And this is a completely separate thing. There is always room for post game analysis of choices. But the line between ‘man, in retrospect, this choice I made gave you the opening to win’ and ‘You only won because I screwed up’ can sometimes be simply one of tone. Because sometimes the answer really is that had you done X instead of Y, the outcome would be different.
Like with X-wing, we often have lengthy post game discussions over lists and choices. In fact the bar next door has become a frequent gathering place after PGS closes to discuss. This includes tactics, and variance. Because it is a game with dice. Sometimes you simply roll 2 evades on 40 dice. (Evades comprise 3/8 of the dice faces, so this is over 5,000,000 to 1 odds, and yes that literally happened to me at a tournament) and you literally can only laugh and blame the loss on the dice. But too often wins and losses are attributed to dice. I’ve actually been noting critical moments in games, and doing the probability calculations to more accurately evaluate play. Sure it may feel like my choices were good, and I got hosed by good luck, but when I look at the numbers maybe I really only had a 55% chance to destroy that ship, and they had a 27% chance to destroy me if I failed to destroy them first. Sure, mathematically, I am in a stronger position and losing that exchange is less than likely. But we are talking ~1/8 odds, thats not that unlikely. Maybe the risk was warranted, or even necessary. But maybe it wasn’t justified at that point and my better option was discretion and bugging out. Other times it is two <5% events that occur, and so my choice was the right one, but just an unfortunate outcome.
So we talk, and try and be mindful of the role of variance in our outcomes. Nobody likes it when someone always blames the dice for losses, and always doing so prevents you from learning from mistakes.
We had one player, relatively new, who did tend to overemphasize the role of dice. But he’s a nice enough guy and during these AAR’s we talked through the events pf the game, maybe ran some numbers, and pointed out different choices and how they impacted things. ‘Hey, you did this move here, which meant your shot was unmodified. Had you done Y, you would have had a focus and so your odds of doing damage would go from 26% to 63%. Or your positioning here meant the obstacle closed off your escape routes, and I was able to use that to get a flank on you. Had you done this the turn before, then you have these options available which would not allow me such clean advantage’
Because we are all fairly invested in the game, and know the group well, we try and encourage more positive behaviors. We all know people have bad days, and try to be mindful. Yeah, sometimes you have a day where everything goes sideways and it’s not really your fault. Your opponents rolled the hottest dice on earth for 3 games, and you simply are salty about the whole thing. We’ve all been there. But lets focus on what you could have changed, burn those dice, and get another beer and try again next week. And because of the group, we rarely have problems. It also helps that we skew older, average probably hovering around 40, mostly married and mostly parents. So we aren’t in it for the drama! So when I, or another, gets a little too salty and on tilt, someone is there to keep things from festering.
