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.

 ingtaer wrote:
Just looks like he is trying to keep them under control and not spray dice over the table to me, I do the same on a congested board if there is no tray.

This was what I thought as well. It looked like he was trying to keep them all in sight of the camera and avoid sending them over the edge of the table.

Someone else will use my dice over my cold, dead body.

With the different ways of cheating with dice, loading dice, certain ways of rolling dice to get what you want, I'd be all for just using dice apps personally.

 Duskweaver wrote:
As far as I'm concerned, you can roll however you like. Pick up hits; pick up misses. Pick them up off the floor without me even seeing and declare the result. I don't care.

Reason is, if I'm playing you, it means I've already decided I trust you enough to want to play this game with you. So you deserve the benefit of the doubt, at least for the duration of the current game.

If I have sufficient reason to think you're a cheater or a basically dishonest person, then I won't play you again. But I'm not going to pack up my minis and flounce out halfway through a game. That's just childish nonsense.

Actual cheaters are generally pretty easy to spot before the game even starts, IME. So I just avoid playing those people.

And, at the end of the day, it's just a game. If you can only win by cheating, that's more your loss than mine. It doesn't actually hurt my enjoyment of the game unless I decide to allow it to. I'm most likely to just feel pity for you for being so emotionally fragile that you have to cheat just to avoid losing a silly toy-soldiers game.

This guy gets it!

Hes clearly just trying to have the dice in the same zone so the camera can pick them without the dicer scattering everywhere.

I chuckled because when I read the first post, I assumed it was Winters SEO. His battle reports often have very minimalist dice rolling.

I don't see an issue with it, but what I see is someone rolling a very low-bounce controlled roll for keeping it on camera and without going off the table/all over the terrain.

I personally prefer a dice tray and like to get a good roll (I roll better when my dice bounce against the tray side, etc.) But I think you're just seeing him roll for the camera to keep it easier for the battle report.

Note his opponent (the camera holder) is also rolling very softly - something he does most of his reports.

I use a Dice Device (TM). This can honestly be a box, a die tower, or a tray with a back stop. Rules are simple, dice must be thrown from one end to the other, and make contact with at least the opposite wall. Unless it's a tower, in which case anything that comes out of the tower is legal.

Look to vegas craps for good rules regarding dice. In much the same way, the pitcher must stand at one end, and throw their dice at the opposite wall. Die not making contact with the opposite wall are re-thrown.

In the event that 100 dice are needed, like the above poster said, break it up into manageable groups. 10 groups of 10 don't take that long.

There definitely is an etiquette to dice rolling. The same way that there is to dealing cards. Why does it matter as long as everyone ends up with the same amount of cards at the beginning of a hand? Because it does!

It's also not difficult to shake the dice in hand and roll them off the outer side of your palm. So that they "roll" off your hand and roll a bit on the table. You can get this result AND keep your dice in a small area without them bouncing all around. You don't need to throw them to get an acceptable roll.

My brother "rolls" his dice for single dice rolls by grabbing it with 2 or 3 fingers and tossing it up in the air with a spin. More often than not it smacks the table and lands on the side it hit with, without much bouncing. I don't mind this unless he repeatedly pulls out 6s with this method as it tends to cause me to think there is some advantage to doing it.

There are ways you can roll dice to add "bias" = increase your odds from "random".

The "problem" with that guy's "rolling" was kinda funny, he scoops up the dice, looks in his hand first, then does a straight drop, guiding the dice down the whole way with little bounce or roll. If you practice rolling dice in a certain way you can do "controlled throws".

I knew a guy who would roll one die at a time for important rolls, would roll the die around in his hand till he saw what he wanted, would ensure he had a codex book under the roll and would whip his hand out from under the die "just so" and could pretty much get a 6 or a 1 75% of the time as needed. I stopped that madness rather quickly. He may vary well thought that was his lucky method to get results but it is just removing most of the variables.
Control the amount of roll: straight drop or 1-3 face turn, control the height for the distance of drop, control the surface to reduce bounce or roll.

The dice need to roll not just drop, even better is to hit against a surface to come to a halt.
There is a reason that is a rule for "craps" as a game.

My feeling about this is that, if you're messing with your rolls, the only person you're cheating is yourself. There's no enjoyment to be had in always winning; in never being challenged. If you win every time, you'll quickly become bored of the game. Not only that, but you'll be missing out on what makes 40k so great: the strategizing. It's far more satisfying to pull out a victory because you "outplayed" your opponent than it is to win because you cheated.

So, for the most part, I'm gonna trust my opponent to "play fair". Because I assume they also want to enjoy a game. And as nice as it is to win, it's more rewarding to lose having fun.

 Galas wrote:
Hes clearly just trying to have the dice in the same zone so the camera can pick them without the dicer scattering everywhere.

I definitely agree that he's not cheating and that seems to be the end goal, but if you removed the context of making a video, it would look a lot like the kind of rolling when trying to drop the dice without getting an actual roll from them. Maybe a permanent dice tower off to the side somewhere, with a dice cam window, would get good rolls and be easy to see.

 flandarz wrote:
My feeling about this is that, if you're messing with your rolls, the only person you're cheating is yourself. There's no enjoyment to be had in always winning; in never being challenged. If you win every time, you'll quickly become bored of the game. Not only that, but you'll be missing out on what makes 40k so great: the strategizing. It's far more satisfying to pull out a victory because you "outplayed" your opponent than it is to win because you cheated.

So, for the most part, I'm gonna trust my opponent to "play fair". Because I assume they also want to enjoy a game. And as nice as it is to win, it's more rewarding to lose having fun.

Yeah...That's why I stuck with my regular Dust Tactics dice when playing Axis. Not because I didn't want gray dice with iron crosses on them. They were so bad (always rolled blanks, 2/3 of the faces) that even my opponents started to say I really should get new dice. If they weren't proprietary, I bet they would have bought me new ones. They worked great with my zombie horde though which saved on blanks. They took tons of firepower to die, again, being undead and all.

I generally don't care about how my opponent rolls dice as I don't care than much about wining or losing as to watch my opponent's rolling habits. I generally double fist my dice giving them a few good shakes in my hands before placing them down in my still cupped hands to keep them scattering. Unless it is only a couple, three dice then I will often toss in an empty section of the table. For 40k, I generally use 12mm mostly in the colors of the army, though, sometimes using various other colors to differentiate weapons. I think I have annoyed a couple of opponents that don't like the smaller size dice. They didn't say anything though. I like the smaller dice because I can roll everything all at once and when I have strays they don't damage anything on the table. I don't care about others touching my dice. I prefer my opponent to just pick up my hit/wounds to roll their saves but most don't like doing that. I just want to speed up rolls where possible.

 Duskweaver wrote:
As far as I'm concerned, you can roll however you like. Pick up hits; pick up misses. Pick them up off the floor without me even seeing and declare the result. I don't care.

Reason is, if I'm playing you, it means I've already decided I trust you enough to want to play this game with you. So you deserve the benefit of the doubt, at least for the duration of the current game.

If I have sufficient reason to think you're a cheater or a basically dishonest person, then I won't play you again. But I'm not going to pack up my minis and flounce out halfway through a game. That's just childish nonsense.

Actual cheaters are generally pretty easy to spot before the game even starts, IME. So I just avoid playing those people.

And, at the end of the day, it's just a game. If you can only win by cheating, that's more your loss than mine. It doesn't actually hurt my enjoyment of the game unless I decide to allow it to. I'm most likely to just feel pity for you for being so emotionally fragile that you have to cheat just to avoid losing a silly toy-soldiers game.

I agree with this. The only time I really have problems with the rolling methods is during obvious cheating, or there was this one guy I knew who would roll one die at a time. Not only did this take forever, but he openly admitted to having practiced to get his desired result, and, at least to my untrained eyes, it seemed to actually work semi-reliably.

The intent for using dice to achieve randomness within a given distribution (16.7% for D6 for instance).
Any methods that change that ,goes against the intent/spirit of what they are used for.

Dice themselves by design can have unintended bias built in them (voids and pockets in them and varying density materials).

In the end, I lean toward casino dice (they are checked for balance and have no voids) and dice towers (multiple impacts = greater randomness) to get rid of any of those questions.

I feel it is a really good and healthy thing to WANT to win but the intent is to do it in as fair a way as possible.

I wouldn't pick up my minis and go home if I encountered rolling like that but I'd request a little more effort and actual "roll". Maybe it was just because he was trying to keep the dice on camera but most of those dice didn't even bounce when they hit the table so I don't think they were sufficiently random.

In craps you want to bounce the dice off something to ensure you're not doing any shenanigans.

I think that's the basis of all dice etiquette, that you want your opponent to be comfortable that you're not influencing the dice beyond superstitious nonsense. '

Backspacehacker nailed it when he wrote:

Backspacehacker wrote:Roll in a location taht is free of models and terrain.
Call the results before hand (IE "looking for 4s rerolling 1s")
Pull misses/fails from the result, not successes.
Before scooping the successes a quick confirm with opponent ("looks good?")
then continue on.

This guy isn't trying to cause a problem as pointed out above.
MiT did this with dice at craps. (looking for a link)
They were ABSOLUTELY able to skew the results of crap games in their favor by setting the dice to a certain facing, and tossing them so that they landed flat just as set a certain distance from the wall of the crap table. So yes, ABSOLUTELY, you could skew rolls by setting dice flat on your hand (or held in your hand) with certain facings, and dropping them softly from a lower height to limit the bounces.
I have a friend who can do this. He places the dice in his hand with any facing up, but the 1 always to one side (the same side for all dice). He then rolls them the opposite way, so that as they fall off his hand the 1 is facing up. Low to the table they rarely roll all the way around to the 1 or land flat enough to keep the 1. He can lower the results of 1 from the normal 1/6 to about 1/10. We have forced him to roll in a box by reaching across the table and tossing. In a tournament, where the real or imagined reward is significant? I'd be concerned if someone rolled with this little "action" on the dice.

I repeat, I do NOT think that is what this guy is doing at all for all the reasons pointed out above.

 auticus wrote:
With the different ways of cheating with dice, loading dice, certain ways of rolling dice to get what you want, I'd be all for just using dice apps personally.

And any entry level coder can re-code the app to adjust the results...

 skchsan wrote:

 auticus wrote:
With the different ways of cheating with dice, loading dice, certain ways of rolling dice to get what you want, I'd be all for just using dice apps personally.

And any entry level coder can re-code the app to adjust the results...

it is generally harder to get your modified app loaded though, especially on Apple stuff. Also while mucking with the random number generator may be easy (so as to say up the number of 5+ or 6's rolled) its a lot harder to do without the source code or without the ability to copy the entire app

If you're not throwing your dice directly at an opponent's face and seeing where they're land, you're doing it wrong.

Thought the idea was to throw the dice at the wall in frustration so hard you can then scan the indentations to see what the score was?

guessing your opponents face works, or perhaps small annoying children/larger annoying adults/rules lawyers or acceptable targets of choice also work

except leopards, obviously

"I rolled... many spots. Why did I toss at the leopard for my leadership roll?"

 Bookwrack wrote:
"I rolled... many spots. Why did I toss at the leopard for my leadership roll?"

*runs away crying*

probably dropping the odd dice as I do so