Do you roll a lot of 1s? A 40k must read

[Yade]

It is probably not your imagination.

I am an engineer and I teach at ASU. In the beginning of every semester there is a lot of book work that my students need to do such as circuit board design and circuit mapping. During this time I have 4 students and a giant mechanical engineering lab at my disposal. So I decided to use my students to improve my 40k game.

In the Spring semester of last year I decided to discard the dice myth "I always roll more ones". So I took a box of the red and white GW dice, a cube of 36 chessex dice, 36 square corner dice with pips, and 36 Vegas style square dice with no pips.

I then constructed a series of plastic barriers that would be used to keep each dice independent of the others. In the lab we have a table that is 4 inches thick solid slate built on hydraulic legs to keep balance and resist independent movement. On this table we put all of the dice in the rolling container and labelled each case, giving each individual dice its own chamber and number.

My 4 students then shook and rolled the dice 1000 times, recording each individual result. Afterwards we calculated the results and the Chessex and GW dice averaged 29% ones. Mind you that this is an average and our high was 33 and our low was 23. We removed any statistical anomalies and came up with 29%.

Game room logic, poor source of anything, would dictate that the side with the one is heavier and would therefore be on the bottom more. Unfortunately this is just not true, take popcorn or batholiths as an example. The 6 is too light to stop the momentum of the dice, the rounded corners cannot prevent the dice from turning due to the weight. In the end 1s are by far the most common result. On a 6 sided dice any given number should appear 16.6% of the time, the Vegas dice were dead on and the square dice with pips were pretty close only displaying a 19% ratio for ones.

I contacted Caeser's Palace in Los Vegas and accessed their research, after much duress because they wanted to make sure I was not some gambling shark, and they had results that corroborated mine.

I then proceeded to buy more GW dice and we filled in the corners of the very same dice that we used, carefully melting the new plastic on to the old dice and filing in the corners to the right size and leveling them to .001 for accuracy. The dice then rolled more accurately but there was still a 19% in the ones category. Over a 1000 rolls from 36 dice this 3% variance from the expected norm is just not acceptable and cannot be considered random.

Finally we dissected all of our dice and looked for air pockets or costitutional inconsistencies. We found a few and compared those to the results of the rolls of that indivudual dice and there was no consistent affect generated by the dice with plastic seeds but there was one with dice that had air bubbles.

So I advise all players to use square dice with no pips and only buy clear ones, like in Vegas, so you can see if there was a problem with the making of the dice. This is not going to prevent you from having a bad dice day but it will better ensure that you have some level of consistency.

[azimaith]

Thats pretty neat. I have noticed squared dice roll higher than rounded edges though. Perhaps its because its both square with pips rather than rounded with pips or squared without pips at all.

[sephiroth87]

Wow!

That's too cool.

I knew it wasn't my terrible skills all those years.

Seriously, though, good job. I'll be buying some pipless square dice soon.

[Morgrad]

Did you roll each set of 36 dice 1000 times, or were there a total of 1000 dice rolled? i.e. 36,000 results or 1000 results?

[Vedar]

What are pips?

[Gaebriel]

Pips are the points shown on the die's sides as opposed to written out numbers.

With solid metal dice - pips and rounded corners - I have the feeling of getting a majority of highroll results, but that's probably just my imagination.

[Rhyskalor]

So to be exactly clear, the die on the right is bad, the one on the left is good?
Guess which one I have been using for the last 15 years?
Man, I knew it, I always knew it!

[Rhyskalor]

uh, wrong pic

it seems you can't edit attachments?

[McMullet]

That is interesting. Are you going to publish this research?

It's feel guilty about buying "better" dice now though, since most people I'll be playing against will still be using the standard GW ones and it'd give me an unfair advantage.

A question: How did you "dissect" the dice without destroying the features you were interested in?

[Mrlemonjelly]

This is ... interesting. I have some data that seems to contradict yours. I'm sure yours is more right than mine, though.

I rolled my set of 36 dice (similar to GW ones, from Wargames Workshop) over and over, until I had made over 1000 rolls (1152). The numbers 1 thru 6 had these percentages:

1 = 16.8
2 = 15.6
3 = 15.0
4 = 15.3
5 = 18.1
6 = 19.1

So 5 and 6 came up quite a bit more often than the other numbers. I'm not sure if this is my dice or what, but they are the same size, style, material as GW dice, the only difference is manufacturer.

[Gimp]

That is to cool.

You should get a prize for helping the us all.

[x-esiv-4c]

excellent research.
Did you use Chauvenets Criterion?

[John Vaughan]

I think that though you did roll 1000 times, I think that the experiment should be carried out at least 2 more times with the same number of dice, just different ones. The data may come out differently the next time.

I have some dollar-store dice (10 for $1!) that are opaque, and seem to roll the same number of each number. I like the yellow one though, for some reason. It always rolls 6s on glancing hits, regeneration, bionics, and WWB! Is there any rules in tournaments or anything that says you can't paint your dice? I want them all to be yellow!

[Yade]

Hey guys, a couple things to respond to.

Mc Mullet I sent a copy of the study to Chessex and their official response was to inform me that the amount of plastic saved from rounding the corners and hollowing out the pips of 2 dice actually gave them enough left over plastic to make a 3rd dice. Economics wins

We dissected the dice using a hydrogen cooled diamond saw which prevents the blade from heating up and scarring the soft plastic. Which you can imagine would melt and tear at the presence of any heat or undiverted pressure.

RhyskalorI think those red dice are almost identical to the ones that I am using now.

Morgrad each dice was indivisually rolled a 1000 times, so 4 sets of 36 dice (144 dice) rolled a 100o times equals 144,000 rolls.

Gaebriel we thought about using metal dice because they are so heavy the weight differential is going to be significant compared to plastic dice. The ratiois so much smaller that we speculated that metal dice would be a lot more likely to be average and accurate. Did not test it though.

[Yade]

Originally Posted by x-esiv-4c

excellent research.
Did you use Chauvenets Criterion?

Yes that is how we "proved" as much as you can that the expected average would be 16.6% and the deviance would be 2.78%.

[Penitent]

My gaming group has always ridiculed me for shunning GW's little dice, except when making Ld tests. Who knew?! This is great research, you should get a medal or something.

Are the pipless Vegas dice readily available?

[IronNerd]

Originally Posted by Penitent

Are the pipless Vegas dice readily available?

That's the question. I don't want to order dice, and I don't know many places to find dice like these. Thanks for the research though, it might help me with my horrendous rolling.

[Elcampbello]

The small white dice are better becasue they actualy roll rther than the big red bastards that just sit there.

[Yade]

Originally Posted by Penitent

My gaming group has always ridiculed me for shunning GW's little dice, except when making Ld tests. Who knew?! This is great research, you should get a medal or something.

Are the pipless Vegas dice readily available?

Not really, the ones from Vegas are scarred after being used. I bought my current dice while I was in London. I know you can find them on eBay occasionally, and some gambling supplies stores sell them.

They are not cheap, that's for sure.

[beefHeart]

Originally Posted by IronNerd

That's the question. I don't want to order dice, and I don't know many places to find dice like these. Thanks for the research though, it might help me with my horrendous rolling.

The War Store sells used Casino dice. 24.95US for 50 18mm dice.