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So I thought this would be an interesting poll for dakka, since we all play a game with a large amount of chance in it, how many of you believe in luck? Do some people naturally always roll great? Or maybe terrible? Are hot streaks and cold streaks real? Do the dice gods answer your prayers? discuss!

Luck is a manifestation of probability. Over the course of a game, you will roll an equal amount of 1,2,3,4,5, and 6. However, not all individual rolls are equally important. It's far better to roll better on invuln saves or LD than for bolter hits and wounds.

I believe i have some magic call out ability to make friends roll a specific number.

i have called out 1s double 1s 6s and double 6s an extraordinary amount of times. though im not really counting.

it never works when i play but its hilarious when i do it to a friend mostly because i call 1s.

I don't believe in luck, but some days it feels very much like I have bad luck.

In all honesty though, the way that we perceive sequences of random events creates the illusion that we are lucky or lucky. As has been stated, the total number of dice rolled in a game and the results of those rolls are very random, but since they happen in a specific order, and because that order is very important, it will seem like unlikely things are happening.

Additionally, there are so many random variables in 40k, and so many sets of things that happen when specific unlikely things happen in conjunction, that it can feel like we're unlucky. This is like the "shared birthday" problem. There are 365 days of the year that you can have your birthday on, and your exact odds of sharing a birthday with someone in a room full of 30 people is unlikely, but the odds that at least two of those people share a birthday with each other are very likely! In the same way, it's unlikely that you'll encounter any specific pattern of good or bad luck, but it's extremely likely during a game that at least one of you will experience some string of incredibly good or bad luck, simply because there are so many interconnecting variables.

EDIT: This actually explains just why the elimination of dice rolls by top players is so effective. When you ignore most saves and rolls that need to be made, or you reduce the likelihood of any single "bad" event to be closer and closer to zero through use of re-rolls, then you drastically reduce the total potential number of variables that contribute to the "shared birthday" problem, and thus reduce how much luck will affect your game.

No, of course not. There is no such thing as luck. You are free to believe otherwise, but people like you are why casinos are a profitable business.

Hell yes. My scatter dice are lucky, and loyal. They roll wonderfully for me, but if loaned out will stab their borrowed master in the back.

 Desubot wrote:
I believe i have some magic call out ability to make friends roll a specific number.

i have called out 1s double 1s 6s and double 6s an extraordinary amount of times. though im not really counting.

it never works when i play but its hilarious when i do it to a friend mostly because i call 1s.

My brother does that. It's really irritating lol.

Statistically speaking and logically the classical idea of what luck is does not exist, but I have more than enough evidence to suggest that there are people in life who have bad and good series of events.

The majority of people in life are thoroughly average, but on a graph over lifetimes people will have lucked out more and some less. It's not that they are lucky they just happened to be the ones who got that result to put them in that spot on the graph.

I mean hypothetically if those people live to 156 and we see their luck reverse and they have "bad" rolls during that whole time to average it out to being normal then yeah they are just average like anyone else.

However given the average human lifespan is 78 years (USA) it seems unlikely to make much of a difference if their lifetime of good fortune was about to reverse when they died of natural causes.

Statistically speaking there has to be the person out there who succeeds with outstanding results every time because there has to be for everyone who fails spectacularly.

Would you call this person lucky?

So in a weird way I do think luck exists but in a very different version of what people would think of as luck. I would say this would only apply to a small amount of the population. As for myself I have proven to be extremely unlucky over the years of my life. Maybe if I live long enough I'll see that reversed, but it seems unlikely given the circumstances. Due to something I have I have a shorter life to live than most. Much less shorter. Thankfully in life luck good or bad can be mitigated with some skill (usually).

It's not like I'm a superstitious idiot or anything either.

I shouldn't believe in luck because its a bunch of gak but in my experience I have learned that I am not a lucky man when it comes to chance. Gambling would be a very unwise move for me. That said I do have the occasional good luck streak, often involving really silly or unimportant things, but never when I need it to pay off.

So to answer the question.... there is no such thing as luck and i definitely don't have much of it..... if it was a real thing. I just don't trust that it doesn't exist enough to be sure I'm not unlucky

 angelofvengeance wrote:

 Desubot wrote:
I believe i have some magic call out ability to make friends roll a specific number.

i have called out 1s double 1s 6s and double 6s an extraordinary amount of times. though im not really counting.

it never works when i play but its hilarious when i do it to a friend mostly because i call 1s.

My brother does that. It's really irritating lol.

It makes my friend soooo mad.

But yah it really is statistics. though it can be thrown off by variations in dice

While probabilities and statistics are good for long term planning, what those fickle little cubes do on an individual throw is the purview of luck. And they are spiteful little bastards.

And lucky/unlucky streaks happen. We as gamers chuck a lot of dice around. And the human mind is geared to find patterns in randomness. This is reinforced by the notable outcomes attached to those rolls. We all have stories of incredible luck. Like when the heldrake burns a SoB retributer squad, and every one makes their 6++ save. What are the odds of 5d6 coming up all 6’s? Low. But it happens, and we remember.

Voted no.

There are numerous people rolling dice out there, so someones gotta loose all their terminators to overwatch from a str3 gun. And some Ork player has to make armour saves all day.

We just don't notice the times we roll 3s all day on 6+ armour saves to balance it all out

In the long run I believe in probabilities. The larger the sample size the more the data will be accurate with the probabilities. Good for calculating overall performance across a gaming career. During individual games that are in effect little sliced units of the larger sample things can be far less predictable. The dice can nail you hard or bring you to glory just as easily as it can give you an average result.

I strongly believe in Gaussian distributions. Relative small good and badroll streaks are likely to happen frequently in this game. It is up to the player how to deal with it. You can either accept, use / abuse it or avoid it by making an army that uses tons of dice for all important rolls.

Players who don't mitigate the effects, don't accept bad roll streaks and start using all sorts of curses with the words "not statistical" in them really annoy me.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
So do I believe in luck. Ehm kinda. "Lucky moments" happen but it has noting to do with the mythical idea of luck : P


Automatically Appended Next Post:
An other thing to add is that I do believe in "lucky" of "cursed" dice. We table top gamers and rpg'ers etc. tend to roll hunge amounts of dice rolls in a game. This might just be enough to show the unfairness of some of our less then ideal dice. I have the tendency to overestimate this effect and tend to label dice as bad or good dice even if there aren't really enough dice rolls rolled to support it.

The same goes for digital dice. Some have really bad random feeds the vassal scatter dice in particular is kinda famous for this.

I want to say no, but I can't. Nothing says luck like getting crazy rolls that just laugh probability in the face.

When you need a good save, believing in luck sure doesn't hurt.

Absolutely. It's a lot less fun to say "My monthly distribution of dice rolls means I'm rolling well tonight" versus "Hot damn, I'm one lucky sob"

 thepowerfulwill wrote:
So I thought this would be an interesting poll for dakka, since we all play a game with a large amount of chance in it, how many of you believe in luck? Do some people naturally always roll great? Or maybe terrible? Are hot streaks and cold streaks real? Do the dice gods answer your prayers? discuss!

There is no such thing as "luck." There is chance, of course, but this simply indicates the unknown and unforeseeable results of the admixture of nature and choice, of necessity and freedom.

But there's no such thing as luck.

The moment that you cast the die, nature simply runs its course.

Wow. I'm surprised how this poll is going.
I thought it'd be a clean sweep for NO.

 Alex Kolodotschko wrote:
Wow. I'm surprised how this poll is going.
I thought it'd be a clean sweep for NO.

I voted yes because but not because I ever have good luck. Like a game I played a few weeks ago where I rolled double 6's on the first psychic power of the game (on two dice) with Be'Lakor, then rolled a 1, failed leadership on 11, re-rolled the 6 with fateweaver, and it came up 6 again. Aaaaaand he's gone! I think the odds are something like 1/7750 ish.

I believe in my opponent's luck.

 Alex Kolodotschko wrote:
Wow. I'm surprised how this poll is going.
I thought it'd be a clean sweep for NO.

It's a poorly worded poll.

Of course I believe in 'luck.' Probability is a very well understood branch of mathamatics, and that's what 'luck' is. Hot and cold streaks exist - they're what happens when you get a stretch of similar results in a row. It's kinda hard to doubt that.

Alex Kolodotschko wrote:Wow. I'm surprised how this poll is going.
I thought it'd be a clean sweep for NO.

Well I'm a Mathematician (Student, soon to be. haha) and I hit yes. I think it's all about how you define luck. One way to define it is along the lines of what Bookwrack said:

Bookwrack wrote:Of course I believe in 'luck.' Probability is a very well understood branch of mathamatics, and that's what 'luck' is. Hot and cold streaks exist - they're what happens when you get a stretch of similar results in a row. It's kinda hard to doubt that.

Basically, Luck can be defined as an outcome or a set of outcomes which are viewed in a certain way (Bad Luck - A set of bad or unfavourable results; Good Luck - A set of good or favourable results).

So it all comes down to how you define it. Plus who doesn't like the whole "The Universe is doing me a favour!" or "The Universe hates me right now!" sort-of definition of Luck every once in a while? haha

 IllumiNini wrote:

Alex Kolodotschko wrote:Wow. I'm surprised how this poll is going.
I thought it'd be a clean sweep for NO.

Well I'm a Mathematician (Student, soon to be. haha) and I hit yes. I think it's all about how you define luck. One way to define it is along the lines of what Bookwrack said:

Bookwrack wrote:Of course I believe in 'luck.' Probability is a very well understood branch of mathamatics, and that's what 'luck' is. Hot and cold streaks exist - they're what happens when you get a stretch of similar results in a row. It's kinda hard to doubt that.

Basically, Luck can be defined as an outcome or a set of outcomes which are viewed in a certain way (Bad Luck - A set of bad or unfavourable results; Good Luck - A set of good or favourable results).

So it all comes down to how you define it. Plus who doesn't like the whole "The Universe is doing me a favour!" or "The Universe hates me right now!" sort-of definition of Luck every once in a while? haha

This. I define luck in 40k as "whether what has happened in hindsight was against probability in my favor, or not in my favor" for good and bad respectively.

If someone hit a one-in-a-hundred million complete-chance like winning a lottery, I would say "wow, you are lucky!" unless they then told me that they've actually played that same lottery 99,999,999 times previous, at which point I would say " wow, you are statistical!"

 IllumiNini wrote:

Plus who doesn't like the whole "The Universe is doing me a favour!" or "The Universe hates me right now!" sort-of definition of Luck every once in a while? haha

I kinda hate it when an opponent almost rage quits due to a bad dice roll streak that seems too unlikely to be true and killed his plan.
Or when players get all grumpy because you roll better then he does all game long for "all the important rolls".

Something people fail to grasp about probability is. There will always be deviations from statistical probability. It would be strange for dice to always roll statistical averages. We don't have a life to to play each game 1000 times in order to get a decent distribution. Another thing to consider is that all dice are not created equal. I have noticed that some players roll better than others on average - I don't think they are cheating I just think their dice aren't perfectly random. There is a Necron player I play against that makes aprox 80% 3+ saves. I've played him over 15 times and I never get close to average results out of his saves. Hes not cheating - but something is really wrong with his dice I am sure. Typically I am unlucky - I roll plenty of 6's - I just roll them at the wrong times!

Of course. Probability is the statistical chance of a given event occurring, luck is the word for it happening at the optimum moment.

oldzoggy wrote:

 IllumiNini wrote:

Plus who doesn't like the whole "The Universe is doing me a favour!" or "The Universe hates me right now!" sort-of definition of Luck every once in a while? haha

I kinda hate it when an opponent almost rage quits due to a bad dice roll streak that seems too unlikely to be true and killed his plan.
Or when players get all grumpy because you roll better then he does all game long for "all the important rolls".

With dice rolls, you can't be TFG. They're random (or at least pseudo-random), so you can't justifiably get abgry. Disappointed? Most definitely! Angry? No!

Bad luck and "The Dice Gods hating you this day!" Ate no reasons to be TFG haha

Xenomancers wrote:Something people fail to grasp about probability is. There will always be deviations from statistical probability. It would be strange for dice to always roll statistical averages. We don't have a life to to play each game 1000 times in order to get a decent distribution. Another thing to consider is that all dice are not created equal. I have noticed that some players roll better than others on average - I don't think they are cheating I just think their dice aren't perfectly random. There is a Necron player I play against that makes aprox 80% 3+ saves. I've played him over 15 times and I never get close to average results out of his saves. Hes not cheating - but something is really wrong with his dice I am sure. Typically I am unlucky - I roll plenty of 6's - I just roll them at the wrong times!

This. It's all about probabilities and statistics.

No, but I believe in loaded dice.

Yes, I believe in luck. Seen uncanny streaks of good rolls and bad rolls to know some people just get the breaks when others don't. Whether it's something subconscious or environmental affecting how things are turning out or probability is just falling in their favor, I can't say - but they are uncannily lucky or unlucky.

And on the other end of the spectrum I've seen the Gamescience speech to know that dice themselves can have a bias. Likewise, I know an individual, given a few warm up tosses, can throw 2D6 in a way to purposely get the result he wants.

 Stormonu wrote:
And on the other end of the spectrum I've seen the Gamescience speech to know that dice themselves can have a bias.

The die themselves can have bias (e.g. Loaded Die), or their environment can make them biased (e.g. the way they're tossed and onto what sort of surface), but I'm not sure this would necessarily cause a particular type of result (e.g. high value rolls).

 Stormonu wrote:
Likewise, I know an individual, given a few warm up tosses, can throw 2D6 in a way to purposely get the result he wants.

That sounds so suss to me haha

I only believe in bad luck.

Like the type that sets fire to your server a mere week before a client showing is due and none of the data is recoverable.