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I have been told by my friends that have played warhammer for years that the official warhammer dice are rubbish as they are biased to roll 1s.

I have no idea if this is true or not but if it is, where should I get dice from - they all bought them from an independent store that no longer exists here in the UK.

I bought a couple bags of like 50 dice from ebay.

Google "dice". The amount of results will be ridiculous. And as for GW dice being biased, I've never heard of it and it sounds crazy, but I wouldn't doubt GW would do it

Those guys probably fell for confirmation bias. Just take those dice, do 500 or more rolls and take down the results in Excel. Then check the average value (should be very close to 3.5) and check how much % each result came. Should be about 16.667% each. If the results are close to those above the dice are fine. If it is shifted the dice are not ok for gaming.

You should read this, it should answer your initial question:

http://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/That%27s_How_I_Roll_-_A_Scientific_Analysis_of_Dice

Your friend is talking rubbish I'm afraid.

GW's dice are just as good (or bad if you wish) as pretty much any other cheap dice and won't be balanced like a set of Casino Dice.
Cheap dice will usually favour certain sides when thrown because they're polished with ballbearings or rocks in a big tumbler to make them look nice and smooth.

For tabletop gaming it doesn't really matter what dice you get. Personally I tend to go for transculent Chessex dice because I really like how they look and they're pretty cheap.

It depends on the dice. My current set rolls with ~16.6% for each number and were bought at GW.

My DV dice roll ~25% 6's, and ~10% 1's. Those go against the study.

However, my first set of dice (from GW) rolled over 30% 1's, with 6's rolling ~2% of the time. (I played multiple games without rolling a single 6)

I've tested a few of my dice, and did find that they deviated significantly from what you would expect (my mini scatter dice in particular - it rolled hits 40% of the time after 200 rolls, which is way beyond the standard deviation).

I now use these dice, which have sharper corners than GW and chessex dice.

I've researched this topic to death, as many others have before me.

There are a few mitigating facts:

1. Unless you are buying professional dice, like those used in a casino, then you aren't playing with balanced dice. Professional dice are very expensive and you aren't likely to find them in a hobby store. Along with this, don't buy dice from eBay. You really have no idea what you're going to end up with.

2. Your dice are only one part of the equation. The dice your opponents use have just as much input on the game. So, in an ideal world you'd both use professional dice. If only side is then the total effects aren't mitigated.

3. It's pretty random as to the quality of any given die within a box; although most are "close enough". Generally speaking, the imperfections in one die will be cancelled by another. There's been a fair amount of research into this that compares Game Science dice to Chessex and although there were differences, those were so minor as to have zero impact. Proper testing of a die will involve 10s of thousands of rolls by a machine designed for this. There are too many potential factors involved (confirmation bias) that is impossible to eliminated when doing this over a hundred or two by hand.

4. If you are truly concerned about dice being a factor then agree with your opponent to use the exact same dice. If that particular set of dice tends to roll low, it will roll low for both of you. If it rolls high, it'll roll high for both of you thereby negating those effects.

5. How you roll a die will have an impact. There are certainly tutorials out there on how to palm dice or roll them in particular ways to have a better chance at getting the outcome you want. This is why casinos require dice to hit a back stop when rolling or the roll doesn't count. However if you start doing this then you deserve the proverbial kick in the teeth when you get caught.

6. A far more important contributor to your ability to win is based on your list, your opponents list, the mission played and general capability of the people playing. You can have an awesome list, perfectly formed dice, or even those that somehow *roll in your favor*, and still consistently lose because you just aren't a good player. Don't get me wrong, you'll win a couple games from it, but by and large you'll lose far more often.

Point is: don't worry about it and get back to gaming.