Printable "Luck Calculator" charts

[El T]

Hey all.

I just wanted to share something that I made and found useful in my own games, and hopefully some of you guys will find it useful as well.

Basically this was brought on by complaints of alleged bad luck (from both the guys I play with and, admittedly, myself ) and I wanted to put those to rest. So I made these charts to keep track of your die rolls in a quick and organized way, and added instructions at the bottom for calculating two numbers that can tell you quite a bit about how lucky you were during the game. It's really nothing earth-shatteringly innovative, and I want to stress that, but I think it makes things convenient.

The sheet is already in grayscale, with simple tables, designed for easy printing for people who play a lot and would use this a lot. There are 100 boxes for both attacking and defending rolls, which should be plenty for most tournament-scale games. If you play games that are a lot bigger, and you need more boxes, then you can either use the back of the sheet or continue on a second sheet. There are also fields at the top where you can fill out information about the game, like who's playing, what date, and what map, for organizing and later review, if you're so inclined. Again, much of this is just what I'd find useful, and I'm just putting this out there in case others think it'd be useful.

You can download it HERE.

Instructions:

1. Every time you roll attack or defense dice, jot down how many dice you rolled in the Dice column, and how many skulls or shields you got in the other column.
2. When the game is over, tally up the total amount in each column, and enter those values into the bolded boxes under the tables.
3. On the Attack side, divide the total amount of skulls you got by the total amount of dice you rolled. This gives you your "Hits Percentage", or the percent of your rolled dice that yielded skulls.
4. Express your Hits Percentage as a decimal, then subtract 0.5 from that amount. Take the absolute value of that number, and divide it by 0.5. This gives you your "Percent Deviation", or the amount by which your results deviated from the expected results.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 on the Defense side, replacing 0.5 with 0.33 in your calculations.

The instructions for calculations are also clearly marked on the sheets themselves.

Anyways, I hope somebody else finds some use from this! I welcome any feedback on it, negative or positive. Thanks for reading this, and happy 'scaping!

[Unhinged Manchild]

Looks nice! I started calculating dice percentages in my scape battle videos for the same reason, the group that I play with always says the dice screwed them when they lose.

I don't have time right now, but I will give this thing a shot sometime!

[dok]

One thing we've learned from automatic skull/shield tracking in online play is that it is only a fairly crude measure of luck in the game.

Consider: three 3v3 attacks against squad figures. I roll 2/3 skulls, 2/3 skulls, and 0/3 skulls. You roll 1/3 shields, 1/3 shields, and 3/3 shields. The stats say I rolled slightly below-average and you rolled significantly above-average. However, the reality is that I got an above-mean number of kills. I was the lucky one, not you.

Of course, the person whose percentages are above average will usually be the one whose luck is better, but I've had games where the percentages looks close but one person was getting most of the key rolls, or games where the percentages were pretty skewed but the person with "bad dice" was rolling just enough quite often.

If you really want to break down luck, you have to just keep a table of each attack's dice rolled, and their results. Then you can compare each roll to expected return, and see who came out ahead. Even this doesn't account for a lot of positional and OM-related advantages that a good roll can confer, but it gets as close as anything I've tried. I've only had the patience to actually break down a game this way once or twice.

So, tracking skulls/shields rolled is obviously a lot easier, and it's fun to look at, so go with that.