Ahhhh… A rare rainy morning in the otherwise grey Melbourne spring… What a wonderful way to start a blog post.
Today I would like to address the old expression “Fortune favors the bold.” While it is true that Warhammer (of both flavours) is a game that is ultimately determined by skill of the player and luck, I would like to suggest that there is a third important component to success. Nerve. While this could be argued to be a smaller subsection of the player skill category I do believe it is an area worth at least a brief discussion.
True, Warhammer and 40K are games that are determined by dice, the ficklest of gambling mediums. At least in cards you can count cards to improve your probability. If you roll 1 dice a number of times the best you are ever going to get is a 1 in 6 chance of rolling the 6 you need to rend and penetrate that stupid land raider crusader. I am sure that all of your reading this have stories of glory and shame that have just come about through Lady Luck’s giftings or punishments. I seem to be on her S^&T list at the moment but I am confident that given a tourney or two my luck will change. After all this is what I learned at school. Probability evens out over time.
Sure, player skill and army design directly relates to someone’s success as a competitor in tournies and/or in friendly pick up games. Largely, I find that both skill and comp directly relate to managing probability in such a way that you have a better probability of rolling what you want than what your opponent does. Picking those charges that you will be more likely to make, attacking units where your death company get more dice or better odds of hitting than the poor grots they happen to be curb stomping at the time, etc…
As I started with, an important aspect of winning in wardollies is holding your nerve. Now I am not saying that you should start with a battle plan and never change it. No plan or strategy survives contact with the enemy (Patton said that?). In order to be successful you need to be adaptable and fluid in your play style (you also need to remember the mission you are playing).
What I am getting at is this.. There will be situations in games where things do not necessarily look favourable (ok, they will look terrible) and you will have the option to be conservative to save your forces or go all out to go for the big win. This happens when I play more often than I would like to admit. Sure it looks bad, sure you have no right winning but I like to think that in that moment Lady Luck likes to come over to watch my game because amazing things start to happen. Now this could be the case but what is more likely happening is that a small pocket of bad dice turns around the other way and all of a sudden you are rolling well… If you roll a dice 1000 times you are supposed to get an even spread across all the numbers. So when things turn… The dice are just evening out so to speak. I don’t know… People have asked me how I manage to “ass” wins in big tourney games when I should loose… Well I read the mission and I take the big risks when the moment is right… Now this does not always pay dividends BUT it works for me…
Not sure if this has been helpful but... It works for me (sometimes)...
Catch you on the flip side…
B
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
ReplyDeleteLet's face it, the game is more fun when you take a gamble to turn a loss into a win than sitting back and trying to minimise your losses.
This could also potentially be attributed to your opponent over-extending when trying to press their advantage. But that will only really matter if you're prepared to go for it when their plans start to unravel.
Totally agreed. good point about putting the opponent on the back foot.
ReplyDelete