We could have the winner of a tournament use the dice of Gavin at the next event  

As someone who came across from warhammer fantasy, the 2d6 roll does grate a little with me. I can see the point, but it feels wrong to me.

Personally I'd like to keep it for determining the winner of the assault, but only use the original difference in points pre roll for post assault casualties.

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http://www.troublemakergames.co.uk/
Epic: Hive Development Thread

Dptdexys and I did swap dice last year on the Sunday session. The result was intruiging. We both experienced some improvement/degredation in luck; I seemed to get better results than usual while Dptdexys' luck suffered a little; but the change in luck was not as marked as expected. Therefore we must conclude that there is a certain element that is inate to the person concerned.

Dptdexys did subsequently admit to employing numerous cleaning agents, magnetic flux and even Voodoo on his dice in a misguided attempt at trying to rid them of my 'evil' influence. History does not relate how successfull these attempts were, but suffice it to say that I do not think he will agree to repeating the experiment, mainly due to the cost.

However, perhaps when his back is turned I might see if I can 'borrow' them again . . . . .

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"Play up and play the game"

Vitai lampada
Sir Hemry Newbolt

In the end I gave up and went to my local joke shop.....whoops I mean gaming store and bought some new Dice  

Way off topic here, but since Mspaetauf is French; perhaps it is worth considering Napoleon Bonaparte’s views on the subject (which may be apocryphal).

On being told the virtues of a new general - the man's heroism, bravery, skill in battle and so on - Napoleon Bonaparte waved his hand impatiently. "That's all very well," he said, "but is he lucky?"
It seems that Napoleon regarded luck as a personal attribute rather than a matter of chance. He believed a lucky person would always win out over adverse circumstances, whereas an unlucky person - even a general who was expert in the techniques of war - was fated to meet with failure and disaster on the battlefield.

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"Play up and play the game"

Vitai lampada
Sir Hemry Newbolt

gaga...WHAT?

i didn't even read your whole post because i had to stop and take a breath after you calling me French....

i am from Austria!  

OOOooopps

Your pseudonym misled me

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"Play up and play the game"

Vitai lampada
Sir Hemry Newbolt

how come?
how does mspaetauf relate to anything French? *curious*

Not as far as I know, just looks 'French-like'

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"Play up and play the game"

Vitai lampada
Sir Hemry Newbolt

actually it's my name  
M being the first letter of my first name, the rest my last name, with ae = ä, which doesn't exist in English (called "Umlaut" in German).

cheers,

I think the problem is the perception of randomness.  People tend to remember the "+3 assault that I lost" because it is dramatic and painful.  That's just the way the human brain is wired.  You strongly anticipate a win when you have +3... but it's yanked away - Aaargh!

In reality the chances of that happening are extremely slim.  Modifiers make dramatic differences in the probabilities of the outcome very quickly.  It is not very random at all once you break out of the low mod numbers.

The actual numbers are:

Net Mod-win%---Loss%---Tie%---Avg Win Kills---Avg Loss Kills
0-------39------39-----22-----1.98------------1.98
+1------61------22-----17-----2.27------------1.71
+2------77------11-----11-----2.78------------1.45
+3------89-------4------7-----3.42------------1.21
+4------96-------1------3-----4.18------------1
+5------99-------0------1-----5.04------------0

At +3 there's only a 1/25 chance of losing outright and almost 9/10 of the time it's a win on the first roll.  Even on the outside chance that the player with +3 loses, the actual casualties are pretty limited with the main penalty being the formation breaking.  While it's technically possible to lose at +4, you shouldn't see that but once in a hundred assaults at +4.

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Neal

I think maybe there may be an additional effect at work here. Mind you, the following is all hearsay...

Neal's odds are based on the assumption that individual die rolls have a 1 out of 6 chance of landing on any particular value. As it turns out, this might not be true of GW dice.

Supposedly, some guy from the internet [GftI]â„¢ performed an experiment to test the white dice that GW provides in all of its games. This [GftI] was a teaching assistant in some high school math or science class, and he asked his students to roll some GW dice and record the results. After performing 1000+ die rolls, he discovered that GW die were more likely to roll a 1 than even odds would suggest (I want to say that he found GW dice were almost 2x as likely to roll a one than they should be).

Okay, by the time you read this post, the info in it is 4th or 5th hand, so take it with a whole salt mine, but...

If you really, really want to make sure your rolls aren't bogus, use casino-style dice with flush pips and sharp edges. And if you really, really, really want to go crazy, throw the dice out after every game.

EDIT: pfft, heresay. How embarrassing.

Here's a link to the actual write up about that dice rolling experiment:

"Do you roll a lot of 1s?"

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"EPIC: Total War" Lead Developer

Now living in Boston... any EPIC players want to meet up?

as soon as i have some time, i'm going to try that myself!

cheers,