Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I've been rolling like crap with the dices I've own, subaverage in like 90% of games. I own 2 sets of 30 small chessax dice, they suck. Then I brought a bunch of cheap used las vegas casino dices, they sucked too.

I just want to roll average or close to average.... help lol suggest me some brands, I'm willing to not go cheap on dices.

It is often the case in gamers that they perceive their luck as skewed, when the results aren't that far from ordinary.

Some people remember sharply their improbable fails, while others remember their improbable successes. You won't remember the time you passed 5/6 Terminator saves, but you'll for damned sure remember the time you missed with all of their attacks except one. I still remember the time 5 TH / SS Termies assaulted 2 Scouts in cover, lost combat, and fled off the table.

So do an experiment. Grab a dice cup [Don't roll from your hand!] and throw 10 or 20 dice in it. Roll them out until you have 200 samples, or so. See if you have a disproportionate number of 1s and 2s. Hypothetically, you should have roughly 67 dice that are in the low range, but even 80 wouldn't be remarkably out of the ordinary. If you do that and you still think you're "cursed", then you should start sacrificing a different coloured goat to your deity of choice.

I suggest a grey goat, as you won't offend either end of the spectrum... and the middle ground Gods will simply be grateful for an offering.

I was going to suggest gamescience dice, but if genuine casino dice are rolling in a biased way for you are either cursed

(see the goat advise above)

or you're not actually rolling them right..... dice cheats are very good at 'shaking' the dice in their hands and 'rolling' them in such a way as to preserve the desired facing which is why they have to bounce the dice of the side of the table in craps.... it's not impossible that you're doing the same with your style of rolling especially if you're trying to make sure a whole handful of d6s don't bounce all over the table

try a dice cup (don't stuff it full the dice have to bounce around) rolling into an appropriate tray so they don't go everywhere

or a dice tower

Like the other poster said pattern bias is a thing so you might be seeing something that over a longer number of rolls will even out, then again gaming dice are made on the cheap and the rounded edges can distort things as the sanding process can again introduce bias, a few hundred sample rolls could help ID any really miscast dice but maths wise you'd really need a physically tedious sample size for any real valid result.

I've heard the Casino dice discussion before and whilst they are most likely better made than 'gaming' dice you also have to take into account that Casino dice are designed to be thrown a fair distance (and off the side/back wall for Craps) which inflicts wear and tear on them thus the Casino replace them fairly often, also if they have been drilled that could be a thing disrupting the roll

I wouldn't really worry, just get some translucent dice (easy to see miscast in the plastic) with square or almost square edges, that should be good enough for gaming

Keep them for leadership tests.
Then you'll realize you fail them too often.
Then maybe you'll realize the problem's not with the dice.

If you're looking for precision dice, skip the casino dice and look at precision backgammon dice.

fresus wrote:
Keep them for leadership tests.
Then you'll realize you fail them too often.
Then maybe you'll realize the problem's not with the dice.

Nope LD tests, I pass most of the time. Also during psychic power fishing, I roll that 1 more often then not to get that cursed earth or veil of time which is beneficial. But then rolling lots of 1s and multiple snake eyes in a single game really hurts when you need to make armor saves or to-hit/wound throws.

Like I said, do an experiment with "nothing on the line" to see often numbers pop.

At the very least, try an experiment to see if you roll more 5's than any other number, during a game. Make a mental note each time you roll a 5. Soon, you'll be rolling 5's like a boss.

There's a vastly superior chance that this is all perception, rather than a demonstrable phenomenon.

Confirmation bias in action.

Roll each die 10,000 times with a 2 bounce minimum and plug into a program like Minitab.

Maybe if you used the correct plural which is simply dice (die being the singular) they'd work.

If you are rocking casino dice, you have to bounce them.


If you want to see if your dice are crooked, float them in water and see if a single number keeps appearing on the top.

 kronk wrote:
Confirmation bias in action.

Roll each die 10,000 times with a 2 bounce minimum and plug into a program like Minitab.

You don't even have to roll it 10,000 times. Just take your pool of dice, roll it, note down the numbers of each result, roll it again, repeat until you've done maybe 1000 rolls, type it in to excel and calculate the % of each number and you should have a pretty clear indication whether your dice are biased or not.

A test like that shouldn't take terribly long. This test took me a couple of hours or so, horizontal axis is the number of rolls and the Y axis is the proportion of time each number came up, for a perfectly unbiased set of dice 0.167 should be where they all converge, so really it wasn't too far off, all within about +/-1% of where they should be (and these were just GW dice that I've bought over the years).



I will not believe anyone who says their dice are biased based on gaming, do an objective test where you actually count the number of results.

You don't really need to test each die individually as long as during a game you're selecting your dice randomly from your pool of dice it doesn't matter if 1 die is biased, it only matters if they entire pool is biased.

 SonsofVulkan wrote:
I've been rolling like crap with the dices I've own, subaverage in like 90% of games. I own 2 sets of 30 small chessax dice, they suck. Then I brought a bunch of cheap used las vegas casino dices, they sucked too.

I just want to roll average or close to average.... help lol suggest me some brands, I'm willing to not go cheap on dices.

Your dice are probably fine. You don't need to spend money on anything more.

You just need to teach them a lesson of fear. Whenever they roll badly, you randomly pick one. Put it on a pavement, round all the others up so they could see and smash the one with a hammer :> If you end up smashing all your dice, it means they were worthless anyways, so no loss.

Buy some dice with proper square edges not the chessex dice GW sell they roll much better.

Some one did a study and the chessex came up with 1's 29% of the time it's on dakka:

http://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/That's_How_I_Roll_-_A_Scientific_Analysis_of_Dice

 SonsofVulkan wrote:
I've been rolling like crap with the dices I've own, subaverage in like 90% of games. I own 2 sets of 30 small chessax dice, they suck. Then I brought a bunch of cheap used las vegas casino dices, they sucked too.

I just want to roll average or close to average.... help lol suggest me some brands, I'm willing to not go cheap on dices.

I take it you're losing at toy soldiers too frequently. I'd suggest spending the money you set aside for dice on one of the following;

A. Some kind of 'Strategies of war' reference book
B. A better more balanced game (particularly if you're complaining about 40k)

Finally, check you didn't buy;

https://www.thediceshoponline.com/dice/8289/Koplow-Opaque-Yellow-Black-D3-Dice

Well, i don't believe a die would ever betray its owner: those little plastic things are as good as gold and beyond all humainly loyalty.

Kidding apart, you're just more likely to remember the times you were unlucky then the times you had a handful of 6, but if you really have know then maybe your throwing isn't that good. Once somebody gave me this advice: roll them on long distances, with a frank throw. Since i've been doing it it actually improved my average scores. It's maybe purely random but that's worth trying.

I'm gonna give my casino dice(craps) another shot, since i wasn't really throwing them like crap dices because of their size and the time to throw them properly (I basically put a bunch in my hands and just drop them).

Use statistical hypothesis testing against the null hypothesis of fair dice.

hobojebus wrote:
Buy some dice with proper square edges not the chessex dice GW sell they roll much better.

Some one did a study and the chessex came up with 1's 29% of the time it's on dakka:

http://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/That's_How_I_Roll_-_A_Scientific_Analysis_of_Dice

That Dakka article is why I did my own study and found much more reasonable results. I've read other people also did tests on chessex dice and come up with results closer to mine as well.

Square edged dice IMO suck, they don't roll well on typical gaming tables. I don't hurl my dice across the gaming table like you do in a casino because I value my miniatures and don't want them destroyed by dice crashing in to them. Add to that most gaming tables I play on are hard, casino dice are designed to be used on soft felt surfaces.

It makes me wonder if that study was done at a time when there were some manufacturing flaws in the dice making process or if there was something specific about the way they rolled them in their study.

I wonder if I can just append my study on to that Dakka study, mine isn't nearly as exhaustive as theirs but it does show that chessex dice don't automatically suck and you should just test your own dice using the method you personally use to roll them on the surface you roll them.

Don't believe everything you read on the internet I guess. It really doesn't take long to test a pool of dice yourself, less time that it would take me to paint a Space Marine or play a game of 40k/WHFB.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 SonsofVulkan wrote:
I'm gonna give my casino dice(craps) another shot, since i wasn't really throwing them like crap dices because of their size and the time to throw them properly (I basically put a bunch in my hands and just drop them).

Casino dice are designed to be thrown hard on a soft surface. They're actually very easy to "cheat" with if you DON'T do that, which is why casinos have rules about it must hit the back wall of the table and it must bounce at least X times to be a valid roll. If you don't do that, you can massively bias the results by how you hold and roll them.

If anyone wanted to play a game against me using casino dice I'd tell them no, I don't think they're appropriate for wargaming.

Haha I guess I'm holding/throwing those casino dice wrong them, handicapping me instead

Oddly enough my GW dice roll very well a vast majority of the time, if i switch to my Chessex dice my results become less favorable.

I also notice a huge difference in how dice are thrown, i give mine a really good shake and roll them off of my hand. I see loads of people just crunch them in their hand and drop them on the table.

I end up buy 12 pcs of game science dice and a dice tower today, so hopefully this will generate better randomness

my mates dice were pretty infamous in our group he used GW dice and they came up 1's way more than they should, he threw them away bought 30 square dice for less than a tenner and has got proper results ever since.

It's perfectly possible to have bad dice that roll badly.

Don't suffer with them go out buy some decent ones.

hobojebus wrote:
my mates dice were pretty infamous in our group he used GW dice and they came up 1's way more than they should, he threw them away bought 30 square dice for less than a tenner and has got proper results ever since.

It's perfectly possible to have bad dice that roll badly.

Don't suffer with them go out buy some decent ones.

I would just say *actually test them* to save you throwing money at your imagination if they're not biased

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

hobojebus wrote:
my mates dice were pretty infamous in our group he used GW dice and they came up 1's way more than they should, he threw them away bought 30 square dice for less than a tenner and has got proper results ever since.

It's perfectly possible to have bad dice that roll badly.

Don't suffer with them go out buy some decent ones.

I would just say *actually test them* to save you throwing money at your imagination if they're not biased

We did that's why he threw them away.

Take a small cup of warm water. Pour in a bunch of salt, mix it together.

drop a die in. If it doesn't float, keep adding salt until it floats.

Once it's floating flick the floating die. If it keeps coming up with one particular number face up than the die is weighted off. Usually with an imperfection like a bubble or something.

Easy way to test individual dice to see if they're off vs. rolling them hundreds of times and recording results. An imperfectly weighted die with be almost immediately apparent with this test. It will also tell you which dice are weighted high or low

*Edit*

When I say warm water, you need fresh off the tea kettle hot water to mix in enough salt to get this to happen.

hobojebus wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

hobojebus wrote:
my mates dice were pretty infamous in our group he used GW dice and they came up 1's way more than they should, he threw them away bought 30 square dice for less than a tenner and has got proper results ever since.

It's perfectly possible to have bad dice that roll badly.

Don't suffer with them go out buy some decent ones.

I would just say *actually test them* to save you throwing money at your imagination if they're not biased

We did that's why he threw them away.

Cool, it's just most people complain about it without actually checking or quote that Dakka article which is hardly representative of every set of dice.

disdamn wrote:Take a small cup of warm water. Pour in a bunch of salt, mix it together.

drop a die in. If it doesn't float, keep adding salt until it floats.

Once it's floating flick the floating die. If it keeps coming up with one particular number face up than the die is weighted off. Usually with an imperfection like a bubble or something.

Easy way to test individual dice to see if they're off vs. rolling them hundreds of times and recording results. An imperfectly weighted die with be almost immediately apparent with this test. It will also tell you which dice are weighted high or low

*Edit*

When I say warm water, you need fresh off the tea kettle hot water to mix in enough salt to get this to happen.

That will tell you if they're weighted.... but how do you relate that to an actual rolling bias? I don't really care if my dice are biased to roll 6's 17.5% of the time instead of a perfect 16.67%, I start to care if it's 20+% of the time.

It's not a question of whether dice are biased, it's a question of HOW biased. I don't know of any way to test that other than rolling them (which again, doesn't actually take all that long, if you own an Orc or Tyranid army you probably already roll your dice hundreds of time in a game, it's just a question of noting the results ). If you're aiming for a perfect 16.67% it sounds more like OCD than caring about the outcome of a wargame.

Proper tests have been done. The small Chessex/GW dice roll 1s over 25% of the time.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Proper tests have been done. The small Chessex/GW dice roll 1s over 25% of the time.

Except they don't. I tested my GW dice and they came out like this....

1: 15.71%
2: 17.03%
3: 16.79%
4: 16.27%
5: 16.37%
6: 17.83%

They were all GW dice bought over the course of several years.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Proper tests have been done. The small Chessex/GW dice roll 1s over 25% of the time.

Except they don't. I tested my GW dice and they came out like this....

1: 15.71%
2: 17.03%
3: 16.79%
4: 16.27%
5: 16.37%
6: 17.83%

They were all GW dice bought over the course of several years.

Did you make 144,000 rolls?

http://www.warseer.com/forums/showthread.php?65531-Do-you-roll-a-lot-of-1s-A-40k-must-read