d20 does not appear to be fair

[unerwünscht]

I have seen this topic come up a few times now, and beyond the non randomness of the die roll there is one other thing that all these threads have in common. No one officially attached to Smite Works has commented on any of these threads.

I see a few possible reasons for this. The most likely being they don't want to have to be the ones to tell you "Random numbers used in computer programs are pseudo-random, this means they are a generated in a predictable fashion using an advanced mathematical formula. This is fine for most uses, it is just not random in the way you may expect it to be."

There is also a chance that they just do not care.. and I would also guess that this is partly true. Not that they don't care about what you or I or anyone else thinks, but they simply do not care how random the dice actually are. It is random enough for Role Playing, and that is probably all they truly care about.

Also, when/if you find a fix for it, please for the love of god let me know, I am tired of rolling so low all the time.

[Griogre]

Change you dice color. It can't hurt.

[Berova]

I'm just waitin' for Smiteworks to "sell" new dice for FG2...

I would be interested in how many takers they get!

[Phystus]

Isn't there a video about the guy who made the original poly sided dice....something about dice bing mass produced on sprues and then being finished creating an uneven distribution.

Yep, back in the day Gamescience ran ads in Dragon explaining all about that. They do make nice dice.

Really, though, the players don't want random dice. They want biased dice, just biased in their favor! Only the GM wants random dice (ones that came with a certificate of randomness would be appreciated at times ).

~P

[steev42]

I had done a study of these things on my own--even wrote a little C program to tabulate all the rolls that had happened in my game to date.

The results were interesting--on every single die size that had a statistically relevant number of rolls, the highest number on the die was rolled less often than it should have been. Interestingly, the d100, which only had about 8 rolls in total, had 6 of those 8 being above 90.

But for my totals--9 was the most common number rolled, occuring 5.79% of the time. 20 was the least common, occurring 3.98% of the time. If I remembered how to do Standard Deviations correctly (it's been quite some time), it was beyond 2 standard deviations; the number 6 was exactly 2 deviations away; 1s, 7s, 9s, and 15s were all 1.0 deviations or worse.

What that means, I don't know--but I had promised my players I would post about it, and since there was a thread already, I figured I may as well.

[DNH]

For those of us using the 4e_JPG ruleset, how does this apply to the functionality in there? We make the vast majority of our dice rolls using either double-click on the die fields or else drag-drop to the token/tracker. Does either of these actions trigger a dice rolling script different to the one used when grabbing a die and tossing it onto the chat window? If so, why? And does it make any difference?

My players have had a run of bad rolls just lately, which has been fairly consistent over the last three, maybe four, sessions. Tempers are getting frayed and people are getting disillusioned but there are no easy answers. FWIW, my own dice rolls as DM seem to be mostly as expected, which of course does not help with the aforementioned frayed tempers.

On a related note, and I know it is only really graphical sugaring, the "double dice" issue does very little to inspire confidence in the software's PRNG when neither of the results shown in the graphics is the actual result shown in the chat entry. This happens with alarming regularity; and when one or other of the numbers *does* get used (talking d20s here), it's always the lower one. Like I say, at the least, it's annoying, and it's getting close to being a deal-breaker.

Any thoughts?

[Spyke]

There seems to be an obvious way to get round this issue.

Switch to GURPS where you roll low to succeed...



Spyke

[joshuha]

For those of us using the 4e_JPG ruleset, how does this apply to the functionality in there? We make the vast majority of our dice rolls using either double-click on the die fields or else drag-drop to the token/tracker. Does either of these actions trigger a dice rolling script different to the one used when grabbing a die and tossing it onto the chat window? If so, why? And does it make any difference?

My players have had a run of bad rolls just lately, which has been fairly consistent over the last three, maybe four, sessions. Tempers are getting frayed and people are getting disillusioned but there are no easy answers. FWIW, my own dice rolls as DM seem to be mostly as expected, which of course does not help with the aforementioned frayed tempers.

On a related note, and I know it is only really graphical sugaring, the "double dice" issue does very little to inspire confidence in the software's PRNG when neither of the results shown in the graphics is the actual result shown in the chat entry. This happens with alarming regularity; and when one or other of the numbers *does* get used (talking d20s here), it's always the lower one. Like I say, at the least, it's annoying, and it's getting close to being a deal-breaker.

Any thoughts?

The double click script and drag throwing uses the same throwDice function that I used when I tested upwards of 1 million rolls and found a fairly even distribution. As far as the double d20s thing that is a bug but only occurs in that ruleset due to the way drag dropping a dielist onto another list is behaving.

If people wanted, I could build into my log parser a way to spit out just the numbers rolled or something but unless you have thousands of rolls between multiple logs you aren't going to be able to get any kind of meaningful distribution.

[Dupre]

I can assure you the dice are as random as we could make them within the limitations of Turing machines and the logic from that perspective has not changed since FG was introduced. The dice are of course symmetric and evenly weighted.

When you pick up dice from the table, the orientation is randomized separately for each die using standard computational random functions. The point of release, impulse and direction of the dice throw comes straight from the user, which provides a good source of entropy. This entropy is lost when dice are thrown with a script, but for all practical purposes this should make no difference in how random the results are.

[EugeneZ]

DNH (re)raises one specific issue which is also fraying my groups' tempers: the double dice issue. DNH's description of his players' reactions are the same that I have seen in sessions where the players are rolling low. The graphical dice are great but they serve no purpose except as a target of anger when they do not show an accurate result. I think many, many users of FG would love to see that bug squashed more than nearly anything else.