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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jedavis" data-source="post: 5823709" data-attributes="member: 35933">Randomness inside computers is actually an interesting topic, because there just isn't a good analogue to the actual unpredictability of dice under the laws of physics.  Most 'random numbers' generated by computers are actually via pseudorandom number generation algorithms, which take an initial 'seed' value, then do crazy maths to it to get a sequence of huge numbers which vary unpredictably.  One common algorithm of this type is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_Twister" target="_blank">Mersenne Twister</a>.  When you ask a program of this type for a d20 value, it actually takes one number in this sequence (using 32-bit ints, it might be up to 4 billion or so), then takes it modulo 20 (equivalently, gets the remainder when divided by 20) and adds 1 to get a 'random' value between 1 and 20 inclusive.  So yeah, there's really no disincentive to using a larger die size; using a larger modulus is certainly easier than acquiring a different die size in real life, and allows for die sizes that can't geometrically exist.There is the question of where to get seed values, though.  In general, if you run a pseudorandom number algorithm with the same seed twice, you'll get the same sequence of outputs both times, which is bad.  Most systems use the system clock as a seed value, since it doesn't assume the same value it held previously very often under normal operations <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> (though that assumption is stressed in a distributed system like WoW, where you have many servers with subtly varying clocks - it turns out synchronizing clocks across many machines to high precision is an even harder computational problem than random number generation).There are a few places where one can get genuine randomness.  Linux gathers atmospheric noise off of network card interfaces and other hardware components and stores it for use in random number generation (stored in /dev/urandom, I believe), and there are places online where you can buy random numbers generated via atomic decay.  However, a system like WoW almost certainly uses pseudorandom number generators, because they're cheap, readily available, and easy to use.</blockquote>

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