The R Word? And anyway, now that I have my masters and am on to the PhD portion of my program I'm moving more towards the biological/bioarch side of things.

Sweet video. You can clearly cheat with six-sided dice, and with two of them. Let's see 3+ dice and eight-sided ones. I have a feeling they are quite a bit harder to control. Though, I think it can be done to statistically improve your odds of rolling the desired values. Personally, if Jigaboo Jones wanted to play X-Wing with me, I'd be happy to let him join me, because that kind of trick dice rolling would be crazy fun to watch in person.

Looking really good! The aggressor is fantastic.

Purchased.

Nah Sarmatians. Women get to do horse archery, fight in combat as light cavalry, and have freedom regarding marriage and the like. Plus killer animal tattoos and a culture in love with falcons.

Very cool. TallTonyB did a gold-plated TIE for his howl runner that I loved. He kept the panels black, but everything else gold. These solid gold ones are cool too though.

I will say that I have specifically changed my style of dice rolling recently after I complained about how poor my dice always were and I was told that the way I was rolling didn't get them moving enough to bump off the table enough to sufficiently randomize them, so I was actually rolling in a less random way that was disadvantageous. I took his advice, changed the way I roll so that the dice bump more cleanly on the table, and my results have greatly improved. They're more or less random now, whereas before, whether they were random or not, they didn't appear to me to be so.

I usually hear people call that SuperFel, but the Red Baron is such a much better name for it. Loving that!

Very cool!

Yeah, but Athenian women were enslaved in a manner that was different in form to the slavery of the Helots, but no less slavery for that difference. Now if we want to talk a stellar place to be a girl at this time period, let's go with the Scythians or Sarmatians.

I still have to ask - if you spend 10,000 hours perfecting a method to roll more successes with X-Wing dice, is that cheating or just good play in the same way that spending 10,000 hours of moving the ships around will give you an uncanny sense of range and movement? I'm inclined towards it just being a form of good play myself, but I hate dice, and they hate me.

The corked-bat argument is a good scenario to refute the idea that "it's not cheating if it ain't working." It's definitely attempting to gain an advantage over the intended randomness of results. And it's not about what you think about your lucky hat, it's what your opponent/TO thinks about your actions. If someone wants to wear a hat for superstitious reasons, who's gonna argue? Everyone knows it's silly, but if it gives that person comfort/confidence, then whatever. However, it's when other people have a problem with your actions (like trying to roll dice exactly 180/360 degrees after timing it out in your hand) that it's a problem. Personally, I don't see what's so hard about trusting your skill to win games, if you can't build a squad that grants you the amount of rolls/rerolls to be successful, that's nobody else's problem. Throw the dice, hope for fortunate rolls, and play fair. You should always roll dice as "randomly" as possible without them flying everywhere. I don't like people who give their dice a half-shake in the hand and drop them about 1 inch onto the table, but if that's just how they do it and they clearly aren't focusing on what's showing in their hand, it's all good. The corked bat is actually a poor analogy, because it's equipment tampering. The dice in the posited scenario aren't tampered with. Also, the corked back thing is only an issue because it works. If it didn't worked, it would still technically be an equipment violation, but it wouldn't be something anybody bothered with. Also, Vanor is a ninja.

In theory sure. In theory if you can replicate the exact conditions every time, you can control a coin flip. But that's not possible in a practical sense for anyone to do. Same goes with the dice. You'd have to drop them from exactly the same height, with the same dice hitting the same spot, with the same amount of mid drop collision of the dice, every time. Even a minor change in any of those things would throw the whole thing back into random chance. Also you'd have to learn to do this on a given surface, and as soon as that surface changes things will no longer work the same way. That means in a tournament you can't really use this method. So I'll grant if someone is using a tape measure to check the distance their hand is from the table, then you'd have a possible issue. True, but what if you're not so much rolling a hit on command as rolling slightly more hits over the long term? That could have a statistically significant difference throughout the course of the game, or a whole tournament, even if each individual throw isn't perfectly executed.

Another thought - is it cheating if you can roll dice intentionally to get hits, or is it just a really awesome skill that makes you better at playing the game?

I think the issue here is whether you're guilty through intent, or whether you're only guilty through your actions. Is cheating an attempt to take an unfair advantage, or is cheating actually obtaining an unfair advantage? I would actually err on the side of the latter. For those of you claiming that even attempting to control the game in an unfair way, whether that attempt is efficacious or not, constitutes cheating, what would you say to someone who truly believed his lucky hat changed the way the dice worked, and he wore it specifically to create that change. Isn't that the same thing as rolling the dice in a specific way to obtain the desired results if both are, in point of fact, equally likely to effect the outcome?

Fantastic painting. Not as fantastic as it would be with Dunelizards, but still totally great.

No, you're right, purple was quite expensive at the time. It was even more tightly controlled in the Byzantine empire where purple was strongly associated with the emperor.

I have avoided his memoirs like the plague, largely because he was such a committed Nazi. Don't want to even dignify him with a place in history, whatever his flying talents.

If you really want to run it through Steam then use the Add Game To Library function. It's got none of the additional support that makes Steam worthwhile though. Oh. I was hoping for multiplayer functionality.

Yeah, Athens was pretty much the worst place in all of Greece to be a girl during its so-called "golden age."

It's not suspicious so much as very poor statistical reasoning. Since dice are random, no throw has any influence on the outcome of subsequent throws, with fair dice anyway. But, if you have dice that are not machined perfectly or whatever and favor hits or evades, the idea that those dice are "due" for failure is actually going to hurt you, because you'll be throwing dice that aren't as likely to land on successes. So, at best, it's doing nothing, and at worst, it's hurting you.

Been going over google scholar for studies on this topic, as I figure nerds would be writing scholarly papers about it with lots of math. So far, just going over the debate regarding the "dice control" crowd in the casino game of craps. Some people claim to be able to manipulate the results of the dice with statistical significance, but the scholarly studies are inconclusive.

Yeah, good point Gadge. I'd probably not notice if somebody didn't have enough blanks or whatever on his attack or evade dice. I never check them before a match. It's easy to cheat and get away with it, I think, but that doesn't bother me so much because the stakes are so very low. It'd take a special kind of loser to cheat at miniature spaceships.

Trust your intuition and only play games with people you like.

I rarely see someone shaking dice with just one hand. Most of the people use both hands (at least for the shaking part) I never use both hands. Just the one hand, palm flat, shake a little, and then move the hand and let them bounce. Otherwise I tend to bounce them off the table.