All we have for you this time is a quick quiz for you to test yourself on statistics and see how much you know about this game's ever-spooky dice. Once everyone's had time to try it out I'll post a writeup explaining the answers.
https://forms.gle/t1D6PeCPdxe5vsD97
No personal information will be posted, email collection is only on because Google requires it for you to see your answers.
Another side note about the Salt Mines, the skirmish league is going well and is set to wrap up in 2 weeks, at which point we will be running a different league format, please let us know if you have fun ideas for stuff we can do for that!
Since this is a blog, we figured we could add a quick note about dice/luck to go along with this quiz. Really more of a musing on dice than anything in particular. It's very common for X-Wing players to get upset about dice in the game, which is understandable. They are probably the greatest source of entropy/randomness in this game and therefore can feel very unfair at times. That being said, it's important to keep in mind some interesting things about dice:
1. The individual outcome might seem weird but the grand scheme of things generally evens out. There are a few games that are decided by dice but mostly, they end up evening themselves out. Even within a turn this can happen. For example, if a player rolls three attack dice with a lock and a focus and only gets one hit out of it, they might feel really bad about it, ignoring the fact that their opponent rolled three blanks on defense and the attack ended up with roughly the "average" amount of damage.
2. Individual random events are expected to have unusual results. It's not fair to expect your dice to roll even close to "average" on most of their rolls. If you go down the rabbit hole of calculating "wow this and this and this happened, which has a 0.2% chance of happening!" it's going to look really bad, but keep in mind that there were hundreds of other possible outcomes for that chain of events, each of which had similarly low likelihoods of happening, and you only noticed which of those similarly unlikely convoluted events happened based on the results. That is to say, everything that happens in this game has "low odds" of happening if you draw things out to their logical extremes.
3. It's ok to be annoyed by your dice. Don't take it out on other people but this is in fact part of the game. Additionally, even for the best players, it's important to admit when the dice behaved outside what could have been expected - if you roll three hits on each of your attacks with your TIE Interceptors and delete three vulture droids before they can shoot and end up winning the game, you still need to accept that in general, jousting those vultures head-on was a mistake, you just got really lucky. That is to say, dice "luck" is worth considering when assessing the tactical choices made in a game.
4. Sadly those TTS/FlyCasual dice numbers don't actually mean anything. Adding up all the results from a game isn't particularly helpful when assessing tactical choices as they relate to in-game results vs the expected results.
5. Dice actually improve the game. A lot of players bemoan the amount of "luck" involved in the game, especially in Second Edition now that passive dice modifications are, in general, more expensive and less common. That being said, consider a situation where you are flying Soontir Fel against a Z-95 swarm. You land inside a couple arcs and are contemplating your action choices. Let's say you have some promising options that include evade roll to only take two long range shots, evade boost to get the free focus, roll boost to avoid all shots and have no shot yourself. In the current game, you can look at those options and make a nuanced decision based on how much damage you want to deal compared to how much damage you expect to take in each spot. In a world without dice (perhaps some redesigned game with Armada-style defense tokens), one of those options is the objectively correct option where you do some damage and take no damage. All this is to say that the current game of X-Wing has a lot more nuanced and interesting decision making, and this is largely facilitated by dice. In games without luck, there's always a "correct" move, and players spend forever agonizing about finding it but once they do the game is pretty boring. If a game like X-Wing were like that, it would probably devolve into the dreaded "ace-wing" where people only bring ships with the highest initiative and increasingly large bids to get to move last and make these decisions with perfect board knowledge. "Aces" vs "swarms" are probably the most interesting form of this game, and kind of cease to exist as a fun gameplay experience if the "ace" player always has a "most correct" decision.
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