again new players and sometimes lose because of dumb luck too (Loosing a hull down Falcon with holofield to a single lascannon shot on turn one is not skill from my opponent. And when you lose two, you don't really have to wait turn 7 to see who won... ), but again a veteran, It always down to basic luck.
We know our armies, we know the threats, and we know how to build a list with enough redundancy to not lose a game with the death of a "key" unit. A prayer to the dice god is often the best course of action.

It's the same as Poker it's a game of luck but the best players know how to manage A. the odds and B. do things things that work around the odds. If your opponent folds due to you bluffing them it doesn't matter what you had in hand.

In the same way, you stand 18.1 inches away from an infantry model with a meltagun... he could roll nothing but 6's he's still not going to destroy your tank with one move to get in range.

Play by the absolutes hell I started an article on dakka of tactics that play by the absolutes and not by the luck.

C-Hydra

Because there's one thing that this entirely fails to grasp: some people are just lucky.

Yes but it is generally accepted that people make their own 'luck'. You are not lucky as in random chance always goes your way. You are lucky in that what you do (be it actions or mind set) increases the opportunities available to you, you undersand them, and are able to act in a way that benefits you.

This is a quote from one Richard Wiseman who did a study into people who were very lucky or very unlucky.

"My research revealed that lucky people generate
their own good fortune via four basic principles.
They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to
their intuition,..."

[italics mine]

You can't just look at ALL die rolls, you have to look at the die rolls where the outcome is actually significant. Far from falling into the world of large numbers, there are generally a very small number of rolls that make or break a game.

Not really. all the rolling throughout the game goes towards whether you win or lose. Very few games in reailty come down to just a few rolls. There may be a few rolls where it 'appears' the game will be made or broken, but they are often a result of ton of other rolls and decisions beforehand, that had they gone differently would not have resulted in the 'make or break' moment.

Many such rolls are also the result of someone putting them selves in that position due to planning and forethought. Or they are the roll that they knew they had if the previous set of actions went wrong, i.e. If plan A fails then I still have Plan B. It may appear that Plan B was the lucky roll, but it was due to application of skill - undertsanding what you are doing whilst engaging in Plan A, having Plan B as a backup plan etc. Simply looking at the 'make or break' moments in isolation distorts the view. As the quote goes 'You make your own luck'.

What constitues luck on these rolls. If I have a make or break moment at 66% odds to win then I do not consider my self lucky when it worked.

In a recent gane I played, in the last turn I assaulted the enemy unit that had just grabbed an objective, killed it and consolidated to the objective.

Was I lucky to get the consolidate (2+ needed), or was I lucky to win the assault (assault unit vs tau fire warriors), or that I made the assault roll (can't remember distance, but wasn't much).

Or was it that a couple of turns earlier I had decied that I wasn't putting my scoring unit in the open to get shot up by a shooty tau force, so hid behind LOS blocking terrain near the objective, knowing I was going second, and that I would almost certainly beat the snot out of anything he sent to grab it.

A dramatic end maybe, and several 'make or break' rolls, but not a case of being lucky in any true sense of the term, all the rolls were seriously biased in my favor. The alternative to try and grab the objective earlier could have seen me shot to pieces with more likely hood of me failing to keep the objective.

Certainly I could have ended losing due to 'bad luck' but I didn't win due to 'good luck' no matter that I had several 'make or break' rolls, someone coming in to watch right at the end might have seen it as just being a lucky win, but that is because they haven't accounted for everything else going on in all the previous turns, all the moving, shooting, assaulting and dice rolling to ensure that my 'key' unit wasn't going to get flanked earlier by crisis suits etc.

I lose consistently.........

Definitely keeps the wife gaming with me when she can regularly kick the crap out of me at my own hobby, lol.

Sure glad she won't paint, so at least I can fall back on that!