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ChaosismyAntidrug wrote:Being an engineer with a fetish for precision I took a micrometer to all of the dice I could find and the best ones were all 0.010-0.020" away from being cubes. In order to remedy this I pulled out some Plastic stock and machined my own set that stay with .002" of being perfect cubes.

Commissions $?

NuggzTheNinja wrote:

themrsleepy wrote:Well.... This is only a once tested thing. Semi s for 40k ard boys, hmm how can i put this in the dakka family setting. Umm.. Well my wife was holding my dice and I did what young married coulples do The night before and morning of. Worked for the first game, I was rolling so incredible that he started picking my dice up to make saves, cept he was failing miserably. It really was rediculous. One example, I was throwing 15dice, hit on 3+ would hit 13 to 14, wound on 4+, wounded 9 and 10. Two turns in a row I did that with just that unit. Whatever works right (oh the dice dont have my stamina I rolled the worst ever in my second game.)

How long was the break between games? Your dice are tellin' you something.

Yea my dice told me they were one hit wonders, unlike their master HAHA! and there was about an hour inbetween first and second game. The second game my dice were distracted by the guy I was playing with because he kept falsely accusing me of cheating, TO had to come over three times to agree with me, my faq and rulebook. They were more angry and lost the fun feeling they came to the tourney with.

After every day of gaming every single die gets rearraged so that all the numbers are alligned to face in the same direction with 1's facing up. I also have strick rules for which die are used for strict actions. Hits, wounds and armour saves are with 36 Terrcottas. Ward saves, Invulerable saves, spells and psychic attacks are done with 12 swirled jade and white die. And Leadership tests are rolled with 12 Blue die. Scatter/artillery die don't get any special treatments.

After my artillery dice misfired 4 times on the same turn, i bought a new one, took them both outside, and smashed the old one with a hammer.

The new dice was forced to witness what happens when you roll poorly!

Lol ShivanAngel. That's not bad

All the suggestions about controlled dice rolling sits poorly with me. Not only is it cheating your opponent, it devalues the whole game system.

When it comes to dice rolling....superstition is ok, having all your dice sitting with 1s facing up etc, but controlling your throw to ensure you roll the number you need is C.H.E.A.T.I.N.G.

I throw one of my GW dice into the microwave until it is mush to teach my new dice a lesson, and then pray to Jashin, while stabbing a hobby knife into the shrike model I have, that has failed me countless times.

Radi87 wrote:controlling your throw to ensure you roll the number you need is C.H.E.A.T.I.N.G.

And what's the best way to spot someone cheating? Know what they're doing. Know what to look for. Be able to get evidence on them so everyone can know (a good cheat makes this nearly impossible!). It can be fun to mess with people every once in a while as well If I really felt the need to cheat to win a game of toy soldiers I have bigger problems.

It's also poor form to use certain dice for certain rolls- such as saving a certain 2 dice Only for leadership tests. I was guilty of this in high school, but it blatantly looks like cheating... what's different about those 2 dice, after all?

Now I use the same dice for all of my rolls, and it's all good . Of course, if a dice "underperforms" it gets a time-out... nothing like the hammer / microwave / etc treatment above though! You guys are harsh

If things are going badly, then we use a large cup for throwing and a tray for catching the dice. We like to believe it restores things to random, rather than runs of 1s and 2s.

Those skull dice in the new WHFB range seem to roll lower rather than higher. If rolling on an uneven surface, there could even be a reason for this.

And if an opponent dropped a die so it didn't actually roll, they'd be rolling it again. I do the same.

Cannerus_The_Unbearable wrote:
And what's the best way to spot someone cheating? Know what they're doing. Know what to look for. Be able to get evidence on them so everyone can know (a good cheat makes this nearly impossible!). It can be fun to mess with people every once in a while as well If I really felt the need to cheat to win a game of toy soldiers I have bigger problems.

LOL too true.......

If rolling only one die, I just chuck it in the air as high as I can. Seems to work! Making four 5++ saves in a roll made me believe.

If rolling like 10 dice, I try to chuck them as far away as possible without me having to walk over to get them, I think that the more they roll, the more random they get.

And to nerf my opponent's rolls, I use the Emperor's psychic powers, to prevent him from doing the same to me, I use a psychic hood.

doctorludo wrote:If things are going badly, then we use a large cup for throwing and a tray for catching the dice.

You can controlled roll with cups too. It's pretty funny The only sure way is to have the dice fall at least 6-7" and hit a tripwire while having to bounce off a wall. Nobody can cheat past that one with fair dice.

What I have heard is luck comes in packets

Its either with you or not

Some games nothing can go wrong and the dice will be instrumental in your victory

Other times its the opposite

For me when my dice are not performing I usually just start picking up my opponent's dice and roll those!


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Oh as an aside, nothing irritates me more than the local noob who walks around at the local battle bunker, leans across your game table and at the critical points yells 'roll a 1'

I have told him next time he does it im going to smack him, but I dont think he believes me

DeadGaurd wrote:I just buy more dice every couple of months. When you buy dice they come with an amount of luck roughly equal to the amount paid for the dice. The more you roll the dice the more luck they use. Once you have used up all the luck you have to set them asside to generat new luck, this is the point where you buy new dice. The new luck the dice generate will never be as great as the luck they came with, but it should get you back up to just above average after about a month. Also the longer you shake the dice in your hands the more luck they will have when you rool them, I think it has something to do with fricsion or static electricity.

Despite how ridiculous that sounds, thats pretty much what I noticed too...

Doctadeth wrote:I personally do 2 things to my ordinary dice. First of all is the heat purification. I heat a copper frypan to nuke point (max heat) and rapidly panfry the dice. The concept is that the new dice has industrial glues and resin on it, and is unevenly coated, so the heat strips the glue and resin off, or evenly coats it.

That sounds like it has the potential to screw up your dice more than they should be. Dice are not "solid" objects, they have pockets of air within. By heating up the dice the plastic will melt slightly and flow within the cube. Theoretically, this could result in dice being weighted to favor a certain number over others.

I was always of the opinion that Space Hulk was slightly unbalanced and favoured the Genestealer player.

My theory is; that instead of changing the rules, Games Workshop instead overcame this problem by cursing all the blue dice that came packaged with the game.

Man are those things unlucky! in all my games I don't think I've ever seen a single one of them roll a 6. The red marine dice on the other hand are clearly blessed by the emperor himself.

For this reason I used red dice whenever possible, as there is always a slim chance that they may have originated from a Space Hulk box and be awesome lucky.

And if my opponent has an important roll coming up, I'm always happy to offer them my 'lucky' blue dice to roll with.

I feel the same way about Risk. It seems to me that the Defenders dice always seem to roll higher than the attackers dice. I have a feeling that Hasbro or whoever manufactured the dice so that the Defender would get consistently higher roles in order to reinforce the recommended 3:1 attacker:defender ratio(especially since the earlier copies of the game that I have from the 60's don't seem to have this issue).

Interestingly enough, it seems to me that Risk II (the PC game) isn't truly random at all. I've noticed that certain AI personalities have a tendency to roll a specific pattern (which also influences the results of the players dice). For instance, when attacking napoleon, I've noticed I have a tendency to roll 2's and 1's. Not just once in a while, but in a series, while napoleon tends to roll 5's and 3's in response, and when I get "lucky" and roll something higher, he has a tendency to match me at 4's, and if I roll higher, he tends to lose on 3's. Meanwhile, Solignac has the annoying habit of rolling double 5s or double 6's on the attack (usually when the player rolls the same thing, in Risk defender beats attacker on a tie, you could see why it frustrates me...). I think its a conspiracy... a conspiracy I tells ya...

Anyway, I've noticed two very real phenomenon:

1. WHFB skull dice don't roll. They suck.

2. SHAKE your dice. I mean actually shake. Not just make the hand gesture and they barely move. TThere should be more than enough space in your cupped hands for the dice to travel about in every which way. Give them a good shake for like 5 seconds and drop. I find that theres a greater tendency to get statistically average rolls this way. No it won't get you tons of 5's/6's (well, it could in some situations), but by doing this for the past month or two, I've noticed that I haven't been getting as many "dead hands".

I never realised how superstitious some wargamers are! Some awesome stories here.

My only quirk is that I really like to throw my dice with force and bounce them off walls and such. The farther and bouncier the roll,the better.

I think it's because of what chaos0xomega says. All this rolling makes the dice get more statistically average rolls instead of dead hands.

burning_phoneix wrote:My only quirk is that I really like to throw my dice with force and bounce them off walls and such. The farther and bouncier the roll,the better.

All well and good until you wind up playing 40k Bowling and send those Ork Boyz flying somewhere...

I have heard that a good soundtrack before a game is a good way to make your army do well. The guy in first place in my store's league claims that he's basically winning because he has a playlist of like 15 songs (about going to war/battle) that he listens to every week. (Well. That and he's about the sneakiest guy I know about getting guardsmen into cover)

DeadGaurd wrote:I just buy more dice every couple of months. When you buy dice they come with an amount of luck roughly equal to the amount paid for the dice. The more you roll the dice the more luck they use. Once you have used up all the luck you have to set them asside to generat new luck, this is the point where you buy new dice. The new luck the dice generate will never be as great as the luck they came with, but it should get you back up to just above average after about a month. Also the longer you shake the dice in your hands the more luck they will have when you rool them, I think it has something to do with fricsion or static electricity.

What a load of twaddle. "Friction" and "static electricity". Where does the amount of "luck" come from in the factory fresh dice that you can't generate naturally?

Are you serious? Maybe my irony detector isn't on today but this has to be one of the dumbest things I've ever read on Dakka.

for me, when I just rolled a 6, that dice is likely to roll low next time. but a dice roll of 1 is more likely to roll a six!

.....

just me though.

Howard A Treesong wrote:

DeadGaurd wrote:I just buy more dice every couple of months. When you buy dice they come with an amount of luck roughly equal to the amount paid for the dice. The more you roll the dice the more luck they use. Once you have used up all the luck you have to set them asside to generat new luck, this is the point where you buy new dice. The new luck the dice generate will never be as great as the luck they came with, but it should get you back up to just above average after about a month. Also the longer you shake the dice in your hands the more luck they will have when you rool them, I think it has something to do with fricsion or static electricity.

What a load of twaddle. "Friction" and "static electricity". Where does the amount of "luck" come from in the factory fresh dice that you can't generate naturally?

Are you serious? Maybe my irony detector isn't on today but this has to be one of the dumbest things I've ever read on Dakka.

No, it's not irony. I believe it as well, and said it in the first post, laid down in simplified terms. And I have a set of dice that rolls amazingly that supports this theroy (I rarely roll it and it's worth well over $50). I've had counter examples as well, but far more examples of this working than it not.

Also, it's not really any more silly than smashing a die with a hammer in front of other dice to teach them a lesson. There's a reason it's called superstition...