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I have heard about and even read about dice inconsistencies and how the only truly balanced set of dice are the Vegas gaming dice. So while this is a completely different level of game balance than other discussions have taken, do you think this tactic would hold water?

The other side of this argument is that gamers and their dice are nigh inseparable.

Not really. The issues with game balance are not found in the dice used to roll the tests.

"It's a poor workman who blames his tools."

If people are seriously thinking it's the dice's fault they're losing then those people need to step back and see what the real problem might be.

The 11th company provides dice at their GTs. It seems kind of awkward at first, but once you get used to it, it works pretty well and can help speed up the game.

I'm not blaming anythig and not have I had any particular problems with my dice, but in the quest for purely statistical accurate and gaming probability it would seem that in all fairness usin the same set of dice might actually have some benefit.

Like I said I have seen a few examples of people testing various types of dice for their probability and found some brands to lean toward a different average. But I could see this happening in purely competitive environments where prize money or awards are on the line.

In a competitive environment, I would be fairly suspicious of someone who wants to use his own "lucky dice".

Id expect everyone to have to use dice provided by the tournament hosts, or at least from a shared pool of random dice.

But in casual games... we just use whatever dice we have nearest at hand. But then, i wouldnt ever suspect my friends of using weighted dice.

Or would i....

The problem with Vegas gaming dice is that they're much larger and heavier than the dice most people use; we have a person at my game store who insists on using them, and it usually results in them running into models and terrain and such, not to mention the fact that he can't roll more than five or six at a time (luckily he plays Iron Hands/Imperial Knights and doesn't need more than that regularly). I haven't done an exhaustive study of the statistical anomalies in GW"s dice (I might this weekend, finals are almost done and now I'm curious) but I sincerely doubt they're worth the cost of buying casino dice or the headache of trying to use them.

 Thorgrim Bloodcrow wrote:
"It's a poor workman who blames his tools."

If people are seriously thinking it's the dice's fault they're losing then those people need to step back and see what the real problem might be.

That's a ridiculous thing to say in a game of chance that literally loses on 1s. Many games are lost because the dice don't swing a certain way and there ARE dice, this has been proven, that are badly made and heavier on one face by a small margin. Do you also consider a blackjack loss to be your fault? Or a slot machine loss to be your fault? Welcome to games of chance.

I personally refuse to roll my dice on flat, hard surfaces because it seems that when the secondary bounce is high enough I can only roll ones. I will only roll on a gaming mat or tablecloth type thing that cushions bounce. However, I don't care enough about my bad luck to force an opponent to use my Cheesex or to use their brand. I keep meaning to pick up casino dice but frankly, I don't want to roll 30+ 16mm dice per turn, or carry them around.

And if you and your opponent both use GW dice your rolls are both skewed exactly the same and any imbalance disappears.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Thorgrim Bloodcrow wrote:
"It's a poor workman who blames his tools."

If people are seriously thinking it's the dice's fault they're losing then those people need to step back and see what the real problem might be.

You may have noticed that this is an intellectual discussion of the probability change for using different types of dice, not a blamefest where we're all sitting down bitching about our dice making us lose. (Not to mention dice with indented pips and rounded edges are more likely to roll 6s than 1s so claiming casino dice would let you win in the first place is a little silly)

Incidentally, I just played in a tournament where the TO got obsessed with the internet idea of providing dice and not allowing anyone to use their own. Considering that there's never been a dice cheating incident in our local tournament circuit (which has been running monthly tournaments for literally like 15 years), no one could quite figure out why we needed to do this, but we've taken to calling the tournaments Calvinball anyways, since half the rules get made up on the spot.

And guess what? It was mostly just a minor annoyance. Since each team had to split the same number of dice, the dice would magically disappear on the other side of the table, and we all had to waste time searching for dice. It wasn't a huge waste of time, but it was nothing more than a minor annoyance with no benefit to justify it.

Niiru wrote:
In a competitive environment, I would be fairly suspicious of someone who wants to use his own "lucky dice".

Id expect everyone to have to use dice provided by the tournament hosts, or at least from a shared pool of random dice.

But in casual games... we just use whatever dice we have nearest at hand. But then, i wouldnt ever suspect my friends of using weighted dice.

Or would i....

Have you ever been to a tournament?

I find that the possibility of dice being not phisically ballanced a bit (not exactly 1/6 for each side) is mitigated by the fact that a high/low result is not always good or bad. A 6 to hit or to wound is always nice, yep. But a 6 to ld or characteristic test is a killer.
Besides, for most dice, it's not that far from perfect.

If a tourney or opponent wanted me to use their dice, that'd be fine. In fact, I often ask opponents to use their dice, especially for saves. It's much easier to pick up the successful wounds and roll those than to count out my own pile of save dice.

 Jimsolo wrote:
If a tourney or opponent wanted me to use their dice, that'd be fine. In fact, I often ask opponents to use their dice, especially for saves. It's much easier to pick up the successful wounds and roll those than to count out my own pile of save dice.

Eew, gamer cooties. I'm not a germaphobe, but use your own dice, dude

I'm not a superstitious person, nor do I believe in magic crystals or New Age thinking. But, I have often wondered how strongly our emotions affect our dice-rolling. As my confidence waxes or wains, can I cause miniscule deviations to chance? If I don't feel confident making 2+ saves, am I more likely to roll a disproportionate number of 1s?

 the_Armyman wrote:

I'm not a superstitious person, nor do I believe in magic crystals or New Age thinking. But, I have often wondered how strongly our emotions affect our dice-rolling. As my confidence waxes or wains, can I cause miniscule deviations to chance? If I don't feel confident making 2+ saves, am I more likely to roll a disproportionate number of 1s?

No. Roll yer darn dice allready.

 the_Armyman wrote:

 Jimsolo wrote:
If a tourney or opponent wanted me to use their dice, that'd be fine. In fact, I often ask opponents to use their dice, especially for saves. It's much easier to pick up the successful wounds and roll those than to count out my own pile of save dice.

Eew, gamer cooties. I'm not a germaphobe, but use your own dice, dude

I'm not a superstitious person, nor do I believe in magic crystals or New Age thinking. But, I have often wondered how strongly our emotions affect our dice-rolling. As my confidence waxes or wains, can I cause miniscule deviations to chance? If I don't feel confident making 2+ saves, am I more likely to roll a disproportionate number of 1s?

HERESY! You think you can channel Warp Energy in to your dice? Abhor the Witch, Burn the Witch!

Clearly my point caused an issue. I was only saying that I'm not of the opinion that a certain brand of dice does more than any other.

In fact, it kind of negates the point that "this is a game of chance" if there are dice out there that are proven to roll more of a certain number than another. If those dice exist and if people know they exist, then it's not as much a game of chance anymore if one knows that a certain brand of dice will roll a certain way.

I never once said this was a blamefest or anyone was whinging about it.

Incidentally, has anyone had any luck with the new Tyranid or Blood Angel dice that GW has pushed out? I've been trying to find a review on them on the off chance that this becomes a trend and each army gets it's own.

Here was one article that I was referring to. About studying the small D6 rolls

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

That's some interesting stuff.

I'm using this:


With larger ones. Initially i thought that it's supposed to ballance out stuff. But now i'm not sure.

 Icculus wrote:
Here was one article that I was referring to. About studying the small D6 rolls

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

I think that article is a lie or used a very flawed testing method.

I've done a few thousand rolls with my box of dice (I think I have about 100 dice, I roll them all at once and add up how many times each result comes up). The variation was negligible, only about 1% variation from the expected 16.7% per side and it was actually biased to higher rolls not lower ones. Here's my old post from it...

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
1 / 333 / 15.7%
2 / 361 / 17.0%
3 / 356 / 16.8%
4 / 345 / 16.3%
5 / 347 / 16.4%
6 / 378 / 17.8%

So that's 2120 trials, compared to the Dakka study that was 36,000 trials, but really, the chance of it swinging to 29% 1's like the Dakka trial is so incredibly small.

I'm actually erring on the side of 6's being dominant.

For the people who like statistics, if you want to check out the convergence:



As you can see, after a couple of hundred trials it was well on its way to converging, from about 600 trials to 2000 trials the trend is pretty well established. Series 1 is chance of rolling a 1, Series 2 chance of rolling a 2, etc.

The Dakka test rolled 29% 1's. The chance of my fluking my my results if the dice genuinely were biased at 29% 1's is freakishly small, like, less than 0.000000000000000000001% (I can't tell you exactly what it is because my calculator doesn't go to number that small ).

Casino dice are just impractical. They are meant to be rolled on a felt surface, not your typical gaming surface, they are designed to be thrown a decent distance, not just rolled in a small space as you'd normally do on a gaming table (your typical table top game roll would not be a valid roll in a casino). They also have sharp delicate edges that can chip (again, designed to roll on felt not a hard gaming surface). They're also excessively expensive and realistically probably won't give you any better rolls.

The larger the dice - the better the results for random distribution. Small dice are more affected by their imperfections than large dice. The same is true of flat surfaces on dice, they are better than groves because they are less imperfect so therefore more likely to be completely random. For the most part these imperfections will have such a small effect on the roll of a dice it will be unnoticeable but the problem comes when people alter dice to roll a certain way. Loaded dice are the big issue for competitive play and it is much more common than you think. More than likely a cheater will have only a few loaded dice and only use it for important rolls - always be suspicious of someone that uses a particular dice for certain rolls. Especially Roll to go first, STI and vehicle pens.

 the_Armyman wrote:

 Jimsolo wrote:
If a tourney or opponent wanted me to use their dice, that'd be fine. In fact, I often ask opponents to use their dice, especially for saves. It's much easier to pick up the successful wounds and roll those than to count out my own pile of save dice.

Eew, gamer cooties. I'm not a germaphobe, but use your own dice, dude

I'm not a superstitious person, nor do I believe in magic crystals or New Age thinking. But, I have often wondered how strongly our emotions affect our dice-rolling. As my confidence waxes or wains, can I cause miniscule deviations to chance? If I don't feel confident making 2+ saves, am I more likely to roll a disproportionate number of 1s?

It more likely effects your perception of the results. Those rolls are the same, you are just get more upset by them if you already feel down.

With the amount of fething random rolls for pretty much everything now, the only way of getting what you actually want to play is to use a series of weighted dice

Although saying that there is one guy at my club who always seems to "roll" for invisible bikers with some other annoying power in every game he plays...

Small, rounded edges work best. as small light wont damage models, rounded edges more roll then bounce.

 Icculus wrote:
Here was one article that I was referring to. About studying the small D6 rolls

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

Icculus, this is a hoax:

http://privateerpressforums.com/showthread.php?112701-Dice-the-reports-of-their-bias-is-greatly-exaggerated

If the chance of rolling 1s is 29% everyone and their brother could demonstrate this with 100 rolls. Any die with that much bias would consistently show it.

There is undoubtedly a tiny bias in every die, and it would be expected that cheaper dice have a wider variance. But unless the participants are using loaded dice, the variance is probably far less (IMHO) in non-random dice than the occasional mis-placed model or mismeasurement.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
The problem with Vegas gaming dice is that they're much larger and heavier than the dice most people use; we have a person at my game store who insists on using them, and it usually results in them running into models and terrain and such, not to mention the fact that he can't roll more than five or six at a time (luckily he plays Iron Hands/Imperial Knights and doesn't need more than that regularly). I haven't done an exhaustive study of the statistical anomalies in GW"s dice (I might this weekend, finals are almost done and now I'm curious) but I sincerely doubt they're worth the cost of buying casino dice or the headache of trying to use them.

You can always use dice cups/dice trays. I like using pretty dice from my AD&D days I won't roll dice on the table because I don't want to damage models and painted terrain.

We use metal dice trays. Anything that pops out of the tray is rerolled....and I've come to love that harsh clank

Wasn't there some kinda study on specifically cheesex dies?

I remember they cut one up with a very sciency saw that showed a boat load of airbubbles and stuff on the inside.

 jasper76 wrote:
We use metal dice trays. Anything that pops out of the tray is rerolled....and I've come to love that harsh clank

Hah!

We use felt lined ones. But yeah, I would never go back to rolling on the table.

I used to have these cheap dollar store die that came with big giant Ones cut out... and there was a huge disproportionate amount of one's rolled with them... These dice could have floated I'm convinced with the one side on top! Needless to say, I stopped using them for rolling, and keep them as wound markers now instead.