Throughout a warhammer game, we often try to guess the outcome of an action, the performance of a unit or spell, to help us build a strategy. More often than not, these outcomes depend on a random factor from dice. But when we're trying to predict dice outcomes, mathematical calculations quickly get difficult (cast value probabilities, for example) or inaccurate (experience shows some units perform better than expected, and some worse).
Some fervently engage in difficult maths and theory to work out itty gritty details of probabilities. But it gets silly when you reason that the "learning experience" for statistics is already there: our own gaming experience, in particular our experience with dice.
I'll try to offer a series of three brief posts, each explaining a way to leverage or sharpen something we already have: our intuition, as it is trained by the game.
With these tricks, I hope people can improve their reasoning and learn to identify how they make better use of their intuitive reasonsing.. or how to better understand a theorycraft without being blinded by seemingly insignificant numbers.
Your intuition is extremely well trained, use it!
The first pointer I'll try to give is "how to read percentages" when reading a theorycraft. If there's one thing a Warhammer player has done a lot, it's rolling a D6. In combat and shooting, we frequently roll them by the dozens! Heck.. If I were to tell you that 83% of the population is literate, you might blink and try to figure out if that number is good or bad. If I were to tell you that 83% equals rolling a 2+ on a D6, then your guts might tell you that's fairly good, but still a risk if it's your only backup from being illiterate.
We can give percentages, we can give averages... but the truth is that such numbers are less likely to feel intuitive as rolling a D6 is. Whenever you read a theorycraft with odds and percentages, try to bring down odds back to a simple thing like a D6 roll, something which you are very familiar with.
Here is a table for reference so they may help you "feel" intuitively what odds are in other posts.
- 1+ 100%
- 2+ 83.3%, with reroll: 97.2%
- 3+ 66.7%, with reroll: 88.9%
- 4+ 50.0%, with reroll: 75.0%
- 5+ 33.3%, with reroll: 55.6%
- 6+ 16.7%, with reroll: 30.6%
Of course, this is assuming we need to roll at least a given score. It's just as easy to roll a 1,2 or 3 than it is to roll a 4,5 or 6. Still, these representations and tests are used so often we can blindly feel how good that number is.
It is possible to expand this table with other kinds of rolls like: "reroll succesful rolls" and other rules we may encounter in the game. However, these aren't used as frequently as the tests above.. and the above reference table should already provide a fairly good start to let your intuition speak.
A brief word to other theorycrafters.
On Druchii.net I see a good effort is spent in breaking down the results of difficult calculations to a usable format. But sometimes.. we fall back on percentages. 90% or 80% doesn't always look so clear to people what that number really "feels like" in the game. Perhaps, we can include such words as "it's like rolling a 2+ on a dice" or "it's like rolling a 3+ with a reroll". It could help people understand what that number means and how it may play out on the table.
Of course, such deductions could be kept to a minimum. I can't imagine seeing a table laying out probabilities become clearer if they all start listen "2+ roll! 3+ roll with reroll!"
I believe it's worth keeping in mind though.