Are dice perfectly balanced?

[Slife]

If the dice aren't balanced it's clearly the fault of the designer. How can they expect us to manage with just 4 sides? d4s are clearly way underpowered.

Your players just don't know how to use d4s effectively. Haven't they seen the mundane equipment section? Look under C-A-L-T.

 

[takyris]

Just to hedge my bets, I like the d20s that have "20" surrounded by, say, 2, 4, and 7, so that even if, yeah, it's weighted a bit to one side or the other, it's still going to roll "low" versus "high" about the right percentage of the time. I don't mind a die that's a bit less likely to roll a 20 but more likely to roll a 19, 17, or 14.

(That makes sense to me. May not make sense to anyone else. And yeah, ideally, totally balanced -- this is just the "here's a nice way to be safe even if it's not totally balanced" thing I like to check.)

 

[Rhun]

I don't know if it is the balance or what, but I have a 10-sided die that rolls above a 7 probably about 85% of the time. It is crazy.

 

[Kularian]

Our dice are relatively balanced, but the rollers aren't.

Of the five of us, here are the common rolls, no matter what d20 is used:

Me: Completely Random. Dunno how I manage it, but I do a pretty good job.
Falidor: 7-13 around 90% of the time, rarely deviating from the median.
Erdrick: 20s. Lots of 20s. He seriously rolls a 20 about 1 in 3. It's disgusting.
Schan: 13+ about 80%, rarely dropping below that.
Onyx: Well...let's just say 12 is a good roll for him, lol.

We've rotated dice and other such things, but it doesn't seem to change anything. Very eerie...

 

[Drawmack]

Just like card mechanics can put a card anywhere in the deck they want to, you can roll dice to come up a certain way. This is why some people always roll consistently around the same variance.

As for the balance of die, if it is mass produced it is not perfectly balanced. The best any mass produced die can hope for is to be within tollerance.

You can force more balanced rolls, defeating both the player's rolling habbits and the imbalance of the die by rolling on a beveled surface.

 

[kenobi65]

Of the five of us, here are the common rolls, no matter what d20 is used:

Me: Completely Random. Dunno how I manage it, but I do a pretty good job.
Falidor: 7-13 around 90% of the time, rarely deviating from the median.
Erdrick: 20s. Lots of 20s. He seriously rolls a 20 about 1 in 3. It's disgusting.
Schan: 13+ about 80%, rarely dropping below that.
Onyx: Well...let's just say 12 is a good roll for him, lol.

All I can say is, test it scientifically.

Each of you, roll a d20 200 or so times. Record the results. See if you get significantly more or fewer than 10 results on each number.

 

[Stalker0]

All I can say is, test it scientifically.

Each of you, roll a d20 200 or so times. Record the results. See if you get significantly more or fewer than 10 results on each number.

Yep, the vast majority of "bad dice" is just superstition on the players part. The thing is we tend to look at the "important" rolls and forget many of the more common roles we make.

We had a girl in one game who was convinced her dice were unlikely, so I started recording every number she rolled. Sure enough, after several game sessions the results were a nice even split.

 

[kenobi65]

There was an article in Dragon, many years ago (I'd guess 1982 or 1983), about the topic. It contained a chi-squared statistical formula that you could use to test your dice, and see if they were truly random.

 

[CRGreathouse]

After about 20 rolls that seemed to favor low numbers on a set of particularly cheap dice, I decided to roll a few hundred times to test my assumption. The results were well within the expected range, which goes to show that modern dice are pretty good (even cheap ones) and that almost all of the die-balance issues can be tranced to the human tendency to see patterns in random data.

 

[was]

no, they're not