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I think there would be a market. I currently use gamescience dice. I am reasonably pleased with them, they roll randomly which is what i want. But I agree that some of them show some shrinkage or bulge a bit. I'm not put off by the sprue mark. Thats what happened when you cast things and I just file it off.

I would be interested in high quality dice that are all uniform and have better quality control and roll randomly.

I would like a set, I wish I could find the thread, but a stats professor at ASU (I think) did a proper study on varying D6 that were mass produced, and compared them to casino dice. The difference was statistically significant, enough that I would be interested in a set. I remember him pointing out not to use the standard dice for leadership checks and the such, because it would be like cheating if using the better dice for hits, saves, etc.

Edit, here it is:

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

talljosh85 wrote:
I would like a set, I wish I could find the thread, but a stats professor at ASU (I think) did a proper study on varying D6 that were mass produced, and compared them to casino dice. The difference was statistically significant, enough that I would be interested in a set. I remember him pointing out not to use the standard dice for leadership checks and the such, because it would be like cheating if using the better dice for hits, saves, etc.

Edit, here it is:

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

The only flaw with that article is that they are attempting to prove an agenda and the results are fabricated as it is statistically impossible to roll 29% 1s without the dice being visibly deformed.

Better studies have tested dice under mechanical dice rolling equipment which found statistical flaws past what human rolling can accomplish and the truth is that flawed dice can be randomly predisposed to any side, not always 1s. So as long dice are rolled in a batch of dice, not individually tested that any potential bias would be balanced out by other dice in the set.

Essentially segmenting any rolls to special dice for rolls is cheating as it changes the odds of what your "common" rolls are vs your segmented dice. The only way to have a true fair balanced game is for both players to use the same set of dice, biases included and not at all observed or segmented.

Which means if you use cram dice, as long as both people roll the same crap dice, you are all good. If you use balanced dice, the same balanced dice need to be used by both players.

The attitude of buying performance dice so you can have better rolls than your opponent is cheating. Rolling LD on casino dice is also cheating. And every tourney I have ever been too gives me the right to molest your dice if you intend to segment dice rolls. You start using special dice or casino dice which cannot be randomized without a bank on a wargaming surface, expect me to respond to your cheating with equally unpleasant behavior of rolling the gak out of your dice.

I would have no issue with sharing my dice. Hell, being open with my opponent is part of what makes this game work, the last game I played I was trying to help the guy out by explaining that Hammer of Wrath attacks aren't replacing his other attacks, even though it would work against me.


Yes, the study was imperfect, as the sample size should have had many sets of chessex and GW dice, to name one flaw. However, it made the point and I for one would like to have accurate dice, much like I prefer well made parts for my cars so I know the precision and accuracy are what they should be.

nkelsch wrote:

talljosh85 wrote:

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

The only flaw with that article is that they are attempting to prove an agenda and the results are fabricated as it is statistically impossible to roll 29% 1s without the dice being visibly deformed.

That's complete and utter BS on numerous levels. Maybe you should actually read the article, and understand what "statistics" can and can't do. First off, it's "statistically" possible to roll 1s 29% or even 50% of the time using a perfectly well formed die. Each roll is independent of the others which means that every single time you throw that die you have exactly the same chance of getting a 1 as the first time you threw it. Unlikely as hell? Absolutely. Statistically impossible? no.

This is no different than flipping a coin 10 times and having tails show every single time. Each flip has about a 50% chance of showing tails; not exactly 50% as weighting comes into play, but close enough. If you're trying to see that flips (or rolls) are in any way impacted by the result of previous flips/rolls then perhaps you ought to look up "Gamblers Fallacy"

It is further not only possible, but completely probable, that the die in question has no visible issues. Most chessex dice are opaque. When you can't see inside then you don't have visibility to see any deformities. In the researcher's case they opened up a lot of the dice with an instrument that can do so without damaging the die: they found air bubbles in a lot of them.

nkelsch wrote:

Essentially segmenting any rolls to special dice for rolls is cheating as it changes the odds of what your "common" rolls are vs your segmented dice. The only way to have a true fair balanced game is for both players to use the same set of dice, biases included and not at all observed or segmented.

Which means if you use crap dice, as long as both people roll the same crap dice, you are all good. If you use balanced dice, the same balanced dice need to be used by both players.

The attitude of buying performance dice so you can have better rolls than your opponent is cheating. Rolling LD on casino dice is also cheating. And every tourney I have ever been too gives me the right to molest your dice if you intend to segment dice rolls. You start using special dice or casino dice which cannot be randomized without a bank on a wargaming surface, expect me to respond to your cheating with equally unpleasant behavior of rolling the gak out of your dice.

I 100% agree with everything you said here. The ideal would be for both players to use the same dice, and using certain dice for certain rolls is cheating and should be dealt with by the summary execution of one of their models.

 SoloFalcon1138 wrote:
I was trying to add something. Its called previous discussions about how many people are getting casino dice or complaining about the "inaccuracy" of mass-produced dice. Several threads have been dedicated to the mathhammering of dice. Even a statistician can tell you the proverbial coin flip is not precisely a 50/50 chance due to imblance in casting and stamping. But for gaming, precision dice are more of a novelty than a necessity.

This. I think if someone is willing to spend good money on dice for gaming, then they probably want them to be "special". While being perfectly scientifically balanced might be one aspect of it, you'd need to make them "shiny" in order for them to be worth the high price you'd be asking.

I think that no matter what techincal terms you use, the idea that dice roll nearly twice as many 1s as expected is slightly preposterous.

Obviously he has data, and I don't, but that's a result so far from the expected that a some doubt is not out of line.

For example, here's a study on d20s that found that the most common result on a chessex was about a 23% deviation. The d6 study found a 74% deviation.

Basically, if the studies done at ASU are accurate, than most d6s are barely even pseudo-random.

One question: If you make my dice perfect, can I not blame them anymore?

How Hard is marine grade plastics? As i wouldn't want it damaging a nice scenic table and such.

I would However be interested in 40k dice that has missions, deployment, the various mysterious effects on them so i don't have to refer back to the book soo often (though now i basically memorized all of them).

Its ok to have 'Lucky dice' to use the same dice pool for your attacks and your leadership tests and allow others to use them also.

The level of bias for standard dice is really really picky. This sounds about as anal as arguing over the accuracy of ranges.
Whats next? Would anyone be in a laser micrometer capable of judging charge distances to ten decimal places.

You could have a great marketing tag for your product.

Precision machined gaming dice. That product, for every That Guy.

Yeh The problem I have with that study is his method of rolling. Dice don't roll well in plastic cube compartments. They are likely to smack flat into a corner and fall into the same position they were in. Another person did a study where he rolled 100 dice at a time in a large dice cup onto a flat surface and got something like 17% ones. That is much more believable.

I've posted elsewhere about that study, it's just very off. Dice tend to be biased towards an axis, not a single number. So if you're rolling a lot of 1's, you're also probably rolling a lot of 6's. It's just that the ones stand out much more when your terminators are dying to them and you don't need to roll 6's as often as you need to avoid a low roll in 40k.

nectarprime wrote:A friend and I are throwing around ideas, as we are both into manufacturing and machining as hobbies. I believe there is a market for precision machined dice-- from d6 to d20.

Most other dice, including Gamescience "precision" dice, are molded. Gamescience dice are supposed to be the best, but they are soft plastic that has shrinkage inside the mold, and they come with sprue marks that the customer has to remove themselves. This sprue mark makes the dice unreliable and not true.

Well feth that.

Imagine a die that is made from hard, marine grade plastic that will not dent or chip (my Gamescience dice had dented edges after one night of D&D on a wooden table). Now imagine that this same die's etched numbers have removed the same amount of material on each side, making an even weight on all sides and a perfect center of gravity.

What are your thoughts on this? How much would you pay for a dice cube of d6 for 40k or a set of 7 polyhedral dice for D&D?

nectarprime wrote:They would be basic colors--- black, white, grey. Those are what colors this marine grade plastic is available in (but I will try to source other manufacturers). Super glue nor paint will stick to this plastic, and it is UV resistant so they will not change color with age.

Since paint will not stick, having colored numbers may not happen. We will have to do some R&D on this once we have some made. I think colored wax pressed in to the etched numbers would work.

I am more interested in having precision dice rather than colorful ones. Chessex already makes those

Honestly, while I would love a set of precision dice of this nature*, I think you would have a very difficult challenge in making a successful business out of it.


First, precision dice are already available: casino dice. These aren't popular in the wargaming world for two reasons, cost, and durability.

Casino dice are much, much more expensive than 'rpg' dice, so any successful competitor to them would probably have to be less expensive than they are. In addition, casino dice, while expensive, are available in some pretty colors, and have colored pips for easy readability. Your proposed marine dice wouldn't have a wide range of attractive colors, nor would they have colored pips, so they would have to compete with casino dice almost solely on price (they aren't pretty, and they aren't readable, but boy are they cheap!).

Casino dice are also retired regularly as normal usage makes them worn and more imperfectly random. This, especially combined with their high cost, makes them unattractive for gamers who will be rolling dice on hard surfaces (not felt) and in handfuls, not ones and twos. If your dice are no more durable (or less durable) than casino dice, they will have to be replaced quite often for people who care about 'perfect randomness'. That means they would have to be quite inexpensive, as RPG dice don't get replaced from wear very often. If your marine dice are very hard wearing and very durable, you are going to have smaller sales potential for them, as people won't need to replace them. I suspect that making them very rugged and hard wearing would also make them more expensive than casino dice, which then hurts them in competing with casino dice on the first factor.

(And for people who don't care about 'perfect randomness' due to worn dice--they won't be looking at buying rather bland looking dice whose main selling point is being more perfectly random).


Then you have the problem of convincing people that they need more perfectly random dice. Just reading any of these dice threads should convince you of the difficulty of that. A perfectly random dice should always, consistently, have the same chance of landing on any face. That's it. Clearly, obviously, modern dice which are tumbled smooth and simply do no have equally sized and shaped corners and edges will not have equivalent chances of landing on each face. Any discussion of this on the site gets distracted by irrelevant side issues like the condition of the tabletop (when better and worse dice would be rolled on the same table) or the bias of any particular die or die manufacturer (we are looking for unbiased dice, not dice with a bias against 1's). Then you also have people who aren't concerned with the level of bias displayed by particular dice for a multitude of reasons (all of which would be minimized by less biased dice to the same extent) and people who want to argue over the details of any particular test for bias (when such tests simply measure the extent and direction of bias from dice which already, measurably, do not have equal sides and edges).

On top of that, you have the people who actually want more perfectly random dice. You will have to be able to demonstrate to them that your manufacturing process does, in fact, do this. After all, a lot of 'dice purists' might like Gamescience Precision dice in theory, but still be put off by the shrinkage and sprue marks of actual Gamescience dice (which themselves would seem to have to have some effect in making the die in question less perfectly random).

Then, there's readability. Gamescience, the current 'top dog' on precision dice, can ink their dice, or you can ink them yourself. The amount of ink required is miniscule, and very unlikely to affect the die's randomness. Since your dice cannot be inked, they would prove very hard to read on the tabletop. Using colored wax would seem to be a solution, since each side had the same amount of material removed for the numbering. However, if any wax falls out of one side, you now have unevenly weighted dice--and your target market is people willing to pay more for precision dice.

Finally, there is the actual dice marketplace to contend with. It's quite obvious that people love to have a wide variety of dice colors to choose from. Heck, I think I've bought a new set of dice for every army and every character I've ever played. It's also fairly apparent that people like the look and feel of polished, painted pip dice over hard edged, uninked dice. In coming up with a new type of precision machined dice, you are basically competing for market share for an already tiny part of the market place.

Honestly (though this may not be possible for you), I would love it if someone would simply come up with a technique for controlled polishing of dice. Rather than using the current brutal tumbling polishing method which produces uneven sides and edges, if someone could only develop a reasonable method for using current dice (many pretty colors, many different paint options) and polishing them with precise tolerances, I think it would be a hit. You could still have polished, attractive, readable dice, in a ridiculous array of colors, but have the added selling point of more truly random rolls.

However, as FW has shown us, there is often a marketplace for even very expensive products in the hobby if you can find the right niche. Good luck and keep us informed!


*I would like to have more confidence that my victories were less due to biased dice, and my losses less to blame on biased dice, than my own efforts. Sadly, my opponents all keep using GW dice anyway.

So called precision dice roll badly, so it is easy to cheat with them with short rolls, or rather hard not to cheat.
That's why Casinos require very long rolls on felt plus reflection from the cushion with those precision dice.
I would never use precision dice for short rolls as are the norm in tabletop games, especially not if they look worse than the ones by Game Science (bland design not countered by fancy colours).

BTW asking posters, that try to give constructive but negative feedback, to leave the thread, is impolite, not helpful and a bit suspicious. Dakka is not a yes company.

Da Butcha, thank you for your words. They are much appreciated.

Kroothawk--- I suggested to the person that was attempting to get a rise out of me to refrain posting unless it was constructive. If you took a look at the second thread he linked to he was trolling there as well. I hardly see what is "suspicious" about asking someone to refrain from being rude.

To answer some questions---

Yes, you can get many different types of plastics that do not vary in density or weight per square inch. Most materials molded in small amounts will not be like this (Chessex, Gamescience). The larger the batch of material, the less variance throughout the whole thing (giant sheets of marine plastic or delrin).

We are trying to decide if sharp corners or beveled corners will be better for players. Machining each edge identical to the others will obviously take more time and effort. We will make prototypes both ways--- and possibly sell both styles.

We are also thinking of trying delrin as our material. This stuff won't dent on a wooden surface like Gamescience or casino dice will.

Well, keep us posted. I'm definitely interested, but I don't know how much of an edge case I am.

Personally, I think that beveled edges might be better for two reasons. Among my players (I run RPGs too), people seem to dislike the feel of sharp edged dice. Also, it seems like beveled edges would wear better than sharp edges, even if the material is more durable than Gamescience dice.

[quote=nectarprime 505862 5279913 37af0e37943bda360674af47481c4e58.jpg

We are trying to decide if sharp corners or beveled corners will be better for players.

As far as I can tell, claiming that you're producing "precision machined" dice is absolutely useless if you're not conducting and publishing statistical tests on those dice. That ends up with a company being the Monster Cable of the dice world--producing expensive products with attached unsubstantiated performance claims. But there's certainly a thriving market for Monster Cables.

Are Chessex dice terrible? Probably. But Chessex doesn't go around claiming that their dice are perfect.

The Game Science argument about the rock tumbler has a point in so far as all it's doing is introducing more source of asymmetry and non-uniformity in the dice. But saying "Our dice are less terrible than theirs" isn't the same as proving that their dice are close to ideal.

Anyone want to sell me some dice that they can provide an accompanying certificate of passing statistical testing?

nkelsch wrote:

talljosh85 wrote:
I would like a set, I wish I could find the thread, but a stats professor at ASU (I think) did a proper study on varying D6 that were mass produced, and compared them to casino dice. The difference was statistically significant, enough that I would be interested in a set. I remember him pointing out not to use the standard dice for leadership checks and the such, because it would be like cheating if using the better dice for hits, saves, etc.

Edit, here it is:

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

The only flaw with that article is that they are attempting to prove an agenda and the results are fabricated as it is statistically impossible to roll 29% 1s without the dice being visibly deformed.

I did a sample of about 600 throws myself with GW dice, and did not find any signifant statistical anomalies. Granted, the sample was pretty small, but the results creeped closer to median as my test progressed and I sure don't believe that adding another 5000 rolls would have resulted number of 1's magically double. In fact, in my test, 1 was the least common result.