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I'll just weigh in on this: You don't need loaded dice to cheat rolls. I don't cheat during any sort of dice game, but I do a lot of sleight of hand magic stuff and one of the things I know how to do is make 1 of the dice show up any number I want and you'll almost never catch me doing it. You'll hear the clacking of shaking dice and when they come out of my hand they look as if they roll as normal. The reason Casino Craps tables are very rough surfaced and have little pits in them is to prevent this.

I have tested and practiced throwing leadership rolls for giggles independently and have a 95% success rate of never rolling a LD check above a 7 with this trick. Hell, I could pretty much set the entire game to my liking (Purge the Alien, Going first or seizing the initiative, and no night fighting, plus how many objectives and what they are when i get them) if I really felt so inclined. Do i? Hell no. I like true random rolls and a fun game and have 0 problem losing.

Hell, you can cheat as well if you know what you're doing by doing a fake shuffle and drawing from the bottom or wherever on a tactical objective deck.

There are also ways to weight dice that are undetectable without tools to measure or a VERY keen eye. One of them is taking the paint off the side you want, drill a TINY extra bit into the cavity, and put a bit of lead into it and paint over top of it. If you do it on the one and bottom pip of a two and the four it will favor a six or a 5. This is also part of why casinos use clear dice most of the time. Doesn't stop gamblers from swapping the dice out with a sleight of hand technique on the roll, however.

Basically my point is: You could have perfectly symmetrical true random dice and still have cheaters cheating with the dice and other aspects of the game.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I've seen a gimmick D100 with 100 sides. It was more like a golf ball than a die. It wasn't a useful tool because it rolled for miles and hardly wanted to stop.

I've seen them a few times. They do roll an annoying amount. I use a pair of D10s for d100 rolls.

Nydhog wrote:
I'll just weigh in on this: You don't need loaded dice to cheat rolls. I don't cheat during any sort of dice game, but I do a lot of sleight of hand magic stuff and one of the things I know how to do is make 1 of the dice show up any number I want and you'll almost never catch me doing it. You'll hear the clacking of shaking dice and when they come out of my hand they look as if they roll as normal. The reason Casino Craps tables are very rough surfaced and have little pits in them is to prevent this.

I have tested and practiced throwing leadership rolls for giggles independently and have a 95% success rate of never rolling a LD check above a 7 with this trick. Hell, I could pretty much set the entire game to my liking (Purge the Alien, Going first or seizing the initiative, and no night fighting, plus how many objectives and what they are when i get them) if I really felt so inclined. Do i? Hell no. I like true random rolls and a fun game and have 0 problem losing.

Hell, you can cheat as well if you know what you're doing by doing a fake shuffle and drawing from the bottom or wherever on a tactical objective deck.

There are also ways to weight dice that are undetectable without tools to measure or a VERY keen eye. One of them is taking the paint off the side you want, drill a TINY extra bit into the cavity, and put a bit of lead into it and paint over top of it. If you do it on the one and bottom pip of a two and the four it will favor a six or a 5. This is also part of why casinos use clear dice most of the time. Doesn't stop gamblers from swapping the dice out with a sleight of hand technique on the roll, however

Basically my point is: You could have perfectly symmetrical true random dice and still have cheaters cheating with the dice and other aspects of the game.

-exalted!

But OP here, does anyone think I should just expand the topic of this thread to include all cheater experiences? I think the person I was playing the other day was doing something weird with his rolls. He rolled every die individually, and tolled them up real high, but with little bounce and the results where VERY in his favor. (He direct hit on everyone of his blasts, and only failed a small handful of saves across the game)

Dont think iv ever seen a loaded dice.

but i have seen rolling "techniques" i god i hate it.

where they pinch two sides they dont want and roll straight so it tumbles on the axis making it effectively a d4. or roll from the palm of there hand to do the same thing. iv also seen the two dice craps trick as well.

also i accept that a lot of dice have preferences to rolling. especially cheesex. heck i have a set of clear blue dice that roll very high and a set of opaque yellow dice that always rolls poorly. it could be a random string of rolls but gamers can be a superstitious lot

 thepowerfulwill wrote:

Nydhog wrote:
I'll just weigh in on this: You don't need loaded dice to cheat rolls. I don't cheat during any sort of dice game, but I do a lot of sleight of hand magic stuff and one of the things I know how to do is make 1 of the dice show up any number I want and you'll almost never catch me doing it. You'll hear the clacking of shaking dice and when they come out of my hand they look as if they roll as normal. The reason Casino Craps tables are very rough surfaced and have little pits in them is to prevent this.

I have tested and practiced throwing leadership rolls for giggles independently and have a 95% success rate of never rolling a LD check above a 7 with this trick. Hell, I could pretty much set the entire game to my liking (Purge the Alien, Going first or seizing the initiative, and no night fighting, plus how many objectives and what they are when i get them) if I really felt so inclined. Do i? Hell no. I like true random rolls and a fun game and have 0 problem losing.

Hell, you can cheat as well if you know what you're doing by doing a fake shuffle and drawing from the bottom or wherever on a tactical objective deck.

There are also ways to weight dice that are undetectable without tools to measure or a VERY keen eye. One of them is taking the paint off the side you want, drill a TINY extra bit into the cavity, and put a bit of lead into it and paint over top of it. If you do it on the one and bottom pip of a two and the four it will favor a six or a 5. This is also part of why casinos use clear dice most of the time. Doesn't stop gamblers from swapping the dice out with a sleight of hand technique on the roll, however

Basically my point is: You could have perfectly symmetrical true random dice and still have cheaters cheating with the dice and other aspects of the game.

-exalted!

But OP here, does anyone think I should just expand the topic of this thread to include all cheater experiences? I think the person I was playing the other day was doing something weird with his rolls. He rolled every die individually, and tolled them up real high, but with little bounce and the results where VERY in his favor. (He direct hit on everyone of his blasts, and only failed a small handful of saves across the game)

The way you throw the dice can have a very big impact on how the roll turns out. Not saying this is what he was doing, but as someone else mentioned, the facing that is up when the die is rolled will always have a slightly higher chance of ending up on top, and by throwing the dice up high, the majority of the energy of the roll will be transferred to the table. This means the die will roll fewer times. If you could throw the die without it tumbling in the air, you could potentially affect the roll. This would take a hell of a lot of practice, and probably wouldn't be an "efficient" way to cheat, but it's possible.

That's why cups and dice towers are a good idea. They prevent the sleight of hand manipulation of the dice.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Imagine a theoretical die with 1,000 faces, with a 10% bias to the 1 face, meaning the 1 comes up 10% more often than totally random.

If the die is truly random the 1 will appear 1 in 1,000 rolls, but due to the bias in this example, it will come up 1.001 in every 1,000 rolls. This is 0.1001 percent of the time.

Now imagine a 2 sided die with a 10% bias to the 1. This is liable to cause 1.1 appearances for every two rolls, which is 55% of the time.

Now imagine a D2 made with 1,000 faces, printed 1 or 2. A 10% bias to a single 1 face will produce almost negligible variation to the overall resuts.

This experiment assumes both types of dice are equally likely to contain flaws causing the same degree of bias. This may not be the case in real life. It would depend on the manufacturing quality of the dice. A badly moulded die might be of varying thickness between different opposite faces, or it might contain air bubbles that affect the centre of gravity.

But this example abstracts individual sides of a die which is not necessarily case in real life. Real life crooked dice tend to be deformed and favour certain hemisphere, rather than just 1 individual side. Golfball-looking d100 die is a good example of it: as said, it rolls for very long time. As it is poorly weighted, during the roll it tends to end up on its equator, meaning that numbers on the 'poles' almost never come up. A deformed d20 can be more or less same on smaller scale. And yes I also have GameScience d20's and they appear much more regular than most of my other dice and probably are more random.

 thepowerfulwill wrote:

Nydhog wrote:
I'll just weigh in on this: You don't need loaded dice to cheat rolls. I don't cheat during any sort of dice game, but I do a lot of sleight of hand magic stuff and one of the things I know how to do is make 1 of the dice show up any number I want and you'll almost never catch me doing it. You'll hear the clacking of shaking dice and when they come out of my hand they look as if they roll as normal. The reason Casino Craps tables are very rough surfaced and have little pits in them is to prevent this.

I have tested and practiced throwing leadership rolls for giggles independently and have a 95% success rate of never rolling a LD check above a 7 with this trick. Hell, I could pretty much set the entire game to my liking (Purge the Alien, Going first or seizing the initiative, and no night fighting, plus how many objectives and what they are when i get them) if I really felt so inclined. Do i? Hell no. I like true random rolls and a fun game and have 0 problem losing.

Hell, you can cheat as well if you know what you're doing by doing a fake shuffle and drawing from the bottom or wherever on a tactical objective deck.

There are also ways to weight dice that are undetectable without tools to measure or a VERY keen eye. One of them is taking the paint off the side you want, drill a TINY extra bit into the cavity, and put a bit of lead into it and paint over top of it. If you do it on the one and bottom pip of a two and the four it will favor a six or a 5. This is also part of why casinos use clear dice most of the time. Doesn't stop gamblers from swapping the dice out with a sleight of hand technique on the roll, however

Basically my point is: You could have perfectly symmetrical true random dice and still have cheaters cheating with the dice and other aspects of the game.

-exalted!

But OP here, does anyone think I should just expand the topic of this thread to include all cheater experiences? I think the person I was playing the other day was doing something weird with his rolls. He rolled every die individually, and tolled them up real high, but with little bounce and the results where VERY in his favor. (He direct hit on everyone of his blasts, and only failed a small handful of saves across the game)

Was he scooping in an almost slap motion with a karate chop hand posture? If so, cheating most likely. NEVER let someone roll all the dice individually if you don't know them. I could have done 37/40 as sixes if I was allowed individual rolls. TIP: If someone drastically closes their pinky faster than the other fingers on a dice with a high number then they are saving it.

From what you describe he was throwing them like I discussed or some variation.

thepowerfulwill wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I've seen a gimmick D100 with 100 sides. It was more like a golf ball than a die. It wasn't a useful tool because it rolled for miles and hardly wanted to stop.

And this is why we use two d10s, but honestly I still find the d100 to be a kind of cool thing just to own.

This, I have one, and its more of a conversation piece. I mean, look at it! Its like a gem of the dice world with all the facets.



We use it on non-meaningful rolls with large 100 result tables. Its like a game show lol everyone thinks its cool when they first see it. It has some small metal balls in it to help weight it and make it stop.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Here is a article by Awesome Dice Blog.

The TL/DR is that GameScience dice are better than Chessex, neither are truly random, but either would be fine for general role-playing use. This test was done using D20 rolled by hand. D6s would be likely to deviate more from randomness.

If using the GameScience dice you need to file off the injection nub otherwise it biases the results.

On the plus side, GameScience dice are clear plastic, making it possible to spot air bubbles that might affect results.

I remember a university engineering department built a machine to test dice automatically, but I ca't find the article.

I think that study has a flawed methodology.

For the principle test we used one Chessex d20 and one GameScience d20, both brand new right out of the packaging. ....

Each die was rolled 10,000 times, and the results recorded.

By rolling the same die over and over again you will emphasize random manufacturing faults. Also testing takes way longer It only took me an hour or two to roll 2120 dice because I was rolling 53 at a time.

In reality we gamers usually have a pool of dice and we randomly select from it, reducing the effect of random manufacturing flaws and only repeatable manufacturing flaws will show up.

But yeah, just look at my numbers I posted. The largest variation I saw on D6 GW dice was 6 coming up slightly more often (17.8% vs 16.7% expected). I rolled it enough times to have good confidence in that result. If you buy a box of dice and just scoop up handfuls randomly when you have to make rolls, you're unlikely to see much variation in which numbers come up as long as you roll them enough times.

The issue within this thread isn't people scooping up random dice for their rolls, but people using dice that aren't random. Sure, you rolled your 53 dice a lot, but did you then roll them individually to know which of them may have had a specific bias? Some people do that, and then find ways to include their favored dice within that "random scoop".

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
The issue within this thread isn't people scooping up random dice for their rolls, but people using dice that aren't random. Sure, you rolled your 53 dice a lot, but did you then roll them individually to know which of them may have had a specific bias? Some people do that, and then find ways to include their favored dice within that "random scoop".

That's why I'm suspicious of people who pick specific dice to do specific tasks.

Actually to be honest I'm suspicious of people who have to use their own dice in general. Maybe I'm an oddity here, but I've always just used a common pool of dice in my games. Some stores have dice on the tables to use, otherwise I'll just dump my pile of dice on the table for us both to use, sometimes the opponent will dump their dice and we both use them. I haven't really met people who must use their own dice and only their own dice and don't let you also use them.

Some people are superstitious or possessive without necessarily being cheaty minded.

I've always taken a cube or two of the standard GW dice to events and as long as I come home with full cubes I am happy.

I have some backgammon dice I use - not full precision but very clear and large, and in three colours to make rolling e.g. saves for pens and glances easier. I am however paranoid about losing them (a gift) so I prefer if others dont use them, but if they ask its fine.

Ass much as i agree cups and towers help reduce the chance to cheat, theyre damned annoying en masse. 200 player blood bowl is LOUD. The beer likely doesnt help, but still....

I used to manage a FLGS, and we would order these huge batches of miscellaneous d6s. We'd put them in a sort of fish-bowl display on our counter, as an impulse-buy type of thing.

And without fail, every time we re-filled the damn display, these three guys would stop in, and ask to take all the dice out and "test roll" them. They'd spend maybe an hour doing it, rolling each d6, checking the results, and setting ones aside that were imperfect enough to roll mostly 4+, that sort of thing.

Then they would buy those dice.

Not surprisingly, after a while we stopped allowing them to do this.

That's probably the closest I've ever seen to actual, intentional loaded dice.