Wargaming: The Big One and Lady Luck
Fritz here with another informative and ground breaking wargames article- actually I’m half serious and half joking about this article on lady luck and how we are all in her clutches…
I’ve traveled far and wide across the Imperium of Man facing all sorts of armies and seen many interesting things along the way, but one of the most problematic has been the gamer who only seems to roll 1’s with the dice. I know of one dude who almost quit the game since his rolling was so bad!
We have all felt the sting in that critical moment when we needed anything but a “1” and that is what rolled up, but what if you are one of those guys/gals who can only seem to roll a single pip, or is otherwise crippled by terrible luck?
A sense of humor helps.
Now, I’m not going to get into mathhammer, natural rolling techniques, or anything like that, as it doesn’t really matter how or why. Tactically, you can actually really DO something about it, so lets talk about some basic statistics.
The key to beating crazy dice is to increase your output in both shots and models on the table. The more dice you are rolling, the more difficult it is to be affected by statistical anomolies. Its one of those subtleties that makes 40k with its higher average numbers of dice rolled a more “regular” and predictable game that Warhammer Fantasy for example which on average uses a much smaller dice pool. Imagine you are putting down a predator tank with a twin linked las cannon and two heavy bolters- this is seven shots with a single re-roll on the las. Throw down a predator with an auto cannon, heavy bolters, and a storm bolter equaling ten shots. Further, make everything you can twin-linked! In general if you can achieve the same level of lethality for the same points try to do it with the most dice rolled if you can when you are designing armies. This is especially important for reliable tourney lists.
When it comes to your lists nothing hurts more if you are playing a tiny number of super elite models such at tooled up Space Marines, or even Terminators, as its very easy for a single bad roll to put you in an unrecoverable situation. It’s one innate advantage that horde armies have build into them to counter that bad luck…
If all else fails and Lady Luck has consigned you to the “low roller” pool, you can still take heart! Throw a psyker in your army and start blasting away without worry from any perils of the warp. Leadership tests, what leadership test? Game needs to end on turn five, make sure you roll that die!
Now, I’m still not sure exactly how serious this article is but in any case- sound off in the comments if you are one of those cursed rollers, or share your worst “anything but a one incident”- terminator armor saves and point blank melta shots to the front of the line! Fritz out.
