Habit, Tradition and Superstition

[Greenfield]

I have at least one player at my game table who lines his dice up, by type, with the high numbers up. It's an old gaming tradition/superstition, to help the dice "remember" the way they're supposed to land.

I've seen people change dice, when they think one of theirs is rolling badly for them.

One player I know (visits my game via Skype) made a comment the other week, after seeing a player roll a 20 for some minor thing, say "Too bad you used that now, You could have used it later."

None of these practices/ideas have any impact on future dice rolls, and I think that somewhere in the back-left of our brains we know it, but that doesn't keep us from doing it.

(Okay, the trick of lining up your dice, high numbers up will actually work. If you do that then heat the dice in a microwave so they soften and sag. )

What kind of dice rolling rituals and/or habits do you have?

Personally I like to roll my dice up against a book, one at a time, so I can tell how well/badly I'm doing. I know that knowing the current numbers doesn't help my future rolls in any way, but still...

 

[Celebrim]

Your post assumes dice are inherently fair. Most of them in fact are not manufactured to a standard that is sufficient to ensure all sides appear equally.

So some of the superstition, such as 'cursed dice' or 'lucky dice', may have a basis in fact. A dice could roll 1's twice as often as 20's owing to small imperfections in its manufacture, and so noticing your run of bad luck and switching to different die could be a wholly rational choice.

And that's not even getting into the subject of deliberately non-randomized throws (ei, rigging the dice) which depend on knowing which way up the dice are when you grip them. Granted, I've never seen a method for rigging the d20 effectively, but I know you can do it with d6's.

 

[Greenfield]

Some dice are noticeably defective, I agree. Most players I know of who spot those dice get rid of them.

As for "rigging" the throw of a D20: I've seen it. Th easiest way is dice-spinning.

Instead of actually rolling the dice across the table, a player picks an end (joint of five faces) with a lot of high numbers on it. With that end up, they spin it like a top. To the casual observer it looks like a time-delayed dice roll by a bored player. In practice, only one of those five faces can land on top.

Some dice are actually arranged so all the low numbers are on one end and all the high ones are on the other. I think they're intended as life-counter dice for some of the card games.

If you've seen the baseball sized D20s, they're arranged that way.

I've also seen players who tried to bring "character builders" into play, black wooden dice with silver spots and obvious lead weights on the one face. Some tried a variation on that: They drilled out the 1 pip on a d6 and put a steel BB in, then painted it. Pretty straight when rolled on a normal surface, but they had a clipboard coated in that magnetic rubber stuff. Roll on that and you get a lot of 6s. Not guaranteed, of course, but a lot.

I tend to classify that sort of thing in the same bucket with people who have "lucky" dice, manufacturer defects that just happen to roll a lot of high numbers.

When I see a player switch dice, depending on whether they want a high number or a low one, I watch them like a hawk. If it actually makes a difference, they're cheating.

But this isn't about ways to cheat. It's about gamer habits and superstitions, the little rituals we tend to follow.

The "Should have saved that 20 for later" idea is a hard one for some people. They seem to think that statistical distribution, the so called "Law of Averages", is personal, that it somehow knows/cares about who is rolling the dice and what they've rolled in the past. It's a "Law" that governs nothing. At best it describes the general behavior of an infinite series of events spread over a near-infinite universe.

But Vegas lives on the idea that "I'm due for some luck".