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So, im a little bit worried about how long it's taking me to roll my own dice, im playing quite a shooty army (ad mech ) with kastalans , Vangard , Icarus onagers and Infiltrators .
That's a whole lotta dice, even just 5 infiltrators is 35 shots, Im as familar as i can be with my army and I try to be quick but my first shooting phase can be 20 minutes while I work left to right rolling finding counting and re-rolling fists and fists of dice.

As such im considering trying a few things to speed up it's not a problem in what I've been doing up til now, casual games friends at home with a beer and pizza
but I am looking to enter a local narrative tourney around Christmas and the London 40k GT (again narrative )next year and don't want to end up causing slow play.

Option 1. I buy lots of dice coloured ones for different numbers I count out 36 red ( 2 Kastalans in double shot and take one out for Infiltrators ) 18 Blue for misc and 15 Yellow Vanguard dice
prepare them in little shakers ( obviously, I let my opponent check the dice to make sure they aren't rigged) and use them for my rolls.

Option 2. A Dice App, I've been looking into some dice rolling apps for Android, where you can save setups of dice, you can even set them to calculate hit or to wound values IE Roll 36xd6
< 3's eliminate , Roll and Show my opponent , do wounds and have them roll their saves themselves if they dont want to use the app.

Negatives .

1. Cost .... im either going to have to buy and organise lots of little trays of dice or an app, free versions don't allow you to save configurations.

2. Opponent unhappiness , I don't want to piss off my opponents ... I can see how uncomfortable it might make someone .... if I were using a dice rolling app ... it's also not truly random
I might even have to use a tablet ... for it because my phone isn't huge and I want to be fair.

So any ideas, opinions .... what should I do, is it Legal, in "most" tournament play to do either of these things?
How would you feel if you were across the table from me and I grabbed my smartphone out to roll my huge wod of dice .. ?
Has there been anything I've overlooked

I usually count dice in batches of 5, because my eyes can pick out how many dice are in a batch fairly easily up to about six.

This means that even the 32-odd dice (I think) that my Sisters throw when one of their ten-girl units gets in Rapid Fire, it only takes about six grabs plus a couple.

The way I roll is:

1) Count out number of dice.
2) Find a clear space.
3) Remove misses (usually I use both hands, storing 1's or whatever gets re-rolled in 1 hand and using the other to discard dice that do not get rerolled)
4) Re-roll misses.
5) Roll all the dice to wound, using the same method if I have re-rolls for that too (Rare for me!)
6) arrange the dice into groups of 3-5 for easy counting for myself and my opponent so they can grasp how many wounds there are.

Usually I hesitate from step to step to see if my opponent has any dice he'd like to call out as misses that I haven't picked up (or whatever) since I'm a flawed human being.

It does, sometimes, take an age, I suppose, in retrospect.

Not really the right place for this kind of thread but I'll roll with it (pardon the pun ).

I would suggest either batch rolling 10 at a time, removing misses and letting your opponent confirm how many hits that batch got (and leaving 1's if you need to re-roll them so the opponent can confirm them) or buying a big auld bukket of dice.

In 99% of cases anything that tried to force you to pay for features has a free fully featured alternative somewhere. Would be nice to have a 40k optimised dice roller though, but as you said unless you're using Random.org it's not going to be truly random.

Perhaps not , if its in breach of "you make the call " a mod can move it ... its more about the etiquette of play i guess.

The pay for premium version was for a much 40k optimised dice rolling app , I spent a bit of time looking at other versions, this was the best I could find feature wise, admittedly I could write my own but I don't think thats a great idea , can you imagine if I were the author of the app I was asking people to trust ;-)

The free version lets you save 1's configuration if I was going to use it ... I'd pay to support the dev and the extra slots ... which save me setting up my 6-7 units each dice roll.

Everyone likes a bit of space background radiation ... the best random calculator I'd heard of was looking at stills of video footage of an array of lava lamps to create Strong random encryption for SSL certs.

I play the same army and take 4 colours of dice - 3 in sets of 9. Mainly for the Kastelans where 3 sets of 9 dice is one shootyshoot for my 3 dakkastelans. Roll twice for Protector Protocols.

The 4th colour I either take in 12 if I have a knight crusader.

Speeds things up a lot to know you can just roll "all the orange ones"

Trouble is I have been known to short change myself by leaving a random dice or two around the table!

I guess its just the inner tech-priest in me that wants to use the app ;-).

Perhaps I should try 4 groups of 9

I Too am prone to leaving dice on the table, or just handing them to opponents for saves, end of ast game I ended up with pretty much all of his blood angel dice and him with my fave grey dice.

Rolling dice is probably the most fun part of the game. However - it's quite problematic when it comes to units like dakka gants which can fire 180 str 4 shots. Even with my standard 36 dice it takes 5 to hit series. Then statistically we are looking at 3 more series to wound. Dice app seems more reasonable in this case - however - no one actually trusts dice apps and it kind of kills the fun. When it comes to strategems like this I really wish they would just say "double the number of hits to this unit" or something to that effect - statistically it is the same average anyways.

Statistics be darned! I've seen people roll 12 6's at a time and also seen the other side 12 1's out of 12 dice rolled. It happens. Statistically the amount of times it happens is insignificant but when it does happen it's memorable and, usually at a key time of the game (if it wasn't when it happened it will be key after the game believe me).

to be honest, 12 1s in 12 dice is something to be photographed, because I'm pretty sure the chances of that happening are like, not even once in the current age of the universe or something.

Like, a once-in-a-lifetime event for an entire universe.

But 12 6's is perfectly acceptable? I have personally rolled 8 1's in a row. Not in one throw but while playing another mini game where you usually roll 2, 3 or, 4 dice at a time. And at least twice I've rerolled 3 1's into another 3 1's. I believe the odds of that is around 1 in 47,524 maybe more since that's the odds of rolling 6 1's in one throw of 6 dice.

Leo_the_Rat wrote:
But 12 6's is perfectly acceptable? I have personally rolled 8 1's in a row. Not in one throw but while playing another mini game where you usually roll 2, 3 or, 4 dice at a time. And at least twice I've rerolled 3 1's into another 3 1's. I believe the odds of that is around 1 in 47,524 maybe more since that's the odds of rolling 6 1's in one throw of 6 dice.

No, 12 6's is equally picture-worthy.

And rolling dice in a row is far far less impressive than rolling them all at the same time, since the outcome of one roll does not affect the likelyhood of the outcome of the second roll. In fact, it's a fallacy to believe that it does.

12 1s in a row is not the same as 12 1s in a single throw.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
to be honest, 12 1s in 12 dice is something to be photographed, because I'm pretty sure the chances of that happening are like, not even once in the current age of the universe or something.

Like, a once-in-a-lifetime event for an entire universe.

It has a P of (1/6)^12 = 0.0000000004593936579977833851735

SO yeah, very small. More likely the dice are biased in some way.