Twitter, in its infinite crowd sourced wisdom, floated this piece across my metaphorical desk several weeks ago, The “Superstitious Mumbo Jumbo” Of Dice Rolling. It’s a Neil Degrasse Tyson-esque read of people having fun with their dice rolling habits and rituals, and exclaiming or bemoaning whether they are “good” or “bad” rollers. The punchline being that it’s silly to hold those superstitions. Dice are dice. Get over it.
The author is, of course, right (I also think guilty of confusing Pedantry with Wisdom). With few exceptions, relying solely on the outcomes of dice rolls is going to lead to a weird slew of successes and failures. As the author states, “Good strategy and tactics in the game is to limit the number of times you have to rely on the dice to bail you out of trouble.” I take umbrage with the following comment about how good players do this and poor players do not. There are many reasons to play a dice based RPG. Some people are less concerned with optimization and perfect strategy, others more concerned with story, even if that means a flawed character trying to accomplish something they are not perfectly suited for.
That being said, understanding how you can best effect the outcome of a roll using your modifiers and skills is the best way to get the outcome you want, not just rolling the dice.
And that being said, I decided for an upcoming four day stretch of D&D with my party to keep track of all our dice rolls. We had 7 dice rolled across 4 days by 6 people with enough ‘data’ to give us what I think is a reasonable picture of how that particular die rolls.
For my data analysis, what am I comparing the die to?
The Perfect Die.
The Perfect Die is the dice that is truly random. Maybe in casino dice terms, the die of evenly distributed manufacture. As I roll the die an infinite number of times I’d expect every outcome to be equally likely. Over an infinite number of rolls my odds of rolling a 1 or a 20 on a d20 would be about the same. Since, for D&D, we roll d20s more than anything else we kept track of the rolls on our d20s, not the other polyhedrals.
In the end some interesting trends did come out. My chosen d20 for the weekend was a Bescon Brass d20, a metal die. I tallied all my rolls over the four days, keeping track of how many times I rolled each number. If I rolled a 15, that was a tally for the 15. I divided my analysis up in a couple of ways. The first was a straight 1-10, 11-20, how likely was I to roll in each band? The next was more granular; 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-20. I then looked at deviations from my Perfect Die in each of those bands. I choose those bands because in my mind they correspond with the DCs for ability checks in D&D 5e. If I have a range of dice available to roll, and I know the skill check DC will be fairly high, maybe I want to roll this die as opposed to another.
With all that preamble out of the way, here is a link to our spreadsheet. I’ll talk more about my chosen die, and the numbers associated with it. Overall, the die was the slightest bit weighted towards the band under 10 by .29%. Looking further into the 1-5 and 6-10 DCs, I rolled more 1s, so this was, in aggregate, a bit of a feast or famine die. I tended to roll pretty solidly in the 16-20 range, 1.18% above the assumed 25% chance of rolling there, but that was also true for the 1-5 range.
One die was truly an outlier, the Velanthe die that the owner dubbed Beneficent; She was right. Over all, in the 1-10, 11-20 bands the dice was about average, only .56% more likely to be above the random 50% mark. However, breaking down the 11-15 and 16-20 bands is where the variation comes in. 33.71% more likely to roll in the 16-20 band. About even for 1-5 and 6-10, but far less likely to barely succeed in the 11-15 range.
What does this tell us? Sometimes, as the original author noted, there are trends in dice rolling. Because the manufacturing process is imperfect (unless we’ve managed to nab some casino grade polyhedrals, which after some short research is highly unlikely) deviations from the Perfect Die are obvious, but looking at the numbers from our weekend over all, the average deviations are usually only one to three percentage points off. Unless you and your party are playing for real money (aside from the sunk costs of books, miniatures, terrain, etc.) the existing dice are good enough for the job.
I’ll leave this with a final thought about what our desire to see patterns may say about us. We’re pattern seeking creatures, looking for order in chaos. We want to control our outcomes as best as possible. We’re dropped into this world with a lot of givens, assumptions, and with only so many avenues to change those. Rituals, ultimately, are fun. Charging on the one or the twenty may not impact the roll, but we share in the game of pretending it matters. Our superstitions are an additional layer of camaraderie as we cluster around our tables, character sheets and reference books spread about, trying to save our fictional worlds.
Ross Blythe is a Chicago based gamer interested in all things tabletop. He enjoys reading history as well as fiction, and so has a soft spot for historical wargames like Pike & Shotte. For the campaigns he runs as a DM he often looks to history for inspiration, for the lessons of the past to challenge the players at his table.
https://www.nerdunion.us/2018/07/03/impressionable-flashing-lights/
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