I just saw this pair of videos on Youtube of what happened when someone gave Professor Persi Diaconis a d30. I think we have had a few discussions on what makes a die 'fair' in the past and I found this quite interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7zT9MljJ3Y
I would summarise but they are quite lengthy. One of the things I did find very interesting in part two is that for some of the more odd shaped dice, the surface you are rolling them on actually effects how fair they are.
I may be alone in this, but I've never cared about my dice being "fair". If I don't notice a pattern, that's "random" enough for me.
And when I'm reffing I use the same dice for everything, so the "unfairness" is evened out.
Same here. I got tired of people obsessing over "fair" dice and their obsessions to prove dice "unfair" long long ago. Especially since half the time they only cried "unfair" when the dice didnt roll as they wanted. IE: it rolled fairly when they didnt want fair.
The old TSR soft plastic dice that were originally Platonic solid demonstrators could be loopy, especially the 20 siders. Forrest Brown of FASA cut a bunch open, and they have huge air bubbles in them, and not on center.
But even then I've never noticed any really game-breaking problems.
Same here. Even the oddly soft blue ones that eroded into spheres. :confused:
(http://rs457.pbsrc.com/albums/qq299/TheMilford/IMGP0286.jpg?w=480&h=480&fit=clip)
That sort of thing only matters if you are gambling with real money at stake. Dice aren't perfectly fair or perfectly random but they are fair enough and random enough for an RPG. You don't need precisely made casino dice to play an RPG.
Unfortunately some players obsess over it. Like some sort of holy writ that the dice must roll perfectly 10000000% of the time. Forever.
And sometimes its just the dice-o-phobes looking for any straw to grasp to deny the hated dice. Or worse case scenario, the random-phobes who bitch and bitch and demand the game be "fixed" by removing the vile randomness. I ran out of patience with these loons long long ago.
Quote from: yosemitemike;919921That sort of thing only matters if you are gambling with real money at stake. Dice aren't perfectly fair or perfectly random but they are fair enough and random enough for an RPG. You don't need precisely made casino dice to play an RPG.
Of course, when your buddy buys a brick of d6s for Epic: Space Marine and one them - no kidding - is a defect that is "five" on ALL SIDES in a game where rolling 5+ is generally going to be a hit or save, casino dice seem appealing.
It was a genuine defect and an honest mistake on his part (hey, we all keep rolling the "good" dice when getting hits), but man, when I finally noticed, I did flip out a bit. :D
Quote from: Omega;919926Unfortunately some players obsess over it. Like some sort of holy writ that the dice must roll perfectly 10000000% of the time. Forever.
These people just don't live in the real world.
Quote from: darthfozzywig;919927Of course, when your buddy buys a brick of d6s for Epic: Space Marine and one them - no kidding - is a defect that is "five" on ALL SIDES in a game where rolling 5+ is generally going to be a hit or save, casino dice seem appealing.
It was a genuine defect and an honest mistake on his part (hey, we all keep rolling the "good" dice when getting hits), but man, when I finally noticed, I did flip out a bit. :D
That's a whole different level from mass produced dice that are less than perfectly random.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;919874I may be alone in this...
Apparently not. :)
The group of folks who do care appears considerably smaller than the group of folks who do not. But then it is often lonely here at the top. :p
Wow, I didn't know that about the TSR dice! We always joked about how crappy they seemed (and how deadly the 4-sider was to step on!), and were jokingly skeptical, but I had no idea they were actually weird in a meaningful way. I am rushing this info to certain old salts. :-)
I'm pretty convinced that almost all non-rigged dice are actually very fair, as long as the roller gives the throw enough bounce and isn't doing some cheesy feeble drop.
I have some friends & players who have been a bit funny about dice superstition, but I think this has acceptable/amusing forms that isn't a problem in moderation. My model for quite acceptable dice paranoia is my friend who starts a game session by choosing dice from those available, testing them out while muttering funny comments about some dice look suspicious and he has a good feeling about certain others today, and during play won't say anything until/unless he has some bad luck, and which point, not during his turn, he might mutter something about the luck being stale in those dice, or those dice being jynxed, and quietly picking another set. We find it comical because he's mostly joking, and he's entertaining and not annoying about it.
Keep in mind that some of the early polyhedral dice... were not dice. They were school learning shapes.
And on the subject of fair dice...
In the end there is no such thing. Even with a perfect die, in the hands of someone with micro-reflex action in effect the dice may skew because the person rolling is doing it without even being aware. And even without that effect just the way you toss the dice will twerk the results sometimes. Hence why I came to view these sorts of obsessions as less than useless.
In my 10 years of gaming, I have yet to see anyone in real life actually make a fuss about the dice not being fair. Then again, I am from a different generation, so we never had really bad dice.
Still, cool video. Definitely something for dice makers to watch, more than players.
Quote from: Omega;920139Keep in mind that some of the early polyhedral dice... were not dice. They were school learning shapes.
And on the subject of fair dice...
In the end there is no such thing. Even with a perfect die, in the hands of someone with micro-reflex action in effect the dice may skew because the person rolling is doing it without even being aware. And even without that effect just the way you toss the dice will twerk the results sometimes. Hence why I came to view these sorts of obsessions as less than useless.
Hmm, but even if the person's hand is having odd effects on the randomness, no one knows what those effects are, and they are translated to evenly distributed different numbers since dice are never asymmetrical (especially in games where you roll several and take the sum), so the distribution will eventually be the same, and only a mathematician with a computer could tell you the difference from the theoretical curve, if any, and neither the game designer nor the players are likely to be able to understand that change as a meaningful effect on what happens in the game because of it. i.e. don't know, don't care, doesn't matter, net effect is extremely subtle, unnoticeable, and just as fun.
What I meant was someone unconciously shifting the dice average positive or negative. Weird stuff. And hence why I dismiss obsessions with perfect dice.
Not to mention that unless the dice is weighted or REALLY bad off, the variance is not going to be really notable short of over hundreds if not thousands of rolls.
These two factors were why a designer I knew way back had his system flip wether a roll needed was roll over, or roll under as a sort of built in baffle.
Quote from: Rincewind1;920194In my 10 years of gaming, I have yet to see anyone in real life actually make a fuss about the dice not being fair. Then again, I am from a different generation, so we never had really bad dice.
Still, cool video. Definitely something for dice makers to watch, more than players.
I see it fairly often in the board gaming community. And the bitching about dice "fairness" goes way way back in the RPG community. And part of why I developed a slightly lower opinion of Lou Zocchi.
Quote from: Omega;920248I see it fairly often in the board gaming community. And the bitching about dice "fairness" goes way way back in the RPG community. And part of why I developed a slightly lower opinion of Lou Zocchi.
That's weird, as I've actually had a pretty decent board gaming experience, more so even perhaps than RPGs in regard to attending tournaments and so forth, and I've never seen the problem outside of jokes. Maybe it's the attitudes and rewards - the board gaming scene is still being born in Poland, so there's not a lot of stress nor huge prizes to worry about.
Whether the dice are fair or not is one of those issues where you have a small but very vocal minority that cares a great deal and an overwhelming majority that just doesn't really give a crap. I think it's just luck of the draw whether you come across one of those people who care Very, Very Much about this or not.
I love to watch the veins on people who declare that electronic and PC rollers are totally fair when I get to point out how the various RNGs are sometimes anything but. Flash in particular. I playtested a bunch of flash games and list track of just how absurdly off kilter the RNG can be. And also just how wretched it was to make an item drop needed for a simple starter crafting item have a mere 0.025% chance. Especially with Flash's screwed up rollers. No. Im not joking. The chance was that low. And you needed 100...
Quote from: Omega;920346... And also just how wretched it was to make an item drop needed for a simple starter crafting item have a mere 0.025% chance. Especially with Flash's screwed up rollers. No. Im not joking. The chance was that low. And you needed 100...
You needed 100 what to craft what?
Quote from: Skarg;920497You needed 100 what to craft what?
An online MSO (Massively Single Player) I was alpha and beta tester on. The designers really had no grasp of both flashes wonky roller and of probability vs frustration levels. Combine the two and its a study in futility.
I bought a bunch of 12mm 'clear' D6 sets from Chessex at one point and it was impossible to stack more than 5 of
any of them facing the same side without it toppling due to deformities. They were that bad, and it was because the plastic shrinks more around the pips while cooling.
Quote from: jadrax;919627I just saw this pair of videos on Youtube of what happened when someone gave Professor Persi Diaconis a d30. I think we have had a few discussions on what makes a die 'fair' in the past and I found this quite interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7zT9MljJ3Y
I would summarise but they are quite lengthy. One of the things I did find very interesting in part two is that for some of the more odd shaped dice, the surface you are rolling them on actually effects how fair they are.
Nifty!
Quote from: Omega;920346I love to watch the veins on people who declare that electronic and PC rollers are totally fair when I get to point out how the various RNGs are sometimes anything but.
They're only totally fair if they're using a physical entropy source, but even the best semi-random algorithms are more fair than any physical die can possible be.
Quote from: Anon Adderlan;921110...
They're only totally fair if they're using a physical entropy source, but even the best semi-random algorithms are more fair than any physical die can possible be.
Why do you say that I think you must've got the second clause backwards (best->worst?), but I'm having trouble getting what you were trying to say. Are you trying to say that a physical die can never be 100% perfectly even because it's a physical thing that will always have some unevenness, even if it's practically impossible to measure?
Quote from: Skarg;921494Why do you say that I think you must've got the second clause backwards (best->worst?), but I'm having trouble getting what you were trying to say. Are you trying to say that a physical die can never be 100% perfectly even because it's a physical thing that will always have some unevenness, even if it's practically impossible to measure?
From experience coding. Alot of RNGs are fairly even simply by dint of the mechanics behind the RNG. For example the ones that glance at the game clock and use that as the seed. I've seen a few that were random only per playthrough. The seed was read once to generate the string for the game thereafter. IE: if you restarted from a save at an earlier point in the game and did the exact same things then the results would be exactly the same. This can be a feature instead of a failure.
Others have some severe quirks. During the playtest of DragonFable and MechQuest youd see it again and again. Id heard complaints of Flash's RNG problems but never seen the numbers before. Quite a few of my bug reports consisted of logs of the RNG locking into patterns for example.
Rolling by hand can be 100% pure with any dice as long as you roll consistently on the same surfaces. This is why dice towers became popular. But toss in the X-Factor of unconcious micro-reflex and all bets are off.
Though watching some peoples luck or lack thereof with electronic rollers... Im starting to suspect instrumentality! :eek:
Maybe it's quantum universe selection. :-)
I do get slightly superstitious about how I'm rolling the dice, which has me try to turn the dice to unknown different positions before I roll them, but I suppose if my subconscious is clever enough, it could be messing with me... but that seems pretty paranoid to think so, and I'm sure my rolls are quite random. At some point, a bit of salt in the RNG seems fine to me. But there are definitely problematic lines that can get crossed, especially with computerized ones.
Or just toss the dice you need to roll in to a cup and roll out of that no micro reflex that way.
Quote from: Skarg;921494Are you trying to say that a physical die can never be 100% perfectly even because it's a physical thing that will always have some unevenness, even if it's practically impossible to measure?
No, because it's quote practical to measure. Otherwise yes.
Quote from: Skarg;921868I do get slightly superstitious about how I'm rolling the dice,
Ask yourself why. Challenge your irrationalities.
Quote from: Skarg;921868But there are definitely problematic lines that can get crossed, especially with computerized ones.
Still less so that physical dice.
Quote from: kosmos1214;921896Or just toss the dice you need to roll in to a cup and roll out of that no micro reflex that way.
Youd like to think so. But thats the creepy thing about this sort of ability and just how far it can reach. Though I personally think that yeah cups and towers will confound it. Or at least make it work overtime. Whatever the mechanism is. It isnt allways on the players side. One of my players rolls absurdly well using a dice tower. Another one rolls absurdly low. Sometimes with the same dice.
So just roll the damn dice and stop obsessing over "fair".
Quote from: Omega;920248I see it fairly often in the board gaming community. And the bitching about dice "fairness" goes way way back in the RPG community. And part of why I developed a slightly lower opinion of Lou Zocchi.
Say more, please.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;922343Say more, please.
He just had a slight tendency to badmouth other peoples product to make his look good. Nothing offensive. Just annoying. Otherwise nice guy from what little saw of him wayyyy back. And he got his own Lost Worlds book. Now you can pit Lou Zocchi against Micheal Stackpole.
Its a practice I dislike in gaming. Fantasy Wargaming (the RPG. Not the un-related wargame) is still tops on my list of low. Though Zweihander has been bucking for the position.