"Would you play with imperfect dice?" Topic

Most gamers say they would never cheat. Many experienced gamers have "lucky dice" that (seem to) give them better results. All dice are imperfect but some give more even distributions of results, Gamescience apparently having the most consistent dimensions.
So, would you (or do you) play with imperfect dice? What are your thoughts?

That I am not going to the trouble of doing the analysis.

"Lucky dice" just show that humans are evolved to recognize patterns, and respond to randomness my recognizing non-existent patterns.

Over the number of rolls in a normal game (I do some buckets of dice games) it would have to be a pretty serious and unusual bias to actually have a measurable effect.

I do put out the rolling dice, and both sides tend to roll the same dice over time; but that evens out perception, not reality.

Never thought of it in gaming – so you could have "loaded" dice – hmmm. I read somewhere that Napoleon was caught cheating at cards, and when asked why he did it, he supposedly answered that he left nothing to chance.

I already do. My dice never seem to be able to roll sixes. Seriously.

Yes I would play with them … as you say … all dice are imperfect at some level of measurement … even Casino dice are only accurate to 1/10000th of an inch

I saw a video clip showing Lou Zocchi hawking his dice. It sems his are machined rather than cast, or something like that.
He was ranting about the tragedy of your character dying because you rolled a save on an imperfect die. Oh, please.

All dice hate me. It was written up in all the scientific journals. Imperfect dice will hate me just as much as perfect ones.

Actually, I always use casino dice in my wargaming, precisely because they are as even and 'fair' as possible.

Cheers,
Scott

I don't pay enough attention to identify 'lucky' dice. But I think players should be prohibited from using their own dice in a game. First it avoids the appearance of cheating and secondly it avoids the inevitable 'Who took my blue d20?' at the end of he game.

Dice are random. Nothing else to it.

I loove to see loosers at cons who go to buy dice and ask the guy if they can roll them before buying them. Kinda like taking a car for a test drive. I had to tell them, "Uh… Dice are random… That's why we use them…" and got a funny look back like I had a third eye…

Yes. I love my solid metal (pewter, I think) d6, I don't care as much about what it rolls (it is random, AFAIK) as I like the solid sound it makes hitting the table…

As for dice in games generally – I have several of the chessex boxes of dice for gaming with other people, I'm happy to provide all the dice in several colors so folks can tell which they rolled.

For me, I pick dice for a game by look and feel -- I've got a 40-year collection, its big enough that I used it as an example of typology (fancy anthropology term for organized sorting) when I went back to school to study shipwreck archaeology. I managed to entertain a class full of my fellow grad students for 25 minutes with a really big bag of dice… there were some Zocchi dice in there.

I have a set of really cool wooden dice with inlaid brass pips that I got at Costplus World Market. The problem is that the weight of the pips really does distort the probabilities. Because they look so cool, I went to the trouble of rolling the whole set about 100 times and recording the results. They all rolled "2" almost 25% of the time. If that result had just been with one die over a hundred rolls, there might be some room for error, but since it was all 6 dice, I think it's safe to assume the results are representative. Oh well, they look cool on the shelf.

As a side note, there is no reason that you couldn't use imperfect dice, so long as both players used the same die. The game will still be fair if both players are subject to the same skewed probabilities.

Normally though, the overwhelming majority of dice are precise enough that it doesn't matter, and I think its more fun to bring your own dice to a game or tournament. I like to have dice that match my different armies.

I will occasionally find a miscast die with one side concave or rounded. When I do, I toss them. Other than that I don't worry about it.

We have a player in our group who merely has to touch the "hot" dice to make them roll poorly from that point on.

Its kind of like magic.

I have a pair of Zocchi D10s whose corners are so worn, they never stop rolling!

I have my favorite dice. However, I base my favoritism on how easily I can read them.

Played in a game with someone who used clear dice with no paint in the numerals. Uncool.

Played with another who kind of fliped the die instead of rolling it out of his cupped hand. No question about the randomness of his rolling.

Played with another fellow who had a die that would roll sixes. He used it only when he needed it. I think it was defective and he knew it. In his own mind it was fair because he "lucked" into having this die. Uncool.

I have a favorite set of D6s, blue with white pips. I use several colors when needed to roll as many attacks as possible at once but I assign the blue dice to my preferred models. In one game of WFB, my Bretonnian infantry were kicking the butt of some High Elf Silver Helms, due to excellent dice luck when it counted. After the third combat roll like that in a row, the other player asked "Can you switch dice?"

I said "Sure" and didn't use those dice for the rest of the game.

Are they mis-weighted? Not as far as I can tell. But that day they were hot and it bugged the other player and of course I switched.

I wouldn't knowingly use them, but don't worry about it too much. The GameScience videos were very interesting, particularly the bits about how wear can make dice more "rolly" towards a given face. Prior to watching that, I'd more-or-less discounted the existence of unintentional "lucky" dice.

Given a choice, I'd use high-precision dice. But I'm not going to spend a lot of money to do it.

- Bob

For the statisticians out there, how severe would a bias toward a particular side have to be to be provably significant in a game-sized run of say 200 rolls?

I've played with this with a random number generator, and I am thinking quite high from the result, but that is hardly rigorous.

Oops. Just posted the expectations for a two tailed test rather than a one tailed one.

Got to go to bed, stats demand thought.

I have been playing with imperfect dice since I started gaming. Way too many 1's and not enough 6's.

Actually Zocchi is right but that won't stop me from playing.

mjc

providing both sides use the same die, what does it matter?

Thank you for all your answers and opinions.
Myself, I buy dice that look good, but I will switch dice if I feel I am getting a large number of "bad" rolls. Of course, this does not help at all but it makes me feel like I am shaking my fist at cruel fate.

Both sides using the same dice is a possible solution but passing dice back and forth in a game that requires 3 or 4 sets of die rolls to resolve each combat is tedious.

To clarify, Gamescience dice (aka Zocchi dice) are cast- they all have a blemish that shows where the plastic was injected into the mold. Casino dice are machined.

However, only Zocchi dice are the color of entrails.

christot wrote:

providing both sides use the same die, what does it matter?

The GameScience video seemed focused more on the RPG type of game, where players are using rolls to determine the fate of their characters versus the GM. He repeatedly referes to bad dice killing off characters. The implication was that non-precision dice often have uneven rounded edges and a squished shape from the manufacturing and particularly the finishing process that will bias them towards particular rolls. He also suggests that lower quality dice are more easily worn, and that a "lucky" die may result from an uneven wear pattern. Given the requirement that casinos use precision dice with no tolerance for wear, there must be something to the argument, but I've neither the means nor interest to figure out how big of a deal it is in my regular gaming.

Affordable precision dice area nice idea though.

- Bob

Some basic information on the technical requirements for precision casino dice: link

Cheers,
Scott

Yeah, of course.
Almost all the dice out there are imperfect, I just like the pretty ones.

OTOH, I don't have "favorite" or "cursed" dice, so it probably comes out okay.
-Kle.

Gamescience dice are molded (cast) .. not milled like Casino dice (2nd confirmation) … I even know WHERE they are molded

The video goes into their tolerances and so forth. They readily acknowledge that they are not milled, but their process apparently is much more precise than competitors. They've got some pretty graphic demonstrations of exactly how much more precise. What was interesting is that the finishing process is apparently the cause of much of the variation in dice. I'm hardly about to toss everything I own and use only GameScience products, but I would be interested in hearing what the competition responds with.

If nothing else, it's fun watching someone get so excited about dice.

- Bob

I've played with dice my kid brother made for me in shop class. They weren't even a proper cube, but the results were random enough for my needs.

I was in a Blood Bowl league once about 15+ years ago and one of the guys clearly had crooked dice that he was using. Crooked in many senses of the word. They were very small and rolled a 6 about 1/3 of the time. I was scheduled to play a game with him and after seeing this trend for the first part of the game, I demanded to be able to use his dice too. He swore up and down everything was on the up and up and he would not let me touch his dice. The guy running the tournament forced him to let me play with his dice. From then on, we both had lots of 6's as expected. Unfortunately, I had already 3 dead figures and had no chance of pulling ahead. He should have been booted from the tournament in my opinion which I stated and was denied. In the end of that one game, I had 5 dead players, so I was screwed for the rest of the season too. That's about when I stopped playing Blood Bowl.

As I have said before on similar threads, I did work with Lou Zocchi back in 1984. It was routine to get shipments from his secret casting plant and see if any had poursprues too large. All of his his were sharp edged as he proved on a number of occasions that 'rounded edge' dice were some of the least balanced.

He was so against the rounded affect of long term use and how it unbalanced dice that he tried to get the most hardness rating in dice of any company.

As you said, all dice but casino gambling dice are imprefect. Howeverhis was the most balanced of all the companies that I have tested over the past 25+ years.

If the imperfect dice were the only ones available and we shared dice why not.