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Man. For such little plastic cubes dice sure do seem to be serious business amongst gamers.

 Dramagod2 wrote:

 Ghaz wrote:
Have you rolled each die hundreds (if not thousands) of times and kept a record of the results to see if there is an even distribution of results?

What dice are you speaking of? Did you read the source article?

My post was directed to the post above yours.

If a store wants dice requirements, it should provide dice for all the players there.

Make them put a deposit down if you have to, but you can't really make requirements unless you provide a set of dice you believe are balanced. Heck, it wouldn't even cost that much money to break open a few dice cubes.

I wonder if there are people out there who make a die or two with something like 2 sixes on them would be difficult to tell them apart.

Drilling extra pips isn't hard, but drilling the one to a six is hard because you'd need to fill the one. If you made it a five, you'd have adjacent five faces.

The best cheat is more subtle, changing some twos to fives. They are opposite faces, so players won't easily see that three more pips were drilled. Net odds of a 3+ or harder got easier by one. No change in Gets Hot or Rending.

Some wee scrote once turned up to my local GW games night with a handful of dice marked 4,5,6,4,5,6. Took us a while to work out that's why his Orks were hitting more often than they should. When we worked it out, we made him use them for Leadership tests for the rest of the game.

I've also got a D3 (i.e. a D6 marked 1,2,3,1,2,3) from Salute. Again, it took us a while to work out that's why my friend's D&D character was getting crappy stats.

See, that's the overreaching bit. Adding +9 pips with 4-5-6-4-5-6 is a HUGE edge, a +43% increase. And in shooting for BS5, he doubled up his odds, which is why you guys picked up on it really quickly.

By comparison, 6-2-3-4-5-6 only adds +5 pips. This would have taken a little longer to detect, because you'd eventually pick up on why he never failed "Gets Hot".

Similarly, dropping -9 pips with a 1-2-3-1-2-3 "leadership" die is even more massive. Your average drops from a 7.5 down to a 5.5, and your worst result is a 9 - so you can make Ld9 & 10 auto-pass.

OTOH, 1-5-3-4-5-6 only adds +3 pips. It's a +15% advantage, +25% bonus on common 3+ tests. Mix 50-50 and you have a +10% overall bonus. Very hard to detect from merely rolling "hot", but definitely enough of an edge at high levels to steal games when money prizes are on the line.

Which is why it's important to mandate translucent dice for all competitive events where money has been paid and prizes of non-trivial value are given. Even moreso to use event-specific dice that cannot be counterfeited.

I have a miscast die that had 2x 3's and no 1's. It was from a chessex booth at GenCon (buy a cup/pitcher) sort of thing. I keep it away form my other dice as I don't want to cheat, but it's kind of neat and I don't want to toss it.

It took me a while to figure it out, but that was pre 40k days, when I just played D&D.