Have I upset the Dice Gods?

“Luck is believing you’re lucky.” — Tennessee Williams (or in my case unlucky….)

Some of memorable bad rolls in the last few years of gaming which brought some laughs, total exasperation and in the last case pure sympathy

The Laughs – My Chieftain Tank
Whilst playing a modern wargame using Force on Force rules. In Force on Force the best troops getting higher sided dice against poorer troops who have lower sided dice. The defender to save hits has to match or better the dice the attacker rolls which favours the higher sided dice. Therefore, with my Chieftain tank getting the best dice, D10s I should get a result against the T64 I was firing against. I had 5 dice to throw and on my first fire – the result was five 1s ! Queue lots of laughter. The odds of throwing 5 ten-sided dice (d10) and getting all ones are 1 in 100,000. The T64 returned fire and my Chieftain brewed up to more laughter.

A Chieftain Tank on the move

Exasperation – A recent BOB game
I usually umpire these games, but for one game I stepped in to play the Bukharans against a mixed force of British, Chinese Warlord, and Czech Legion troops. I had a particularly bad run of dice rolls and at one point worked out that I had thrown 49 D6s without rolling a single 6. By that point, I was hoping to reach a half-century of no sixes, but on the 50th throw I finally rolled one. The odds of rolling 49 six-sided dice without a single 6 are 0.0132%, or roughly 1 in 7,584. Contextualizing the odds – you are 99.9868% guaranteed to get at least one six and it is statistically comparable to drawing a specific five-card poker hand.

What no sixes!

Sympathy – A most recent Mexican American War game
As mentioned at the start of the blog this is the game that Piotr challenged me to write a blog about dice rolling. Using the dice designed for that game which has 3 black dots and 3 red dots, for certain morale purposes all I had to do was avoid 3 back dots. Well, I rolled 3 black dots, 5 times on the bounce. The odds – if you roll 3 dice, 5 separate times and did not want all 3 to land on black every single time, your probability is 1 in 32,768

Mexican – American War 1846

I think at this point we need a bit humour so I turned to Terry Pratchett for anything he may have written on odds.

“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”

Terry Pratchett

Statistically these are undoubtedly freak outcomes, but I have rolled them all. However, for some reason I cannot seem to remember my good dice rolls, and I know I have had a few. However, it is also strange that I can remember great some great dice rolls that other players have and they are not always my opponents such as Jonathan Hobbs in a recent WW2 tank battle using a D20 dice. For the whole game he appeared to roll no lower than a 17 for the entire evening, winning the game for us singlehandedly. I recall Kamall rolling 7 sixes out of 8 dice (a 1 in 62,208 chance) one recent Friday game.

Alex also recently said to me “you do appear to be a bit unlucky with dice, but you do not lose every game so you must be rolling some good dice every now and then”. That got me thinking which is a dangerous thing. The obvious place to start is why do we use dice in our games.

Dice are used in games to introduce unpredictability and level the playing field. By acting as a shared randomizer, dice prevent perfect strategy from dominating, create suspenseful narrative moments, and eliminate the need for complex, memory-heavy bookkeeping. Dice dictate random outcomes. This forces players to adapt to new situations on the fly, preventing master strategists from always winning.

Would we like a game where if you do certain things in a certain order, you are guaranteed a success but is true warfare like that? To a degree certain mechanism in games are designed in this way to increase your chances of success but in very few cases they are guaranteed. Rules that are written to load chances by doing set actions can give players who know the rules well a distinct advantage over the novice, even if that novice player knows the period they are playing way better. However, that is a rabbit hole I am going to avoid in this blog!

We can all agree certain things have happened in battles that defy the odds. Should approx. 6,000 exhausted English troops (mostly archers) beat roughly 20,000 to 30,000 heavy French cavalry and infantry at Agincourt. At the Battle of Long Tan (1966), During the Vietnam War, should a company of 108 relatively inexperienced Australian conscripts and regulars successfully defend their position against an estimated 2,500 veteran Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces?

 

Australian troops at Long Tan

Commanders make mistakes too and orders can be misinterpreted. Who on a wargame table would order the charge of Light Brigade. Uhm, well actually, I can think of a few players that order their cavalry to charge at anything that moves…

However, when your troops do not move due to poor dice rolls many of us get frustrated and say how unrealistic that is. I often get very frustrated with rules that use dice to bring in this type of friction, such as the order system in GDA2 or Black Powder. I know from the books I have read on the Napoleonic period (and indeed other periods of warfare) that these things happened in battles. D’Erlon’s Corps marching backwards and forwards between Ligny and Quatre Bras is a classic example.

Is failing my brigade command dice in GDA2 any different from a Napoleonic commander misreading his orders – probably not?

Here are what two of the great military thinkers from the Napoleonic era thought about luck

Carl von Clausewitz: Compares war to a card game, emphasizing the constant “interplay of possibilities, probabilities, good luck and bad”

Carl von Clausewitz

Napoleon Bonaparte “I would rather have a lucky general than a good one.”– well that is me at the back of queue or the front of the firing squad.

Napoleon Bonaparte

What is luck?

“Luck” and “randomness” are words that permeate our lives from work to play. One can be lucky in love, get a lucky break or get the luck of the draw. With something so prominent in society, one would think there would exist a more precise definition of it. Luck has some sort of magical connotation that it is something that can be possessed or controlled. Quantum science researchers and dark fantasy readers like to call it chaos. Luck is the old-school term which suits me! Good luck seems to change the nature of an event favourably and bad luck somehow burdens the wielder with the short end of the random deal.

Luck is simply a knowledge that reduces/raises the random nature of a given event.

Which would point that the definition of luck may be intertwined in the definition of random.
Random and Luck are simply terms used to cover huge grey gaps of human knowledge and perception. It’s just easy to lump all of human shortsightedness into a blob we call random luck.

 

Good luck token

Now we all understand that…. let’s turn to my beloved nemesis dice…

Here is what I found on the subject.

Dice come in a variety of forms; the common Six sided, the famous twenty sided, and a whole variety of others including the lesser known four-sided dice (often a strange little pyramid shaped fellow). Whatever the size or shape, we’ve all used them and we’ve all cursed them when we see the famous “snake eyes”, it doesn’t matter if this meant losing hundreds in a casino, or seeing our veterans break on the battlefield, the dice are the same. Who knew these little bastards could cause so much discussion.

Dice – They come in all shapes and sizes.

The problem I have, and I’m sure a lot of fellow gamers share this, is that dice have an unavoidable randomness to them. This randomness will of course result in some people feeling unlucky or claiming that the dice gods hate them. Simple games like Snakes and Ladders, Cluedo or Monopoly can rely heavily upon the random aspect of the dice, meaning that the game can be hugely influenced by some poor fellow rolling a few bad dice rolls in a row. Obviously over time the number of Lucky or Unlucky dice rolls will even out, but in a lot of games this can be too little too late, especially in a game like monopoly where getting around the board at speed can be a crucial aspect to the first few rounds of the game, and you are left slowly (always slowly in Monopoly) losing all your money to the lucky git who landed on Mayfair first.

Dice rolls are governed by the strict laws of physics rather than true, magical randomness, meaning no human possesses an innate “lucky” aura. However, individuals can influence physical outcomes through specific throwing techniques, while psychological factors like confirmation bias make certain people merely appear lucky or unlucky.

The Physics of the Throw:

The initial position of the die in your hand, the speed of your throw, the rotation, and the surface all dictate how it bounces. Because the physical throw is so complex, professional “dice rollers” (like casino dice setters) can physically manipulate their throws to minimize randomness, meaning consistent technique matters more than chance.

I will come back to this subject a bit later.

Manufacturing Flaws:

Practically no standard physical die is perfectly balanced. Pips (the dots) are drilled out, removing plastic and making the side opposite the 6 lighter. The manufacturing process introduces a slight statistical bias, making certain numbers more likely to land face-up. There are also the deliberate flaws to create loaded dice!

An ASU professor tested dice with over a hundred-thousand rolls and discovered that they rolled 1s 29% of the time- rather than the predictive model’s 16.6% of the time. He took existing Chessex dice and added plastic so that they’d have sharper corners and they rolled 1s 19% of the time. The 19% statistic was very consistent across these sets of sharp-edged dice.

High Brow research on dice… wow!

Interesting Casinos use square dice with painted numbers to maximise the randomness of the dice rolls.

Casino Dice

The Law of Large Numbers:

The true statistical average (e.g., a 1 in 6 chance for a 6-sided die) only perfectly balances out over thousands of rolls. In the short term, “lucky” streaks and “unlucky” droughts are statistically bound to happen.

Psychology & Confirmation Bias:

Humans are hardwired to spot patterns. If someone claims they are “lucky,” they vividly remember and talk about their clutch critical hits, while easily forgetting their average or poor rolls. Conversely someone that says they roll bad we remember their bad rolls and forget their good rolls. Our minds over-emphasize the times we frustratingly roll low.

The Illusion of Control:

People frequently adopt personal rituals, dice storage habits, and throwing styles to relieve anxiety and create a psychological sense of agency over chaotic situations.

This last section caught my attention.

“DON’T TOUCH MY DICE!” Was a common expression when I played D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) all those years ago, with my friends believing that another player would “corrupt their dice” if they touched them.

My Precious….

There are definite dice superstitions at our club. I am aware that some club members keep aside certain “good” dice or choose a certain colour, believing that they will roll better than a different coloured dice.

At one stage I bought the club lots of new dice as thought the old dice were cursed. The new dice still did not help my dice rolls.

I also had a superstition when need a 2+ roll I thought the dice were cursed when I uttered anything but a one which always seem to deliver that one and said instead all I need a 2 or better which in my mind produced better results. This was noticed by Trevor who kindly had a T-Shirt made for me on this very superstition.

My Anything but a 1 T-Shirt (back)

I found out that there are many dice superstitions are out there. Unfortunately, many of these superstitions contradict or are the complete opposite of another.

 Here are 15 that I came across that amused me.

1. Don’t roll the die before you need it because you’ll use up your good rolls.

2. Always roll out the bad rolls before you need the die.

3. Once you have a good roll, don’t let the die sit idle for too long lest it “get cold.”

4. Your first set of dice is sacred. Don’t ever discard or mix them with other dice.

5. Always lay your dice with the lowest number facing up.

6. Always lay your dice with the highest possible number facing up.

7. Never allow ANYONE else to roll your dice. Sharing is not caring. Sharing lets in the monstrous bad-luck demon that makes you roll poorly!

8. Specific dice are used for specific situations. There is an attack roll D20, a D20 for saving throws, a different D20 for skill checks, a D20 to seduce red-haired, one-eyed bearded dwarven women named Irene, etc.

9. A new die must be tested: Keep the new die separated. Roll it 25 times. Count the number of times the max roll appears versus the minimum roll. If the maximum is greater, that’s a successful turnout. Repeat this process. If the die fails the test three times, get rid of it.

10. If the status of a die’s luck is in question, keep it separated from the rest of the dice, lest it bring down the luck of the others.

11. On the other hand, some believe mixing a single unlucky die with several lucky ones will make it roll better.

12. There are various rituals to prime or “cleanse” dice before use. They range from leaving them in a special place for a day to rubbing them on the tombstone of a deceased game developer.

13. Teach a particularly bad die a lesson by “punishing” it. This can be putting it in the “shame bag” or even the freezer.

14. If a bad die is clearly cursed for all eternity, it must be destroyed while the other dice bear witness.

15. If you find that one particular die is lucky, you should name it (but not after a significant other) and only use it for very important rolls. And it should also be kept in its own special holder. And you should talk to it when you take it out and put it away. Yes, seriously.

A Dice Alter!

Going back to the dice throw itself – is there way of improving your odds. I know of one ex club member was convinced there was a trick to rolling good dice and watched videos on how to throw dice. I do not believe there is a silver bullet here but here are some tips that you can find on the internet!

Can you increase can increase your chances of rolling a 6 by using some tricks:

1. Place your index finger and thumb on the numbers that are on opposite sides revealing 1 and 6.
2. Throw the dice slowly and hope the dice rolls straight.

The trick is that you let the dice roll with the remaining numbers, creating a higher probability of landing on the number 6.

Holding the dice the correct way… Really!

Popular in craps and board gaming, this technique involves carefully arranging the dice in your hand so the numbers you want are facing up and sideways, then executing a smooth, low-arc toss so they slide and roll with minimal rotation.

Rolling dice onto a soft surface or felt mat creates less bounce and tumble, keeping your rolls slightly more predictable. Maybe that will encourage everyone to use dice trays rather than trying to hit figures and terrain on the table!

A lot of commentators suggest the number that was on top when the dice was rolled was the most likely to end up on top when it lands. Nobody seems to know why this is, but it could partially be due to the way they were rolling for some reason. But it’s not a bad thing to keep in mind. Try putting all 6’s facing up in your open palm before rolling.

Some advocating practicing your dice rolling. Well, I have been rolling dice for years and that has not helped me!

Here are a few last observations that tickled me when reading about dice throwing and gaming.

“Dice love the power they have over you in your games. It’s that crucial 2+ save that will make or break the game when they show their true nature. Or for me, roll 1’s on Dangerous Terrain tests for my vehicles. I swear I had a die actually wink at me in mid-air just as it landed on a 1 when I was trying to take an objective with one of my vehicles. Hand to God, that is the truth.”

“Dice have been known to show pity on new players. It is well known that dice will often roll higher for a newbie than for the seasoned gamer. This is because the hands of a new player of soft, plump, and moisturized and form a pleasant cushion for the dice. After tumbling around in a new player’s smooth, padded hand-room, the dice appreciate the cushy tumble and return the favour. Veteran gamers notoriously have hard calloused hands from doing so much rolling.”

By all counts Noel said that I was that lucky novice when I first joined the club as was Brian. I called Brian the “Dice Man” at the time, as whatever roll was needed, he threw it. Now we both believe we are cursed with our bad die rolls!

To conclude I am unlucky with dice – well no – I believe I have created an aura of confirmation bias for my bad dice rolls. I and many other players take more note of my bad dice rolls than my good dice rolls. Conversely, we have nicknamed Doug as “Deadly Doug” for his dice rolls but he, like all of us, has bad dice days. He will point out that his poor dice rolls at a recent WW2 O Group game totally confirms this.

Dice are indeed fickle things, and they are used for that reason in the games we play. I need to embrace the bad rolls far more and laugh at them as my good friend Noel does. As without them our gaming experience would be infinitely poorer! You would not have those great jeopardy moments in games – that crucial morale saving throw or last-ditch charge home. Without dice rolls we will all miss those cries of “Ahhhh no (more likely a profanity instead) it is snake eyes” or “yes, yes, yes it’s a double six!”

I also need to remember that I have been very lucky in life being born in a western country, have a great home, beautiful wife and two wonderful children. I am also very lucky to be part of a great wargame club that has brought me many hours of joy despite some bad dice rolls along the way.

However, for the last words this caught my attention – “Some people who notoriously roll poorly have seen some improvement when rolling in a dice tower. It is widely thought that the negative energy that the roller imbued in the dice is knocked out of them during their 3-point tumble in the dice tower. When they finally land, they are so disoriented and confused that they forget that they planned on screwing you.”

I think I will be buying or printing some dice towers!

                                    

Dice Towers to buy or print….