Rogue Squadron- When to Blame the Dice

You’re playing a game of X-Wing (or any game involving dice really). You make a throw and the worst possible result comes up. It happens. Then, it happens again. And again. The game ends and you’ve just been dealt a crushing defeat. As you ponder what happened you look back over the game, recall those rolls and ask yourself…

Clearly, you didn’t lose because of anything you did. You’re awesome. Your opponent is an idiot who got lucky. The dice gods ruled in his favor and are punishing you. You have nothing to do but destroy those dice and find new ones. Better ones. Infallible ones.

In our darker moments, we’ve all been there. Coming across what feels like insurmountable bad luck. You’ve defied all odds and rolled four blanks for a range 1 attack. But you had Heroic and rolled them all again…into four more blanks. There’s no getting around that. That’s just bad luck.

Bad luck doesn’t, usually, lose you a game. You had some agency there too. At a recent Hyperspace Trial, I mentioned a round where I went up against a TIE swarm. At range 2, all guns firing, I lost a X-Wing and a half and did zero damage in return. I’ve run that scenario a few times, simulating the dice rolls. Sometimes I come out killing several TIE’s (or rather TIE + Iden charge), sometimes I’ve barely lost my shields. Most times I didn’t lose or just barely lost an X-wing. It’s true I ran into the worst possible results that game. So did my dice cost me that game?

No. They cost me some MOV surely. And they certainly didn’t help me any. But I made the decision that put my ships in that position. If I had picked better maneuvers two rounds before, my ships wouldn’t have been eating six Howlrunner + Focus modified TIE shots in one barrage.

More often than not, when your dice fail you they feel like a failure because you needed them to roll phenomenally. You made a mistake somewhere and you need your dice to pull you out of this hole you dug yourself. You’re expecting perfection and are disappointed when you don’t get it. As the Mynocks would say, “fly better.”

But can your dice lose you a game? The dice are a vital component of any game, including X-Wing. In another round at that tournament I was up on points. Time has been called. I maneuver my U-Wing so my opponent only has a single shot from a non-gunner TIE/sf at range 3. I have three health. He needs to roll perfect and draw a good crit. I need to whiff. And that’s exactly what happens. In that case, I made the correct decision, avoiding getting shot multiple times and keeping my X-wing, which had one health, from getting shot. Statistically, I should have rolled at least one evade. But I didn’t. It happens.

Sometimes loses do come down to bad luck. But more times than not, there was a decision that you made that put yourself in the position where bad luck could come into play.