What to do when dice go crazy

[pointyteeth]

This sounds like almost every game I've played since 1995 (well, perhaps worse).

Dice are the more fickle than women I find. At least you can make women happy with flowers and jewelry, dice don't like anything. Every since the great Wood Elf Lord vs. Chaos Knight debacle of 1995, my dice rolling has been abysmal. The only thing I find that works is purchasing new dice. I usually do this before every tournament, its become a superstitious ritual for me. I've heard of others that will go through extreme lengths for "dice re-education" where they will set up all their dice so they can see and then smash/melt/grind/ritually destroy a random die in order to get the other dice back into line and fearing to roll bad.

[Pavisel]

yep, the 'threaten the dice with destruction' technique is a favorite at my lsg... one guy swears that his dice never performed badly again after he crushed one to dust in a vice while the others 'watched'

altho I get more than my share of bad rolls ;-), usually my tactical failings ruin me quite a bit faster...

[Artinam]

I'll just laugh it off, I roll extremely well or awful.
I do not do average rolls .

[Liber]

Start laughing!

This. Honestly a huge advantage to playing 'funnier' armies (Ogres, Skaven, Ong etc) is that when one of 'those' battles happen (like the Ogres in OP's description) you can just laugh, and laugh hard.

I lol'd just from imagining OP's scene of a grand Ogre army showing up and promptly blowing itself to smithereens.

[Darkminion]

This is the reason my Slaughtermaster general has the Earthing Rod. Thing is, ever since he has the rod he has not once rolled a cascade on the miscast chart. I replaced the rod with a scroll just one game (took out the firebelly in the list who had the scroll) and on his first cast my Slaughtermaster cascaded into the void. that's Karma for ye!


A buddy of mine actually has a hammer in his wargamer bag which he places next to his dice and he warns them before the game what will happen to them if they mess with him......and he means it also!

D...

[Angelwing]

The only thing you can do is laugh, and if the dice have ruined any chance of a win, then set yourself a realistic more modest goal in the game (eg kill the general in a challenge, capture the battle standard or what have you) to salvage some pride and a good story.

[Vaiuri]

The Ogre player is a good friend (if you are following Bromance Wargaming on youtube, you'll know which guy it is) and I'm glad that his fun wasn't ruined. We had quite a laugh at the absurdity of those rolls. I think maybe I'll tell him to "punish" a few of his dice and have the others watch to see what happens to malcontents...

A friend of mine used to 'execute' bad dice with a hammer in front of the others to make an example out of them.

I just change dice, I'm a bad shot with a hammer!

I will confess to getting super emo when dice just dick all over my game, I make enough mistakes without them turning on me too - big props to that Ogre player, sounds like a dude.

[abdulaapocolyps]

I actually start playing more defensively when I start rolling badly.
I feel sorry for every bad roll except level 4s cascading off the board,its what they get for uber spelling people all over the place,the gits.
my fighter lords have yet to disappear into the warp and I always thank him for it while others criticise me for me non optimal choices.
I was going to have a set of dice for each army but fear the bad karma of 'cheating' on my old Necromunda and Quest dice after so long...

[Jezbot]

Laugh and have fun with it. Rename that unit of Irongut Unit the 'the disgraced' until they manage to do something epically unlikely to redeem themselves - at which point they're renamed 'the almost redeemed'.

At the end of the day this is a dice game. You do what you can to put the dice in your favour, but you can't stop the dice from just crapping out on you. It will happen, it'll cost you games from time to time, but that's okay because it's just a game.

[Evil Hypnotist]

Some games you can tell early on how the dice will behave. Last night my opponent knew it was going to be 'one of those games', especially when I was pulling off so many Parry saves I was feeling guilty. His response was to go down fighting and try and claw something out of the game - which he did, running down a 500 point cavelry unit with his 150 point goblins. I won but he definitiely took the shine off. I also wasn't happy when my general failed 3 rally tests in a row (with an Ld of 10) and ran off the board, he was being chased by a giant though!

[Skopey]

I stopped using my Trebuceht because of the constant bad rolls i get with it. Twice now its scattered the maximum distance and landed on my dueling spec lord and killed him before ive had the chance to even get him into a worthwhile combat. I swear the crew have been swayed by the dark gods! The latter time though my lord was duking it out with a small unit of marauder horseman and managed to roll 4 2's consecutively in 2 rounds of combat. So probably was destined to do nothing that game anyway. Not a good game that one lol.