Are dice perfectly balanced?
- Thread starter Emirikol
- Start date
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.)
(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.)
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...
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
First Post
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.
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 said:
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.
CRGreathouse
Community Supporter
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.
