"Dice Superstitions" Topic

I asked this in The Lounge* :"One of my pals brings several sets of dice to a game. when a set "runs cold", he swops them. Another has a "lucky die" he brings out for "pinch" rolls.

Do you have dice superstitions & if so, what?

Me? I don't believe in any superstition at all (currently knocking on wood, just in case)."

Lots of great replies.

* I hope I haven't committed a faux pas by mentioning The Lounge. It's actually worth paying for membership to get access to this revered place.

I just got my Dice Jail! Dinky little thing, rubbish dice everywhere beware!!!

Not a superstition….cold hard fact….my dice luck STINKS!!!!
I can say this with the supreme confidence that comes from 30+ years of not being able to roll dice to save my life!

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The Bureau of Gaming Justice Statistics defines the incarcerated dice population as the population of dice confined in a prison or a jail.
Incarceration is a mechanism to punish criminal rolling offenses, but it can affect the well-being of families and communities.
Between 1980 and 2024, the United States dice incarceration rate increased by 220 percent, which can be linked to desperate-and-losing-player policy changes that enacted harsher sentencing rules.
In regards to numeric outcomes, data indicate that dice attempting to role high have a greater likelihood of being incarcerated than those attempting to role low.
Overall, incarceration shows outcomes that do not necessarily correct behavior and lead to recidivism, which can negatively impact the well-being of dice rollers.
Many dice face obstacles reintegrating into society following their release, with such difficulties as the inability to roll high numbers, low numbers, or any number remotely wished for by their rollers.
Furthermore, dice who were formerly incarcerated are at an increased risk of rolling off of the table or gaming surface, leading to a return to the "package to prison" pipeline.
Studies have shown that this recidivism leads to dice-rollers being more likely than the general population to have high blood pressure, asthma, anger issues, arthritis, anxiety, and depression.
In many instances, incarcerated dice negatively affect those expecting better outcomes from their incarceration. Children and partners of gamers who incarcerate their dice are especially at risk of negative effects related to dice incarceration.
According to data from 2020–2025, more than 5 million children, spouses, and partners in the United States have experienced the incarceration of a loved one's dice. They may be more likely to witness violence and verbal abuse by a loved one towards gaming miniatures, leading to higher rates of gaming disabilities, rules-learning delays, and attention disorders, Additionally, children of parents who incarcerate their dice have been found to be up to 5 times more likely to forgo wargaming and switch to PC and Console gaming.
Additional research is needed to better understand how to improve services for people and communities impacted by incarceration. This additional evidence will facilitate public health efforts to address incarceration as a social determinant of health.

I'll go with Jeff Beck.

Gift your bad dice to an opponent or just leave them on the table for some other sucker or get a random number generator for your cell phone.

Wolfhag

My dice will roll 6s at the beginning of the game, when it's a "nice but not crucial" situation.
Then, like a cheating girlfriend, they come up 1s near the end, when it IS important.

No. I'm not bitter. Not at all.

Hot dice.

Never play a dice game against a child under 12, at least if you want to win.

I also shake the dice in my hand before dropping them in the dice tower, as if that will randomize them more, or, contrarily, produce a better result.

Also, if a dice lands outside of the tower/tray/box/off the table, it doesn't count, unless it's a good result, in which case it's obviously legit!

I once made the mistake of using a brand-new fancy d6 at a DBA tournament which proceeded to grossly betray me in both games (I was quickly eliminated). I came home, went out to the back garden, filled a small tin cup with an inch of charcoal lighter fluid, and incinerated that traitor. The melted corpse of that die has resided on my shelf ever since as a warning to the other dice, and I must say there have been no repetitions of that level of perfidy.

"Pour encourager les autres."
👍

My dice are particular to their army ( solo) any roll wrong color doesn't count.

I've seen people cheat (yes, I mean that literally) with their dice: they will either blatantly lie about what they rolled, or they will drop their dice from their hand in such a way that they actually gain some control over their results.

I began using a hard wood Dice Tower with 4 baffles (here is a video of a handful of polyhedral dice being dumped into the same Tower -- still totally random results…), around eight years ago and my results are sooo random and sooo bad, that my friends tell me NOT to use the Tower, as my rolls are so punishingly bad.

It does not matter which dice I roll, they all give truly random results, every time. No one has ever accused me of cheating, but they do grimace when I use my Dice Tower because they know my dice rolls will likely be consistently terrible. I also own dozens of polyhedral dice, d4's to d20's, as I need multiples of each for the games I play.

If you want guaranteed random rolls, every roll, just use a Dice Tower made of some hard material (plastic or wood). No one will ever accuse you of cheating… Cheers!

1) "Dumb Kid Luck" is real. Prepubescent people are better dice rollers than adults.

2) I hate using someone else's dice. I have thousands of dice. Please let me use my own dice.

John the OFM +1

Indeed! And I also wonder about dice production quality – I have never tested this, but have read it can be a real thing.

The Science Behind Dice Precision: How Fair Are Your DND Rolls?

Dice rolls in DND decide the outcomes of pivotal moments—combat, skill checks, saving throws—so it's important that your dice offer truly random results. Uneven weighting or imperfections in the design can bias rolls, leading to unfair gameplay. This is particularly concerning for competitive players or anyone looking for a game where luck, rather than faulty equipment, determines the outcome…

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Are Your Dice Balanced? (And Does It Even Matter)

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I do recall an article about a UK tournament that mentioned in passing a gentleman playing a Vlad Tepes army that had a drill and a little set of spikes and was impaling dice that failed him.

I just try and have appropriate flag/symbol dice when available.

I play with a guy whose dice, all his dice, hate him but when used borrowed dice, rolls like a dice god.

Everybody switch to cards.

Cold dice.

I worked with a vendor, back in 2018, to set up a dice rolling game: people would pay $6 USD to roll six of his foamy d6's through his 4-foot tall, transparent Dice Tower; if they rolled a fixed set of numbers, they would win various prizes from his product inventory, with the top prize having a value of around $150. USD (five different roll results would win a prize -- the rarer the result, the higher value the prize won) Every person who bought a roll, won a set of polyhedra dice (costing him $2 USD/set, so a net profit of $4 USD/roll sold). The idea was to attract customers to his booth, get them to roll for a prize, and if they didn't roll lucky, they would still walk away with a nice set of polyhedra dice, which I believe everyone would have been happy with for the cost of entry!

I found a website that detailed the chances of rolling 6d6, getting the qualifying results to win one of five different prizes, ranging from metal polydedra dice (costing him around $4 USD each) to the grand prize (rolling six 1's, six 2's, six 3's, etc., gaining the winner an exotic wood Dice Tower which he sold retail for $150. USD The chances of anyone rolling six numbers all the same, was around 1 chance in 250,000.

He did not trust my printout of the odds of his customers rolling any winning number (the odds of winning the metal dice set was around 1 in 100), so he and I rolled his foamy d6's, 300 times, recording each roll… The odd's sheet I printed out, was dead accurate, based on 300 rolls: there were approximately three metal dice set wins -- a Tier 1 prize costing him $7 USD, or $21 USD total; two Tier 2 prizes costing him $20 USD retail price of his inventory, each, or around $40 USD total; and a single Tier 3 prize winning roll with a retail price loss to him of around $60 USD value of one of his products, and that was it! Total net profit for 300 rolls: $1,200 USD; net loss for prizes given away: $121 USD (this includes the $2 USD sets of plastic polyhedra dice given away with each of the 294 non prize winning rolls); so a final profit of $1,081 USD for 300 paid dice rolls…

At $4 USD profit, per roll, he would have made bank selling dice rolls to convention go'ers, if he would have pulled the trigger on it… He never did. He ordered a couple of hundred plastic sets of dice for the guaranteed prizes, and around a dozen sets of the metal dice, but they were ordered from Temu, and he never received them. I ordered a few sample sets of the polyhedra plastic and metal dice sets, to check their quality (very good, actually), but his big order was never delivered. That soured him on the whole thing.

I've been keeping that dice-tower-rolls-for-prizes in my memory banks for years, in case I ever needed such an attraction for a booth at a game convention. So far, I have not needed it, but I keep it active in the mental archives, just in case. Gamers are crazy about buying sets of dice. LOL! Cheers!

My record is 14 "1's" on d6. The CRT result was "attacker eliminated" so the game was over at that point. I have had gamers with 30 years experience say they have never seen dice as bad as mine. When my dice have really hit bottom and can't get any worse my opponents dice sometimes get better than usual: "I never roll this great!" is the standard remark. Every time I meet a new gamer and he says his dice suck my dice take that as a challenge and make absolutely certain they roll pure crap.
Although all the assorted shapes are hateful, the D6 in particular is absolutely merciless and should be banned.

The Science Behind Dice Precision: How Fair Are Your DND Rolls?

A hundred rolls is really low to get power for a chi-squared. It will converge at 100 for a d6, but not really give you any confidence level for 1/6 magnitude steps.

Are Your Dice Balanced? (And Does It Even Matter)

The standard deviation of a d20 can't be greater than 9.5.

Everybody switch to cards.

Unless you shuffle every time (shuffling six cards is horrible; doing it well is worse), the card process has memory. If that's what you want, you shouldn't have dice in the first place.

I play a lot of games with hits then wounds mechanic.
Sooo when I roll a lot of hits, I pick up the dice and do a long roll across the table. Hoping for average number wounds.

I do not have a problem!

At any convention I always buy a brand new D20 and flush it down the toilet to appease the dice gods. Then back to the table and roll away with those that were spared the sacrifice.

Careful— that'll breed otyughs.

I also assign dice by color:

Red are for attack/damage.
Blue and Yellow are "Good guy" dice.
Black and Bone are "Bad guy" dice.
Green can be Good (elves, Rohan) or Bad (orcs).
White are neutral catchalls.
Yellow can also be "treasure" dice.
Blue can be "magic" dice. Though I now have some purple dice that may take on that role.

The above all apply to d6 only. All my polyhedrals have multiple colors, and very few repeats, so they're always generic. I play no dice favorites!
(Okay, I have one fancy design set of polyhedrals that came in a "blind" collectable pack. I kinda like them, just for the look. A dangerous thing to admit, either to them or the other dice…)

I find myself picking up the dice with high numbers showing when I want high numbers and low numbers when I want low numbers. Plus I will change dice out after several turns of bad luck.