The psychology of dice

The psychology of dice rolling

Some of you who may have played for a while have accepted the fact that some days the dice aren’t working or get the feeling that the dice gods are about to abandon you. I too know this feeling but have worked at overcoming the defeatist attitude these feelings can cause.

A battle with dice…

It’s all about the attitude. If you’re worried about the game or the person you’re playing against, then all of a sudden you freak out because you’ve rolled double 1’s on your first magic phase, then it’s already set you off on a course of destruction. You’ll notice that once your dice have “gone bad” then the rest of your rolls tend to do the same. Apart from playing with loaded dice, what can you do?

Smile, someone will be watching

Take this example of reverse psychology for a second to see where I’m headed with this. When driving a car and approaching traffic lights that are green, most people will say to themselves, “Don’t change, I’m running late, let me get through…” or something to that effect. What happens? The lights change and you have to stop. I started thinking the opposite. The lights are green, I’m approaching them and I think, “Ok, I’d like to stop, come on change to red, come on… Dang! They’re still green." I said as I sail through the lights with a giggle, reverse psychology on the lights! I’m serious about this, I reckon it’s almost 90% accurate, and then I think that the 10% failure rate is down to not being able to convince the lights I'm being serious.

Ok he’s gone mad, but bear with him for a second…

So how does that example fit in with dice rolling and being successful in your games? How many games have you played where the dice have rolled badly and you’ve had the worst game ever as nothing ever went right? I know you’ve all had one or two of those games. Simply put, don’t concentrate on the numbers you’re after, think of another set of numbers. Instead of thinking, “I don’t want to roll double 1’s for this magic phase”, think, Ok, I need to roll 1’s to get this spell off, convince yourself that’s what you need and you’ll never ever roll them, well at least you’ll be about 90% accurate, more so if you’re particularly convincing.

The dark side of the dice

There is also a dark side to this psychology of dice. It's been dubbed "Dice calling". Basically put, it's calling the result of the dice before the person has rolled the dice. It can have the ability to crush your opponent when you're calling correctly. I've gained a reputation for calling dice. I played an empire player at my home once, it was his shooting phase, and he had all his warmachines on a hill which was in his deployment zone. I told him he'd "roll a misfire and then a 1." To which he then rolled exactly what I called, his first turn of shooting and it was all gone. My undead were free to move across the table and wipe out his troops.

I took it to the next level with an orc and goblin opponent, by this stage I was told I wasn't allowed to call dice, so I took my artillery dice, placed the misfire die to show misfire, and then because it was a rock lobber he was using, I used the scatter dice to point back at his army. His shooting turn came and I tapped on my dice, showing him without vocalising, what he was going to roll, and guess what... He rolled exactly what I had shown him on my own dice, right down to how the scatter dice faced. It can be a potent game winning device, but one that can also cause your opponent to swipe everything off the table onto the floor...