Dice with character...when is using them cheating?

[Ralif Redhammer]

True, but I could listen to Lou's self-interested tirades all day. And I always like the gem-like look and feel of game science dice, though the burrs from the molds always bothered me. Not because I was worried about the rolls but it just blemished the look.

Same. Having been to a couple of his seminars, he's a showman and a salesman, sure, but he has such a flair and passion for talking about dice. Not to mention a ton of knowledge.

On the topic of cheating: there was a guy in our Living Forgotten Realms (the 4e organized play program) at the FLGS who claimed he had bad eyesight. He would roll his d20, then quickly pick it up "to look at", while rotating it so a suspiciously large number of high die results were facing him.

It was impressive how smoothly he could do this. I often wondered if he practiced in front of a mirror for hours and hours to get the moves down. Consider that the icosahedron has so many faces that you can only plausibly rotate it to, say, one "circle" of them as you pick it up. (You can't rotate it from the 1 to the 20 -- that would take too long and be too obvious.)

So he had to know, based on what he REALLY rolled, which way to rotate it to get to a high face like 17 or 18 or 19 or whatever.

We eventually called him out on this and he stopped doing it.

I had a tough situation once with a player that was losing his eyesight. And he would declare suspiciously high dice rolls every time. Eventually I caught him cheating when he sat close to me at the table and politely but firmly told him to knock it off. Within a few minutes of the discussion, I caught him again and went fairly apoplectic on him. And then he finally stopped cheating.

My eyes aren't great, but I can't imagine what it's like to be completely losing your ability to see. Still, the answer isn't cheating.

 

[aramis erak]

I won't use dice with inclusions nor dice of multiple materials.
If a die seems notably off, I'l run a chi-squared test. If it's significantly off, I'll ban it from the table. Usually, when badly off, they're not in player favor anyway.

I've had four players who were habitual about lying about their rolls. One was pathological - the group bought a 2" d20 for him.
One was dying from brain cancer — astrocytoma. He died during the pandemic.
The other two? Just cheaters.

 

[nevin]

There a spectrum of opinions regarding dice and the importance of balance. A healthy minority of gamers have strong preferences for balanced die. Louis Zocchi is the grandfather and first example I think of for this cohort. I've gone down this rabbit hole. When I got back into the hobby, older and with more disposable income, I bought a set of precision dice which were my main DM dice for years (made more expensive because I worked with the vendor to buy colors matching medieval colors associated with each of the polyhedrals, instead of buying a matching set--I wanted the best balance I could get with physical dice, but I still care about aesthetics, character, and like to engage in a bit of magical thinking).

The second cohort are those who care more about character than balance. They want cool looking dice and/or have emotional connections to certain dice. Many of this cohort exhibit a bit of magical thinking about their dice and are often accused of falling for the gambler's fallacy. Yet, I find that in many instances they are not falling for the gamblers fallacy, because their dice are not balanced and their dice will favor certain numbers to various degrees. I have a d10 from the 1980s. A cheap plastic blue die with the numbers filled in with white crayon, which is well worn from years of use and has some gouges from the teeth of the family dog who got a hold of it in the 80s. It ain't balanced. It isn't as consistent as a weighted, cheater's die; any number still has a chance of coming up, but it favors some numbers over the others.

The third cohort are those who don't think about it much and are happy to use whatever dice are available. They are not the focus of this discussion.

So, how do you feel about other players using unbalanced dice of character? I've never experienced a DM or another player complaining because everyone at the table wasn't using precision dice, but I have seen people complain about certain dice being too unbalanced. What about you? Is digging through bins of cheap dice and collecting various dice with a focus on dice that look cool more than being balanced part of the fun, or an annoying distraction that detracts from the pure fun or true randomness? Is it a legitimate strategy to dig through a large bag of dice that you have curated and have come to know their quirks well; rolling one die for one game or kind of roll and another die for another game or kind of roll, based on your experience of how they roll. Or is that cheating?

One thing I miss about in-person play now that I run games on a VTT with digital dice, is the various superstitions, gamesmanship, personification of dice players engage in when rolling physical dice. Unless you are rolling precision dice through a dice tower, you aren't coming close to true randomness. How you role, the imperfections in the dice, and other factors can lead to lesser degrees of randomness. This is something I think most gamer accept. But where do you draw the line?

I'll point out to players that the dice don't seem to be random. If they want we can do an extended test. Luckily I play with a set of friends these days and my rules lawyer who is as hard on herself as anyone would catch it before I would and they'd just change dice.

True story I had a player go to the local game store who had a bowl of dice and spend 4 hours rolling them looking for dice that would favor high rolls. On top of that I observed him fudging a few rolls here or there. It was a game of good friends and I didn't want to start a huge fight so I simply started "rolling" a natural 20 everytime he did. Took about 2 and half game sessions and he started whining to one of the other players and said "my luck seems to have turned. He's rolling a lot of 20's. " the reply. "have you not noticed every time you fudge a dice or roll your green dice he rolls a 20?" Priceless. He started rolling correctly and my 20's became more naturally random.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

Foundry explains how it randomizes its dice rolls and why they should be as random as physical dice. I've pasted their explanation below. The last paragraph is very interesting to me. I don't have enough technical knowledge to ensure I'm reading this right. But it sounds like a set of random numbers are pregenerated and cached when a user connects to a session. So, let's say you are rolling poorly in a session. Could you just log out and re-log in the hope the your next set of random numbers will be better? Since they are all random, it probably doesn't make sense to do so, maybe you are logging out just before a string of good numbers. But I'm curious.

A random number generator is a deterministic generator that, given an initial "seed" number, will generate the exact same sequence of numbers. So if you know the algorithm and the seed number, you can predict the full sequence perfectly. This is why they are often called "pseudo-random". So if you were rolling d20's and you started with the same seed, then your first roll will always be the same, as will your second, and so on. That's why they put in a different seed each session.

The important feature of this sequence, though, is that if you do NOT know the seed, and you aren't using a computer to work it out and solve the sequence, the sequence it produces is impossible to predict. So although it is based on a completely deterministic algorithm, the observable number are more random than you could ever find in nature. For the Mersenne Twister algorithm, it will be more random than any dice you will ever see, as measured by a ton of factors, like serial correlation, simple frequencies ... anything really.

It is a core algorithm used by modern software libs, and you really have to be a bad programmer to screw up the usage of them, especially for so trivial an application as rolling dice. And since people are designed by evolution to see patterns even were they aren't there (because that error is not as bad as doing the opposite in keeping you alive), if you are seeing non-randomness in a long-running commercial program used by millions for which creating random numbers is a core requirement .. it's almost certainly your perception that is off.