There's a lot of "superstitious mumbo jumbo" (to quote Sir Alec Guiness about The Force in Star Wars') in the world. I take the scientific, naturalistic approach. I don't accept the supernatural as an explanation for anything, so why would I think there can be anything magical or supernatural in dice rolling/games?
"You can blow on the dice all you want, but whether they come up 'seven' is still a function of random luck." Barry Ritholtz
How many times do you hear someone say "I'm a bad dice roller," or occasionally, "I'm a good dice roller." This is pure hooey of course: probability governs dice rolling, personal characteristics have nothing to do with it. (Though a few people can consciously control dice when they throw them, which is why you have to throw off a cushion-wall in a casino.) Rather, most people don't understand probability, and some choose poorly about when to rely on the dice, which gives the appearance that there are bad dice rollers or good dice rollers.
Take Dungeons & Dragons for example, or other similar role-playing games. The objective in the game (for most) is to survive, then prosper. Good strategy and tactics in the game is to limit the number of times you have to rely on the dice to bail you out of trouble, and good players do that, while poor players rely on the dice a lot. So of course bad things happen to them following dice rolls. They may get the impression that they are "bad dice rollers", but what they actually are is bad tacticians, or simply unwise. ("He chose . . . poorly" (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).)
Let's say there's a chance that you can try periodically in a game to acquire additional assets, but it comes with a risk. One player takes a chance with one sixth likelihood of failure three times; and he/she fails once. Another takes a much worse chance, say a one third chance of failure, and tries six times. They fail twice. The first has failed a little more than average, but only once; the second has failed twice, average, but blames the dice for their greater failure rate (two times instead of one). In reality they only have themselves to blame for relying on the dice, but they turn this into "I've rolled badly." Duh!
If you don't know that there's no such thing as a bad dice roller or a good dice roller, then you probably shouldn't be a game designer, because you won't have a clue about probability. If you want to play games by depending on the dice, more power to you, but you have to understand simple probabilities to design games.
This doesn't stop you from having fun when you play; it doesn't prevent me from "casting spells" with ridiculous magic words (e.g. popocatépetl or ixtaccihuatl) to help someone else playing a game roll well, even though we all know it's ridiculous. It doesn't stop me from advising people to change hands when the rolls aren't going their way. Superstition is common in general, but we all know, or we should know, and I'll occasionally say it even as I indulge in it, this is all BS.
So get a grip on reality: dice are dice, random unless they're weighted unfairly of course, or unless you have a 20 sided die with two 20s and no 1's. (I've got one of those as a lark.) It has to be said though, most commercial hobby dice are likely to have a small bias, the production is just too cheap for anything else. So if someone has a "lucky die," maybe it really is skewed - but then it should be lucky for anyone not just for the owner. Maybe that's why, when somebody owns a "lucky die", they often won't let anybody else roll it.
Reference: "Probability for Game Designers" by James Ernest (Cheap-Ass Games).
contributed by Lewis Pulsipher
Photo by Alex Chambers on Unsplash
"You can blow on the dice all you want, but whether they come up 'seven' is still a function of random luck." Barry Ritholtz
How many times do you hear someone say "I'm a bad dice roller," or occasionally, "I'm a good dice roller." This is pure hooey of course: probability governs dice rolling, personal characteristics have nothing to do with it. (Though a few people can consciously control dice when they throw them, which is why you have to throw off a cushion-wall in a casino.) Rather, most people don't understand probability, and some choose poorly about when to rely on the dice, which gives the appearance that there are bad dice rollers or good dice rollers.
Take Dungeons & Dragons for example, or other similar role-playing games. The objective in the game (for most) is to survive, then prosper. Good strategy and tactics in the game is to limit the number of times you have to rely on the dice to bail you out of trouble, and good players do that, while poor players rely on the dice a lot. So of course bad things happen to them following dice rolls. They may get the impression that they are "bad dice rollers", but what they actually are is bad tacticians, or simply unwise. ("He chose . . . poorly" (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).)
Let's say there's a chance that you can try periodically in a game to acquire additional assets, but it comes with a risk. One player takes a chance with one sixth likelihood of failure three times; and he/she fails once. Another takes a much worse chance, say a one third chance of failure, and tries six times. They fail twice. The first has failed a little more than average, but only once; the second has failed twice, average, but blames the dice for their greater failure rate (two times instead of one). In reality they only have themselves to blame for relying on the dice, but they turn this into "I've rolled badly." Duh!
If you don't know that there's no such thing as a bad dice roller or a good dice roller, then you probably shouldn't be a game designer, because you won't have a clue about probability. If you want to play games by depending on the dice, more power to you, but you have to understand simple probabilities to design games.
This doesn't stop you from having fun when you play; it doesn't prevent me from "casting spells" with ridiculous magic words (e.g. popocatépetl or ixtaccihuatl) to help someone else playing a game roll well, even though we all know it's ridiculous. It doesn't stop me from advising people to change hands when the rolls aren't going their way. Superstition is common in general, but we all know, or we should know, and I'll occasionally say it even as I indulge in it, this is all BS.
So get a grip on reality: dice are dice, random unless they're weighted unfairly of course, or unless you have a 20 sided die with two 20s and no 1's. (I've got one of those as a lark.) It has to be said though, most commercial hobby dice are likely to have a small bias, the production is just too cheap for anything else. So if someone has a "lucky die," maybe it really is skewed - but then it should be lucky for anyone not just for the owner. Maybe that's why, when somebody owns a "lucky die", they often won't let anybody else roll it.
Reference: "Probability for Game Designers" by James Ernest (Cheap-Ass Games).
contributed by Lewis Pulsipher
