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Here are a few tips for new players or old players that simply cannot beat those 4 or 5 guys in the store that always dominate.

My dice sucked that game.
I needed to go first.
The scenario screwed me.
My opponents army was crap, no way I could've beaten that broken list.

If you've ever said anything like this after a game that you've lost, you need to stop. Right now. Never say it again.


People need to stop looking further than the real source of why they lose games. Place the blame where it belongs. Accept Responsibility.

Games are not only won by armies that go first in their favorite scenario against preferred enemies while using loaded dice.

Once you realise the REAL reason you lost, and are able to prevent it from happening in the future...you instantly become a little better at 40k.
............................................
Here is an example:

I played a friend of mine not long ago in an RTT. I was using my Grey Knights and he was playing his Dark Eldar...my worst possible matchup. Him with tons of Dark Lances and my tactics hinging on 3 land raiders.

When I saw his list I cringed. I know I dont build the list for fighting against Dark Eldar with their multiple bright lances. My grey knights have an exceedingly hard time with CC incubi as well. I saw an uphill battle for me.

Mission was an objective mission...against his speedy army and multiple scorers. I totally figured he was going to wipe me out however since there would be no escape...he had a webway portal. He could've EASILY blown open a tank or two and engage me in HtH at the very beginning of the game.

He made a crucial mistake of, for some reason, placing his webway portal on the opposite edge of the board from me.

This allowed me to massacre his army as he came on peicemeal far away from me. Nothing got within blaster range...he never got into HtH combat, and I blasted his army off of the board. All for the cost of a couple of marines and an immobile Land Raider.

His reasoning why he lost? His dice were terrible and he needed the first turn.

He was totally oblivious to the fact that if his entire army could've deployed off of a CLOSEBY webway portal...he could've smoked my elite armour 14 army with ease.

What did he learn from this game...not a thing.

To make matters worse, when I tried to explain his mistake to him (in a friendly manner...hes a gaming buddy of mine) he simply wouldnt have it. He was sure that he'd done everything right. Actually, he was too frustrated by the loss to accept his own blunder. Why was he frustrated, because if he would've gotten the first turn and his fleet moves a little better...he 'could've' won.
....................................................................

I call myself a pretty darn good 40k player. I can typically place within the top 10% easily at major tournaments. I win local RTT's all the time just by showing up. All the while refusing to invest my hard earned dollar in the latest "flavor of the week". (Lash, Bikernob, Lootaspam, Biker Seercouncil, ect)...and instead often preferring to pilot "underdog" lists like Deathwing or Grey Knights.

When I lose a game, I blame myself....everytime.

I look for my own mistakes...and learn from them.
I constantly look for weakness in my armies...and tweak them.
I'm aware of my weakness against certain lists....and try to minimise them during games as best I can.
I always keep the scenario in the back of my head...and preserve my maneuverable elements if I have to.

Most importantly...I NEVER...

NEVER...

...blame the dice.

While I agree with the need to take responsibility, in a game whose outcomes are dependent upon rolling small numbers of dice, the fact of the matter is that sometimes the dice ARE to blame.

It obviously doesn't apply to your example, but I can think of countless games where my (or my opponent's) rolling was so terrible or so spectacular that it completely negated all application of strategy or tactics by either general. The combination of statistics and small sample sizes dictates that chance does indeed play a major factor and is sometimes responsible for outcomes more than the decisions made on the field.

A good player can handle bad dice.

I agree with op..

I once distracted a ultramarine player with gun drones so he wouldnt charge my gunline with his assault marines. I didnt bother telling him his mistake. It cost him.

I dont remember what he said after the game but I remeber he didnt think it was his fault.

Nurglitch wrote:A good player can handle bad dice.

Tell that the Tyranid player who I beat simply because I made 4 times as many Terminator saves as I should have. Or hypothetical player X who fails every single roll in game Y.

Even the best players can only handle so much bad luck.

Nurglitch wrote:A good player can handle bad dice.

If you find yourself complaining about bad dice...start twin linking weapons, use flamers, and incorperate more fearless elements into your list.

Players fault...not dice.

We're not talking about those times where "all I gotta do is make a shadowfeild save and I win"..that is a separate issue.

You didn't make 4x as many saves as you should have, you simply made 4x as many saves as you would have had you rolled some idealized average.

That's one reason why the whole "Well, I'd roll 4/8 4+s on average..." kind of reasoning is so stupid, because only considers what will happen on average, rather than the expected value of all possible results. Sure, 0/8 and 8/8 are less likely than 4/8 on 50/50, but it happens, and particularly where the sample of dice being rolled is so small.

If hypothetical player X fails every single roll in game Y then he failed as a player because he did not adjust his strategy to cope with the worst possible luck. There's more to 40k than rolling dice.

He's right, there are a lot of ways to mitigate and 'push' the odds.

Don't roll very well for shooting?
- Get troops with good BS that don't need good rolls.
- Add factors that will allow rerolls (twin-linking, guide, etc)
- Get more rolls in there (more troops, weapons, rate of fire, etc.)

If you don't like to gamble, I would recommend playing the Dark Angels. I've found with my current DA list that luck is almost entirely eliminated as a factor.

So even when my TL Lascannons almost always miss, that's still my fault? Flamers I agree with, and Fearless makes you suck up close. Elminating dice-rolling is effective, but fact is, when I rolled an average of four 1's for every 6 saves I made for my Obliterators for the entire night last friday that was my fault apparently too. I get what you're saying about whining and such, but this game is about dice a large majority of the time. Tactics can't save you when it comes to luck sometimes. Giving examples of a player using bad tactics is one thing, but it doesn't cover the dice rolls.

Sorry bud, but I disagree. 40k takes very little skill when on the battlefield. Once lists are made, the battlefield is static. As long as you know what each unit does, there is very little room for strategy. Anti Tank units shoot tanks. Anti Infantry shoot infantry. Melee units run in and melee. Shooty units sit back and shoot. Once the game starts, there is hardly any adaptation from your core strategy - either run in or dont.

Unlike a real time strategy game, you do not need to worry about reaction speed, managing units all at once, and new variables in purchasing units. This limits the level of control of the player and the skill range. Sure, there are some advanced tactics with things like multiassaulting and countercharging, but nothing that is constant throughout each game. Overall, you just want to make sure you dont make mistakes.

The strategy comes from making a list. If you want to win, you want to take reliable units minimizing the odds of failure. You want to know that the unit you purchased is going to be able to do what it needs to do. You want to make sure it can adapt to any list as well.

Ofcourse, that being said, bad luck plays a factor as well. Both in the dice rolls and what your opponent brings. Again, unlike a RTS, you cant adapt to your opponent, as the battlefield is set at the beginning of the game. I would really like it if they added rules like some sort of capture points that give you extra units out of reserve, or something like an airstrike. A better cover system and suppressing units like in Dawn of War II I think would also add strategy, allowing you to flank pinned enemies from the side. It would make the movement phase much more strategic, and force people to anticipate what their enemy is going to do.

As for your example - you played as space marines, the easiest and most forgiving army in the game. Your friend was DE, the hardest and least forgiving army. While he did make a mistake, any mistake for him is much worse than any mistake you may have made.

I agree with OP! Tactics are everything. And a game that comes down to one dice roll at the end was a great game against two evenly matched people so everyone wins here. Out of a persons Win/Draw/Loss record I'd say 1 of every 100 of those games actually were "luck". (or maybe less)

I had an opponent at an RTT once that I baited his uber squad out of his landraider with an iron clad. He fell for it I had 3 tac squads jump out of rhinos all about 10-13 inches away from the now standing around in the open uber squard and I sprayed 27 pistols 3x (vulcan) flamers on them and after half were dead I charged in with all those attacks and 3x charging power fist.... he wouldn't have lost that squad if he didn't roll bad.... I smile and almost table the poor sap. I hate it when people try and take a victory away from you. This has happened many times this was just the first thing that came to mind.

Matt
(fan of tactics)

If dice don't matter, tell me how many games you will win if you roll nothing but ones.

Not a majority, or even half, ALL ones.

I'm not say it has ever happened or ever will happen. But 40K is a DICE system with miniatures.

I play 2 armies, Tyranids and Grey Knights. Tyranids don't really get many twin-linking options, sure as HELL don't get any amount of good BS, occasionally have a good WS. If the dice go poorly for me (or very well for an opponent, tactics don't matter. If you can't kill the enemy, or force them off objectives due to bad rolls, YOU CAN'T WIN.

In a game where ALL outcomes are determined by the dice, there is NO WAY for them NOT to be THE determining factor in the outcome of the game.

Maybe its just that interesting turns involving dice stick in my head more than others because of their unique nature, but I recall a lot of times when dice made a game.

....lictor pops up out of nowhere and assaults my entrenched firewarriors and dies.

....chaos sorceror and squad of terminators deep strike onto my front lines, mishap and are wiped out.

....squad of 5 space marine bikers assault my ork kommandos in cover, take dangerous terrain tests and lose 3/5 models, leaving 2 models to assault (and die).

....Ghazghkull failing four of seven 2+ invulnerable saves and dying.

.....lynchpin squad of terminators getting wiped out by 3 STR5 AP5 big shootas.

The list goes on.

Deadshane1 wrote:We're not talking about those times where "all I gotta do is make a shadowfeild save and I win"..that is a separate issue.

Is it? Your initial premise was that "My dice sucked that game" is never a valid statement. But there will be times when the dice wander so far from the theoretical average case as to render defeat inevitable, or victory certain.

I played three games against a friend's 'Ard Boyz Chaos list last week. In all three games, Abbadon was hit precisely once with Boon of Mutation, and rolled a '6' for his Toughness test. I've had a Bloodthirster charge a single ork, and bounce. I've failed 6 out of 6 Terminator saves.

Dice happen.

It's well and good to plan for the worst - in fact, it is often crucial to have contingencies in place to handle things like "Fateweaver just scattered 12" the wrong direction and mishap'd himself to death." But this isn't chess; we play the game with dice, and generally not statistically-significant numbers of them. It makes the game a little more interesting, and a little more chaotic (hail Eris!). Good players will make allowances for one or two standard deviations from "average" results, but let's not pretend that in a game where you roll nothing but 1's, any level of tactical brilliance is going to save you against a competent foe.

Nurglitch wrote:You didn't make 4x as many saves as you should have, you simply made 4x as many saves as you would have had you rolled some idealized average.

That's one reason why the whole "Well, I'd roll 4/8 4+s on average..." kind of reasoning is so stupid, because only considers what will happen on average, rather than the expected value of all possible results. Sure, 0/8 and 8/8 are less likely than 4/8 on 50/50, but it happens, and particularly where the sample of dice being rolled is so small.

If hypothetical player X fails every single roll in game Y then he failed as a player because he did not adjust his strategy to cope with the worst possible luck. There's more to 40k than rolling dice.

If Player X rolls all 1s and Players Y rolls all 6s, Player Y WILL win, no matter what.

If player X rolls 99% 1s and 2s and Player Y rolls 99% 5s and 6s, same srory.

If player X rolls 75% 1-3 and players Y rolls 75% 4-6, then player X COULD win, especially, if his few 4-6s are all 6s and happen on important rolls but he'll have a hell of a job.

Don't get me wrong, you VERY rarely get these games, but they DO happen.

There are also games that are determined by a single die-roll. These are a bit different, as yes, if you allowed yourself to get into a sitation where a single die-roll determined the result then, be definition, you got yourself into a situation where you COULD lose.

@ Night lords- you're pretty wrong on several levels....

Night Lords wrote: 40k takes very little skill when on the battlefield. Once lists are made, the battlefield is static. As long as you know what each unit does, there is very little room for strategy. Anti Tank units shoot tanks. Anti Infantry shoot infantry. Melee units run in and melee. Shooty units sit back and shoot. Once the game starts, there is hardly any adaptation from your core strategy - either run in or dont.

Wow, you've got 40k totally figured out then dont you? Or not, this statement is so incorrect I barely know how to address it. What I will say is that you've simplified the actual "game" to a level here that would make 40k so boring that nobody with a lick of intelligence would bother to play it in the first place. Target priority isnt NEARLY as simple as you put it....sure anti-tank units target tanks, what kind of naive statement is that? Which tank do you target however, which one poses the bigest threat to your most valuable unit...what might make a game winning move in the next two turns.

Geez, according to you, Chess must be the easiest game ever...regardless of your opponent. Congratulations on being smarter than anyone...ever.

Unlike a real time strategy game, you do not need to worry about reaction speed, managing units all at once, and new variables in purchasing units. This limits the level of control of the player and the skill range. Sure, there are some advanced tactics with things like multiassaulting and countercharging, but nothing that is constant throughout each game. Overall, you just want to make sure you dont make mistakes.

Again, its not that simple....for all the same reasons.

The strategy comes from making a list. If you want to win, you want to take reliable units minimizing the odds of failure. You want to know that the unit you purchased is going to be able to do what it needs to do. You want to make sure it can adapt to any list as well.

List building IS very important in 40k, as a matter of fact, its part of were some mistakes happen...so in an odd way, you've validated part of my post that you "disagree" with.

Ofcourse, that being said, bad luck plays a factor as well. Both in the dice rolls and what your opponent brings. Again, unlike a RTS, you cant adapt to your opponent, as the battlefield is set at the beginning of the game. I would really like it if they added rules like some sort of capture points that give you extra units out of reserve, or something like an airstrike. A better cover system and suppressing units like in Dawn of War II I think would also add strategy, allowing you to flank pinned enemies from the side. It would make the movement phase much more strategic, and force people to anticipate what their enemy is going to do.

Of course bad luck plays a factor, but people dont lose game after game after game because they've got bad dice. Not unless their dice are imbalanced to land on 1's all the time...such a claim just isnt realistic. If a player is losing game after game...and blaming dice all the time...the problem lies with the player, not the dice.

Also, saying that you cannot adapt to opponents? That is amazingly wrong. What do you think a single build does during a tournement series. A space marine army might shoot against a hand to hand army like chaos Khorne, but totally shift gears against a gunline superior tau army and attempt to engage in HtH.

...thats called adapting to your opponent.

As for your example - you played as space marines, the easiest and most forgiving army in the game. Your friend was DE, the hardest and least forgiving army. While he did make a mistake, any mistake for him is much worse than any mistake you may have made.

Not to be rude, but if you think Grey Knights are forgiving, and skimmer based Dark Eldar dont have an advantage over them in an objective mission...then you sir, have not a clue about 40k. Actually, your entire post is a testament to that fact.

A good player will always examine a game to see what they could have done differently. Sometimes, however, the answer really is luck/dice.

Good post though. Can also be applied to all other areas of one's life.

+1 to Deadshane's last post.

You'd be surprised how many people make dumb moves because they don't take their time on their turn (forgetting to run, use WAAAGH!, etc.) as well and how many times bad dice can turn something completely on its head.

For example, my Night Lords were fighting some vanilla marines at the store. My opponent deploys 5 Terminators on my far left flank to hunt down my Raptors. I use the Raptors to get them into the open and then hit them with a battlecannon shot. One had already died from small arms fire, but the remaining four got 1's on their 2+ save. 160 points gone in one shot because it didn't scatter (good dice for me) and he failed many more saves than probability predicted that he would (bad dice for him).
Dice CAN make a difference is my point. I would also say that they generally DON'T in the overall scheme of things. If you roll worse in one place you tend to roll better in another (Law of Large Numbers). But putting a loss down to dice is stupid. If your strategy depends on luck that much, you deserve to lose.

Deadshane1 wrote:
Of course bad luck plays a factor, but people dont lose game after game after game because they've got bad dice. Not unless their dice are imbalanced to land on 1's all the time...such a claim just isnt realistic. If a player is losing game after game...and blaming dice all the time...the problem lies with the player, not the dice.

I like this statement better than your initial phrasing of your position.

Nurglitch wrote:You didn't make 4x as many saves as you should have, you simply made 4x as many saves as you would have had you rolled some idealized average.

Good players understand the underlying math and use it make predictions both before the game (list building) and during the game. Obviously expecting to roll a statistical average every time is absurd, however without the ability to see the future, it is the most reasonable assumption to make. Of course you need to be prepared for when you do not roll "on the odds", but there are limits to what kinds of preparations can be reasonably made.

If hypothetical player X fails every single roll in game Y then he failed as a player because he did not adjust his strategy to cope with the worst possible luck. There's more to 40k than rolling dice.

Rrrrright. You seem to be ignoring the fact that while there's more to 40k than rolling dice, rolling dice makes up a huge, integral part of the game. You're sitting there saying that a player who fails 500/500 rolls to hit in a game is bad because he didn't anticipate and compensate for that situation.

Congratulations--that is hands-down the most ridiculous thing I've heard on Dakka, ever.

Janthkin wrote:

Deadshane1 wrote:We're not talking about those times where "all I gotta do is make a shadowfeild save and I win"..that is a separate issue.

Is it? Your initial premise was that "My dice sucked that game" is never a valid statement. But there will be times when the dice wander so far from the theoretical average case as to render defeat inevitable, or victory certain.

Maybe if the death of that archon was so pivotal you should'nt have even chanced the 2+ save and instead hid him behind a hill.

See how this works.


Absolutly, dice DO happen...sometimes, but they dont happen enough so that you can blame every lost game on them.


...and you guys that are insisting that games happen all the time where someone rolls only 1's and their opponents are only rolling 6's?

well, you're being arguementative for the sake of arguing. I've played this game for some years now and I know what the true definition of "bad dice" is. What you guys are suggesting just doenst happen...if you insist it does, what can I say besides...

Please ignore this entire thread and continue losing your games to "dice". My only alternative to saying that is to simply call you a liar, which I wont do.

"bad dice" cannot be blamed for every loss...there is generally SOMETHING you couldve done better.

Absolutly, dice DO happen...sometimes, but they dont happen enough so that you can blame every lost game on them.


...and you guys that are insisting that games happen all the time where someone rolls only 1's and their opponents are only rolling 6's?

well, you're being arguementative for the sake of arguing. I've played this game for some years now and I know what the true definition of "bad dice" is. What you guys are suggesting just doenst happen...if you insist it does, what can I say besides...

With all do respect, you are retreating from your original position. All Janthkin has done is call you out on it. You proposed an absolute maxim that people should never, ever blame the dice for the outcome of a game, but now you're admitting that dice DO happen, just not enough to blame every game lost on them.

Not being able to blame them for EVERY game is a far cry from not being able to blame them for ANY game.

If something is a 50/50 chance, is it a gamble? What about 75/25? If I take a risk and, say, disembark a squad to shoot and assault another squad, and I have an 85% chance of victory and still lose, was that "something I could have done differently?" What if I had a 45% chance of success and succeeded, would it have been a bad move if I hadn't tried it? Stop trying to draw imaginary lines and make generalizations.Bad dice can lose games and so can bad tactics. You sound like one of those Magic players that tries to justify building their deck so efficiently that they'll never get mana screwed then you play them and they do. Dice are as much a part of the game as strategy (barring a strategy that eliminates dice, such as having a large wall that blocks LoS to all units on either side).

The problem I see here is that people are operating with a relevance bias, that because many dice get rolled during a game, dice are the entire game.

There's actually something you can do to disabuse yourself of this notion. Here's what you do. Organize a game with a friend, doing all the normal stuff, and then, using a sheet of paper (or several sheets of paper), pre-assign dice results to each turn of the game and each dice-rolling event.

You can assign failure to most rolls that a unit will potentially make (moving throw difficult terrain, shooting, assaulting, saving throws, etc), or distribute an idealized average of results, or whatever (playing a handicap, such as 1s to 6s is pretty interesting if you adjust victory conditions accordingly). The point is that neither you nor your opponent will know exactly what the results of an action will be, but you will know exactly where on the bell-curve the game happened.

So then you play the game, and you find out where the tactics are in the game. Much like newbie Poker players learn to stop kidding themselves about their luck, Warhammer players will stop being distracted by the buckets full of dice that the game employs.

So when did I get bored enough to figure this out? Well, it's actually an interesting story (to me at least). You see, around the beginning of 4th edition I became rather fed up with 40k. It didn't seem to have any tactics or whathaveyou, yet somehow I didn't seem to be very good at it. Like so many other people, I considered it to be a beer and pretzels game, that GW somehow incapable of writing good rules (despite Bloodbowl, Epic, Warmaster, etc...), and so on.

So I tried to write my own version, which led me down some interesting avenues of thought regarding why we would play a game of toy soldiers one way rather than another, and led me to researching conventions of wargame design in attempts to find new ways of doing stuff. In the meantime I encountered games like Firefight, Fast and Dirty, Stargrunt, Crossfire, Heavy Gear, Starship Troopers, and Nom.

One of the most interesting ideas that I explored was that of ordering dice. Basically if you're going to have two objects (both units and models are objects in 40k) address each other, then you roll whatever dice you've assigned to randomize the outcome of the action, and then assign them to the action via some ordering mechanism, like saying the hit dice with the lowest results are assigned to the closest elements of the addressed object.

Ordering dice was interesting because it had two implications: (1) that dice values could be pre-assigned, and (2) that the shapes and arrangements of objects on a free-form board could have a distinct impact on the results of dice depending on how they were assigned Assigning highest to closest, for example, yields different results depending on the configuration of the objects, such as when they are conveniently line up Napoleonically, or one encircles another, or whatnot.

This brought me back to 40k, particularly how it connected to the 4th edition tactics of killzone sniping. It occurred to me that the reason I had sucked at 40k, and found it boring, was because I had disregarded all the positioning, brinksmanship, and basically game-playing that situates when and where dice get thrown.

Then the latest Codex; Chaos Space Marine came out, and I fell in love with the back-to-basics "bring your own imagination" vibe that it had. I started buying a Space Marine army, the Khorne-dedicated shooting army I had quit before collecting years before, dusted off my Imperial Guard, Dark Eldar, and Orks, and started playing the game.

The first thing I did was read the rules, given that killzone sniping was a logical conclusion about how the rules operated, and applied the same care to those rules that I gave to my schooling. It turned out that I really should have sat down to read the rules carefully when the 3rd and 4th editions came out, as contrary to rumour (and my previously under-informed opinion), they were clear, straightforward, and tactcal (not to say there wasn't plenty of amphiboly, combing background and rules and whatnot, but nothing on the scale that was reported in the forums).

After that, I stopped sucking so much at the game, and play became less a "I'm going to take off during your movement phase to have a sandwich and a smoke", and more a "Okay, if he's moving 5" in that direction, then I'll need to move unit A 3-5" in that direction to scrape those specialists off that squad."

5th edition removed the kill-zone sniping from the game, but the basic concepts of range, movement, line of sight, and flanking (fitting as many assault units on a target unit as possible...) remain, and have even been somewhat refined. Heck, running and screening have added all sorts of interesting tactical problems to the usual problems of ordering and distributing firepower.

Janthkin wrote:

Deadshane1 wrote:
Of course bad luck plays a factor, but people dont lose game after game after game because they've got bad dice. Not unless their dice are imbalanced to land on 1's all the time...such a claim just isnt realistic. If a player is losing game after game...and blaming dice all the time...the problem lies with the player, not the dice.

I like this statement better than your initial phrasing of your position.

I agree. A streak of losses is not something that can be realistically blamed on the dice. However, they can very much make or break a single game.

You hit the nail on the head.

I will admit though, I am sure there have been some games where the dice were the reason that someone lost. If the DA guy would have placed his webway perfectly and played smartly, but then all his DLs missed or did nothing more than glance and did nothing and he got slaughtered by your lascannons and lost in assault, then that is a reason to blame the dice =(. This might happen though once or twice in your gaming career if you're good XD.

I do have to agree though that 99% of the time that it is the players own fault.

And I have to agree with shane about what Nightlords posted.

To quote Chuck Pahlaniuk

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

Outlive your opponent.

Deadshane, in everything you said, so true. I can't believe how many times I've seen people at the local GW playing, and losing, shrugging it off and saying "Oh, I just had some bad rolls", meanwhile, you can visibly SEE their horrible strategy, and they think they lost due to luck.

That said, I remember an epicly hilarious game: I was playing my Necrons, and I was 2 below phase out at the beginning of my WBBing, and I had 14 guys in various squads to WBB. I failed EVERY SINGLE WBB, and phased out. We had a good laugh about that one. But still, that is an incredibly unlikely situation, and claiming that that kind of stuff happens to you on a daily basis means you should either stop lying to yourself, or burn your dice and buy new ones. Yes, luck is a factor, but if it's the deciding factor in EVERY game you play, then there IS something wrong with the you the player.

Nurglitch: I noticed that about some of the games I see taking place around me; people stop
playing constantly to talk outside or grab a sandwich or whatever. Is that pretty
common for 40k? The Warmachine and Hordes players I've gone up against play until
the end of the game before they take smoke/sandwich breaks. I always figured it
was because we can count on playing 2-3 games in the time a 40k game plays once, but
I've never confirmed my theory.

malfred:

It used to be common for me because I didn't find the game to be particularly engaging, hence I'd have nothing to do in the Movement phase (I suppose I could have checked to make sure my opponents weren't cheating, but I didn't play with people where I needed to worry about that). Now that I've rediscovered the game, so to speak, I usually spend the movement phase talking with my opponent and thinking about how his movement will affect my next turn, and occasionally taking notes.

I can't speak for others, but it used to be pretty common back in the day.