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Post by Trollock on Jan 10, 2018 15:32:09 GMT
Not sure why "lucky" dice are all that surprising. Even with casino dice it's very possible to have a die that's been physically biased in some manner, and is more likely to produce a certain result. Outside of casino dice it gets even worse, since the die manufacturers seem to focus on looks over quality and even randomness distribution. Confirmation bias is definitely a thing, but biased dice are too. The "inaccuracy" of a flawed die is minuscule though. There is no way that you can detect the difference between a flawed die and a "perfect" one without keeping rigorous records of every roll, and "no one" does that. Casinos do because they can lose (or earn...) large sums of money even if the inaccuracy is very small. Unless you have dice that are deliberately weighted you would have to roll the same dice thousands of times to say "for certain" that it is inaccurate. One can measure a die precisely and say that it is not exactly cubic easily enough, but i dare you to try and determine the inaccuracy of your regular gaming dice by keeping track of the results they roll. Also, this assumes that it is the physical die that is "lucky". Most players talk about a particular person some how rolling higher/lower regardless of what physical dice they use. This is even more silly and superstitious. It is sort of like adults still believing in Santa Claus or God. *starts running away from the angry mob gathering pitch forks and torches*
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mattmcd
Junior Strategist
Posts: 521
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Post by mattmcd on Jan 10, 2018 16:14:25 GMT
I also think the Fell Caller will be an improvement over the Shaman. Any thoughts on the Mist Speaker over the 2nd? Seems it would pair very very well with the Glacier King. Ignoring clouds and giving magical weapons (melee also), but also ignoring stealth and concealment. Also has prowl for survivability and drops his own cloud.
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Post by macdaddy on Jan 10, 2018 16:36:29 GMT
Also, this assumes that it is the physical die that is "lucky". Most players talk about a particular person some how rolling higher/lower regardless of what physical dice they use. This is even more silly and superstitious. It is sort of like adults still believing in Santa Claus or God. *starts running away from the angry mob gathering pitch forks and torches* *stands by open door to church potluck eyes pitchfork in corner of room...* "...eh his loss I guess" I swear my Brother has the best luck when he is rolling what he calls his "ork dice" They are green dice he got a while ago and every time he uses them I cry a little inside (mostly when we play warhammer fantasy) I try to use them but my results are always less than stellar as if the dice reject me Not saying that I actually think the dice are lucky, just saying its a funny coincidence of chance He has notoriously high dice rolls for the most part as it is I typically only roll high when I only need a low result, and roll low when I need an average result
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Post by GrumpyBear on Jan 10, 2018 16:51:19 GMT
In my dojo my frequent opponents are convinced my dice are lucky.
I always play Calandra or Vlad so it may be confirmation bias, but I find nothing skews dice bias like dice fixing.
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ravenfire
Junior Strategist
Me Mulg me SMASSSSSHHHH
Posts: 244
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Post by ravenfire on Jan 10, 2018 16:56:11 GMT
I think the aura of his personality influenced the dice to his favor
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Post by deviantcad on Jan 10, 2018 17:29:02 GMT
From what I have seen a lot of good players tend to have "lucky" dice. I think a lot of it is conformation bias like CDnerd said. If you consistently put yourself in a position to minimize dice "turning against" you. People tend to remember you not missing the rolls you need. Not that you hit a boosted a 5 when you really needed to hit or jumped through hoops to make sure you had the extra fury to boost and try again.
It let's people vent after a hard game and as long as you or your opponent don't harp on it to the point of diminishing the winners accomplishment I don't see the harm in a little superstition.
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Post by macdaddy on Jan 10, 2018 18:13:27 GMT
From what I have seen a lot of good players tend to have "lucky" dice. I think a lot of it is conformation bias like CDnerd said. If you consistently put yourself in a position to minimize dice "turning against" you. People tend to remember you not missing the rolls you need. Not that you hit a boosted a 5 when you really needed to hit or jumped through hoops to make sure you had the extra fury to boost and try again. It let's people vent after a hard game and as long as you or your opponent don't harp on it to the point of diminishing the winners accomplishment I don't see the harm in a little superstition. I have actually had issue with this the more I play at events. I try to go through a lot of effort to minimize bad dice, so much so that I typically do my bath based on lower averages to make sure I’m not taking too much of a risk. This typically translates to my opponents thinking my dice are amazing or that I never roll poorly even though there are instances throughout the game where I’ll miss Boosted 6’s or 7’s. Or roll lots of ones and 2’s. I also typically try to help my opponents not tilt when dice get really bad. It gets hard at big events though, some players take it on the chin and laugh it off, but others tend to not like that much.
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Post by greenjello on Jan 10, 2018 21:12:17 GMT
The "inaccuracy" of a flawed die is minuscule though. There is no way that you can detect the difference between a flawed die and a "perfect" one without keeping rigorous records of every roll, and "no one" does that. I've done it when I was bored and curious. Generally a few hundred rolls isn't that difficult to do, and enough to get an idea of what the dice are doing. I did it in an hour or so. There was also a professor who tasked some of his students with doing it, they hit several thousand rolls, and made it interesting by building a machine and using machine learning to determine the pips. In both cases we found that the average Chessex "brick" dice tended to roll a bit on the low side. I find that the problems with GW and Chessex dice can be extremely obvious in some cases. I had one Chessex die with such a large bubble that the one's pip was very visibly sunken. I can't imagine what else might have gotten through their quality assurance. Actually you were the one who brought up people who have a "lucky" die that they always roll X for. So I'm not making any assumptions. I had a buddy who had some dice out of Axis and Allies (the board game) that tended to roll high. Sounds like more superstition but we played many many many games over the years, and they did roll high. After a while I asked him to stop using them for 40K, and his "luck" changed. I agree with deviantcad, seems like the better players do make their own luck to some extent, by avoiding situations where they need to roll well, or everything depends on a single die roll. Personally I loved my 40K orks for this reason, since everything involved a bucket of dice and tended to average out very nicely. I found that the idea of orks not being random never occurred to most players because they had a rep for being random, largely from previous editions, and some pieces of equipment I didn't use. Anyway, I find that in Warmachine you'll also notice a certain understanding of how to avoid critical die rolls. I find this surfaces most often when discussing the various high quality ranged attacks which have a random number of shots, like the breath weapon on the Legion dragon garguant (Archodon?).
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Post by joetortillas on Jan 11, 2018 3:36:37 GMT
You are correct, that is just superstition and you are just correlating something that would have to be tested with a few thousand rolls in a controlled environment to have any sort of truth. But hey, if it helped you guys deal with his ''luck'' better, whatever works!
Btw gnerd, it was a nice article and a nice change of pace to the usual madrak1 is good with champs (derp). I've been following your posts and I like your ideas so far! What do you think of the other casters such as in the ADR format?
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gdnerd
Junior Strategist
Posts: 656
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Post by gdnerd on Jan 11, 2018 7:29:29 GMT
I've looked at doing Grim/Bearka, Grim/Kolgrima or Kolgrima/Bearka. They're all pretty decent combos. Kolgrima is the only one who can really take advantage of the sideboard though - she loves being able to convert double bomber into a melee package of some sort.
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Post by grimgor on Jan 11, 2018 7:45:02 GMT
Do you prefer really kolgranny PoD over kolgranny in SoTN ? I played her in both, and i fel like, it's often SoTN the best choice, you have more units to help for an assassination plan, and she doesn't really need an expensive mulg for arcnode, her threat range are enough in my mind. What match up do you feel good with kolgranny PoD over SoTN ? Do you see a reason to come back madrak 1 in your pairing ? ANd thanks you for the write up, it is very interesting
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Post by joetortillas on Jan 11, 2018 15:47:00 GMT
Another general question for you all, do you feel Madrak1 is so strong that he needs to be in your competitive pairing? Most of the lists that I am doing have to answer this simple question: does Madrak1 runs this better?
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Post by greenjello on Jan 11, 2018 15:58:59 GMT
You are correct, that is just superstition and you are just correlating something that would have to be tested with a few thousand rolls in a controlled environment to have any sort of truth. But hey, if it helped you guys deal with his ''luck'' better, whatever works! Not really, I don't think you understand statistics very well. What you're thinking of is a more subtle issue, where it's only slightly off, say there's a 5% chance of getting a 6 more often that the normal distribution. To take it to an extreme, if I have a warped die that rolls 6 every time, I don't need to do a thousand rolls to see it has a bias. I don't need to do 100 rolls. In that case I think about 10 would be sufficient, as the likelihood of having that many 6s in a row becomes astronomical. Most people would probably stop at 3-4 rolls, which has a probability of about 0.07% likelihood of being 6 every time, but I like to be through so I'd do more. As a practical matter, generally rolling about 5 times as the number of sides (or 30 rolls) are sufficient to do a rough test if a die is biased. rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/70802/how-can-i-test-whether-a-die-is-fairI saw those dice roll repeatedly over the couple of decades we played together every few weeks. It was pretty clear they had a biased. Now there's something to be said for having a machine do the rolling, since the way the dice are rolled definitely effects things (generally the reason for those chained tough rolls), but once again not strictly necessary. A cupped hand, or a dice tower does a reasonable enough job to make such a determination. Finally I don't understand why crappy dice are such a surprise. You can get them by the handful for less than a buck, and there is no good way to determine the well made vs the cheaply made by looking. Sure I get that a lot of people like to complain about their "luck", instead of improving, but crappy dice also figure into that.
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Post by trout on Jan 11, 2018 16:07:23 GMT
Another general question for you all, do you feel Madrak1 is so strong that he needs to be in your competitive pairing? Most of the lists that I am doing have to answer this simple question: does Madrak1 runs this better? Oddly , it is actually the opposite for me. 6 of the 20 players at the last Steamroller I attended were Trollbloods. I believe we were all rocking Madrak1 in one list. There were already some hard counters showing up in some of the opponents lists. I am quite sure that next even will see even more. I am thinking that Madrak1 is going to the shelved for me for a bit. He is really good in my opinion but not Denny1 Ghostfleet good.
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mattmcd
Junior Strategist
Posts: 521
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Post by mattmcd on Jan 11, 2018 17:32:37 GMT
Do you feel a Kolgrimma def skew list would pair well with Madrak 1? Well placed clouds can effectively act as a +2 def spell and allow you to create a pair that will typically force your opponent into one of their lists.
You then get to choose which would be best against it.
Imagine a team tournament with a team setup to choose tables. Earthborns near lakes. Other teams have ghost walk with obstacles in the middle. Others pick to see through forests with a center placed forest.
Bearka could do something similar with a list with tons of whelps (all getting concealment from his spell... hahahahaha) and counter charging swamp trolls lowering attack rolls -2.
I LOVE all these new options.
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