How many rounds do your fights last? I'm playing a cleric - I get maybe one roll a round, and not even that if I am casting spells that have a save (like ye standard Sacred Flame), rather than a spell attack roll.
Ain't nothing wrong with that.
How much do you care about "balanced" dice?
How many rounds do your fights last? I'm playing a cleric - I get maybe one roll a round, and not even that if I am casting spells that have a save (like ye standard Sacred Flame), rather than a spell attack roll.
Ain't nothing wrong with that.
Celebrim
Legend
I find that a well-balanced dice is necessary for the peace of mind of most humans, and strongly encourage my players to purchase dice of the highest quality to avoid the natural but irrational perception that the dice is rolling badly because there is something wrong with the dice.
Ralif Redhammer
Legend
You make a good point. At my open table group, which is seated around a single table, seeing everyone erupt in excitement when a much-needed nat 20 is rolled is a glorious thing.
Ralif Redhammer
Legend
Truth. I accept the illogic of dice superstition. My brother, a psychologist, does not. To me, it's part of the fun, and a reminder that the game doesn’t just boil down to numbers, that there’s this nebulous, unquantifiable “other” to it. And yeah, not to take it too seriously.
I think it much better for my players to get mad at their dice than at, say, their coworkers. Blow off the steam in a controlled environment, and all that.
And the superstitions - your brother should understand better than most that this is how the human mind works - including his own. Way better to get your fill of magical thinking while playing a harmless entertainment game, than when making health or public policy decisions, no?
The Crimson Binome
Hero
I'm in the camp where too much knowledge is a dangerous thing.
The way I see it, any die is effectively balanced for game purposes, as long as I don't know otherwise. You might have a d20 that only rolls 4 (ninety percent of the time) and 11 (ten percent of the time), but if I don't know that, then it's still an effective randomizer, because the likelihood of it being unbalanced in that specific manner is exactly the same as if it only rolled 9s and 12s, or 1s and 3s. Without any specific knowledge to the contrary, the chance of a die being weighted toward any given distribution is balanced against the chance of it being weighted toward any other distribution, such that the probabilities cancel out.
Of course, those probabilities change after you've observed the die a few times, so it helps to not pay too much attention.
Except that this is really not true. It isn't an effective randomizer if it isn't effectively random. What you *know* about the randomness is not relevant. Randomness exists outside yoru perception of that randomness.
This becomes clear with the hypothetical die that rolls 20 nintey percent of the time, and 17 ten percent of the time. The fact that you don't know it doesn't change the fact that almost every roll with this die is going to be a hit. If you just don't happen to realize, "Hey, wait, I hit every single attack for the last four sessions!" doesn't mean it is still an effective randomizer. The character's performance in this case is anything but random.
Ralif Redhammer
Legend
While he absolutely does believe in the value of games and gamification in therapy, dice superstition, that he gets grumpy over. Start talking about luck and he says there is no such thing. So naturally, I needle him about it and double-down on my dice beliefs.
The Crimson Binome
Hero
If you really get down to the details, dice are physical objects which act under entirely known principles, so it's possible to remove virtually all of the uncertainty in the outcome of a roll. At best, the strength with which you roll can be difficult to control, but it's still not random. Lieutenant Commander Data could make a die roll any number he felt like, if he wanted to.
The only reason we can treat a die as a randomizer is because we intentionally choose to not do the math. We intentionally maintain our uncertainty over the factors involved, because if we didn't, then the outcome would be (effectively) certain. A given die may be objectively unbalanced to a meaningful degree, and that can be measured; but the outcome of any given roll can still be effectively random (to a given individual), because uncertainty is a matter of perspective.
I mean, the point of using a random number generator is that we can't predict it or exploit its bias. As long as we don't know what that bias is, then we still can't predict or exploit it.
MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
Well, right now I'm running Rappan Athuk, a meda-dungeon crawl. Losts of trap, arcana, history, religion, athletics, acrobatics, and other checks, not to mention all the saves also involved with all the nasty stuff you run into.
Combat varies greatly. Many are only a round or two but it is easy to find yourself in a combat that can last many rounds.
I may also have my view skewed by the fact that I'm running 8-hour games. I'm tempted to count the rounds at the next game and see what the rolls per hour looks like.
