Probability
It’s common knowledge that one in twenty attacks is going to crit. That’s just science. But there are lots of dice experiments you can try in the comfort of your own dungeon! Here are just a few.
- Pre-Roll: If you positively, absolutely have to avoid a botch, you just need to keep rolling. Eventually you’ll pre-roll all the ones out, leaving you with a die guaranteed not to crit the bed!
- Roleplay Harder: You’re not just going for the Oscar to entertain your friends. You’re also trying to entertain your dice! If your vicious mockery is especially viscous, or if your witch bolt vocal components are especially witchy, you’re going to improve the roll by +0.5 on average.
- Monsters Want to Live: Beware of monsters with exactly one hit point left. Your dice know that these critters have nothing left to lose, so they’ll tend to shy away from delivering the killing blow.
- Dice Mates: Dice long for the company of their own kind. If you’ve bought yourself a pound o’ dice, then do yourself a favor and take the time to pick out members of the same set. They’ll reward you for keeping the family together.
- Recharge: You’d be surprised how many gamers don’t know this, but all dice come with tiny batteries. That’s what the plastic adheres to at the dice core (just below the dice mantle). While a fully charged die will produce high results, a depleted die will produce consistently low results. So make sure to rest your dice and let them recharge!
- Lost Cause: It can be painful to say goodbye to a favorite platonic solid. But if one of your dice comes up natural 1 three times in a row, it’s time to take it out back and shoot it. There is an upside though. After the execution, the rest of your dice will roll better! No one wants to be next on the chopping block.
There are plenty of other dice facts floating around out there. In fact, I’m willing to bet you know a few yourself! So how about it, Handbook-World? Have you got any absolutely-true dice science nuggets to share with the rest of the class? Shout ’em out down in the comments!
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Not tabletop, but i play Dungeons and Dragons Online.
game is inspired by tabletop so often you have d20 skill checks (like diplomancy) and I KNOW I will roll low when check if important.
it’s like my d20 is replaced by d3
Ender’s Game messed with me pretty hard as a kid. Any time I got to a seemingly impossible part of a video game, I’d be like, ‘Hold on… Is this some Last Starfighter we’re-secretly-testing-you shit?'”
I prefer the “sword of damocles” method of motivating dice, by way of a lump hammer kept within conspicuous view of the dice throughout the game.
Public execution of dice was invented by Chessex to boost sales. True facts!
Hit ’em hard enough and every hammer is a lump hammer.
Oh yeah, every now and then, you’ve gotta pop your dice into the freezer for a couple of hours. Keeps those latices crisp.
> Keeps those latices crisp.
I’m fuckin’ dying bro. XD
It was very fun to hope to the universe for a Nat 20 on a Performance check to cap off a campaign arc…and then getting it, for a final, poetic song to commemorate an NPC lost to time.
Even in online play, the desire to make probability less random remains. And 5% of the time, the dice cooperate exactly as planned.
You remember my buddy pala-bro?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/disembodied-voice
Dude’s convinced Roll20 hates his guts, and is deliberately messing with him. Having seen him roll, I can’t say I blame him.
I’ve never met a digital dice roller that didn’t seem to desire my death.
In another server for a d20 game I’m part of, there were three different functioning dice roller bots at one point. I think the point was that you could swap if you were unlucky with one or more of them.
Gotta play em off against each other.Toy with their affections like you’re in some kind of robot harem anime.
We’re moving to FoundryVTT next time we play our main PF2e game, and I have to admit my dice have come in clutch on Roll20 when I *really* need them to.
Hopefully my luck will remain. Hopefully.
It’s almost as if Roll20 is saying, “Please don’t go, baby! I’ll make it up to you!”
I like to use Exposure Therapy with my dice. I set them aside with their highest value is always face-up, so they learn what they’re meant to roll.
Patience, training, and positive reinforcement. All of these are key.
It does make me wonder what training treats look like for dice though. Maybe you roll ’em on a velvet tray when they’re good?
I also do this.
A positive side effect is that late in the evening, when shape recognition fails, I can find the correct dice by the display of the number facing up.
I do the same thing. I figure if my d20 is used to resting with the 20 side up, maybe it’ll want to land that way too.
otoh: there is the risk that they‘ll roll 1 to get some sunshine on that side for a change.
Rat Dad and PoeticallyPsychotic above are *both* right– you’ve got to set the high value on top and *then* keep them in the freezer to lock those high numbers in place.
Though one of my favorite game night memories is seeing one friend with his very unsanitary hand stuck in the ice-dispenser of the host’s refrigerator as he attempted to retrieve his favorite D20.
*Record scratch*
“You’re probably wondering how hot myself into this situation.”
Thanks for the Swords heads up. My Sprout and Pest stuffies will be happy to see it!
As for dice…threats sometimes work, but can also make them go into a serious pout. I’ve also found that having DM specific dice and character specific sets seem to help.
Also had one DM who learned not to tell my one character to “roll three 00’s in a row and I’ll give it to you”. Both times he said that I did just that. Never happened with another character or as a DM, just that specific character and only having to do with his healing skill (SPI Dragonquest based game)
Man, I remember Dragonquest. It’s too bad that no-one has a clear idea of who owns that IP.
TSR bought out SPI after they sued them (along with everyone else) and released “their” version of Dragon Quest. So the rights to the IP should have gone to WOTC and then to Hasbro.
The room must have absolutely exploded the second time you managed to roll a 1000 on command.
Don’t confuse your dice! Reserving separate sets for specific heroes and different dice for minions and for Big Bads helps the dice remember what roles (and rolls) they are intended to play. There’s nothing worse than a favorite D20 who forgets what side they’re on and begins to empathize with the monsters in the middle of a fight.
Laurel is the queen of this. Dice for every individual character in individually labeled glass jars.
sorry, no dice superstitions for me, (bar the odd shout of “these dice hate me”) I spend too much time pondering dice maths, besides, almost all of the dice I roll these days are virtual, just discord bot RNG
Discord bot RNG is every bit as open to “””science””” as physical dice.
I much prefer my vicious mockeries to be more watery; if they’re too viscous I tend to be mistaken for a particularly angry St Bernard…
BRB. Writing a vampire comic.
Story time! Story time!
So no shit there we were, deep in the dungeons of an abandoned castle in the Broken Kingdom of Rumekka. There, something happened that was so terrible that magic was fundamentally altered. Casting any levelled spell had a 90% chance of causing a roll on a custom Wild Magic table, with usually devastatingly detrimental effects. Whirlwinds would start, the air would bleed, tentacles would spring from the ground, and so on. There were some positive effects, but they were few and far between.
At the time, we were using a dice bot named Sidekick, now defunct. Players would roll using Sidekick to determine what magic effect they got, but the table was secret. Coincidentally, in the lore, it was well known that “the fluffy ones”, catfolk, were much beloved by old King Rumek. And wouldn’t you know it? Every time a catfolk rolled for Wild Magic, they ALWAYS got a positive result. Everyone else got the negative ones. This was so consistent that one of my players declared:
“Wait a minute… the fluffy ones… they’re rolling on a different table!”
In hindsight, I should have rolled with it. But no, I laughed it off and explained that Sidekick loved the fluffy ones too. From that day on, Sidekick was officially renamed in our server to Sidekick Loves Kitties, and the rule held true until the day an update broke it.
lol all catfolk party is invincible!
Every d20 has a fixed number of times it will roll each number; and once those times are used up, they’re gone. So it’s ok to do a couple practice rolls to see how your die is doing; but you should never keep rolling until you get a 20, or you’ll roll all the 20’s out.
This is only half true, it resets when it is given a new owner. I had a d20 that I had for years and eventually used up all of its uses of each number. From then on when I rolled it the d20 would gravitate towards the edge of the dice tray and always end up on an edge.
Frustrated I exclaimed my old die was broken and passed it on to another player to have them give it a shot. It’s been rolling normally ever since.
Fascinating! Is there any way to gauge a die’s “fuel level?”
I am now specifically reminded of a particular Darths & Droids wherein the local Munchkin keeps a die with the 1’s supposedly rolled out of it, forgetting that if you pick a die based on how often it fails you, it is statistically more likely to fail you. Which it does.
I’m also reminded of the Glitter Hearts game I run, where my players and I consistently note the ever changing attitude of the dice provided by Fari, the service I run the game on. For example, the session I had yesterday seemed to note who should succeed and who should fail in the ultimate battle scenario I was running at the time. The punk was getting very good rolls and the poor little rich girl was rolling like trash. Except for when she was healing another player. To which I remarked that the dice are specifically making HER suffer and if the roll does not pertain to strictly her.
So fun story. I wrote a similar comic a million years ago. This one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dice-rituals
I’d kind of forgotten about it. But then, when I was looking for inspiration for today’s rant, I came across an old thread about dice rituals on reddit. It was my own thread from 2015. That Darths and Droids comic was the top comment.
Ah the embarassment of finding out you’ve written this comic before. Whoops.
I know a fellow who carefully places all his dice for a given game with the optimal number on top (whether that be high or low), so that the Dice will know what to roll.
Personally I’m not much of one for dice superstition of this sort.
A fair die cast fairly has an even chance of landing on each face and I take comfort in that statistical truth.
Arguments for not caring: a) If any of these tricks worked, they’d be cheating and b) Not caring about dice superstition gives you more time for arranging the dice into towers or pleasing aesthetic arrangements.
Whether that outweighs the counterargument that pretending to care about them can be a bit of goofy fun, I’ll leave as an argument for the reader.
I’m also not superstitious about dice, but I do believe the “keep the highest value up” method has the most merit. Maybe after long enough the atoms in the dice slowly gravitate to the bottom of the dice and it becomes a set of weighted dice. Especially if left for long periods of time in a hot car…
> I know a fellow who carefully places all his dice for a given game with the optimal number on top (whether that be high or low), so that the Dice will know what to roll.
When I’m feeling particularly trollish, I will put that player’s dice 1-side-up while they’re in the bathroom, then wait to see how long it takes ’em to notice.
How have the classic superstitions of Dice Jail and not letting other people “suck the luck” out of dice by touching or rolling them not come up yet?
Well I mean…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dice-jail
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dice-rituals
Well, yes… but I meant in this thread.
Make dice out of hard chocolate or candy.
When they disobey you with low rolls, eat them in front of your other players.
I did that once:
https://thetrufflecottage.com/products/lg-d20
Fun and delicious. 😀
I salt-water test my dice. If they don’t bob to a particular side they’re balanced, and fit for use.
There was a period where I was DMing where my luck was phenomenal. (Much to my chagrin) I rolled in the open out of both a sense of fairness, and to make the player’s suffering sweeter. I offered to let the players use my dice when they rolled. They rolled a reasonable spread for the players.
Never heard about the salt water test, I’ll have to look it up.
With “my luck” all my dice will be weighted and I’ll have to sort them for later… err, throw them out.
Yes, definitely throw them out…
If water is sufficiently salty, (Like black sea salty) plastic dice will bob to the surface. If you prod them and they bob to a particular side, that means that they’re imbalanced.
And if they go on unhinged rants, that means they’re unbalanced. 😀
I don’t have superstitions about dice*, but I do know that when I play my dice trend towards rolling average to high and when I GM they trend toward rolling average to low.
There are just enough break out crits in opposite direction of the trend to make one suspect they’re actually rolling average, but hey aren’t. My dice favor the Players, always have. This holds even for digital dice.
(I’ve ‘done the math’ by recording my dice rolls across whole campaigns, and the math doesn’t lie.)
.* I don’t emotionally understand magical thinking so I’ve never held much to superstitions. I know them, I enjoy gently mocking others when they get too superstitious, but I don’t understand the desire on an emotional level.
Good thing we’re not talking about superstition. This is science!
Why take a traitorous die out back to shoot it? It must be executed in plain view in front of all the others, so that they know that fate that awaits them should they fail you. Some prefer going a step further anointing the remaining dice with the flesh of the fallen, but I worry that the bad luck would be passed on
It’s more psychologically scarring for the other dice if there are no witnesses. You don’t get the same level of gory spectacle, but it haunts them wondering what might have happened. That tends to produce the long-lasting results you’re looking for.
Absolutely true dice fact: If you leave your dice with their highest side up as often as possible, they will naturally gravitate towards that side when rolled.
Useless side effect: If you encourage new players to do this, they’ll learn which die is which faster.
Like Gabe above, I too salt-test my dice. However this is done in an effort to cleanse any dice ghosts that may have made it out of the factory… It’s much harder to exorcise these little buggers once they’ve spread to the whole collection!
Strange. I typed this in the comments box at the bottom and ended up as a reply… This was supposed to be it’s own thread; I am not trying to hijack GreatWyrmGold’s!
Most glasses are circular. That makes your salt-test cup a salt circle. Ghosts are contained within the ring of your diagram.
Logic checks out to me!
Instructions unclear. I’ve learned I have a d0 and a d00. 😛
Eh. It’s not like you’re going to use either of those dice in actual play.
Unless you’re a fighter with a bastard sword. Then they’re kinda important.
Do you know the theory of the multiversal quantum dice? Each time you roll them you get the best possible outcome since they change with all the other dice of the universe getting infinite rolls and only settling the quantum dice superposition when such rolls happens in some corner of the multiverse exchanging their state with such roll. Basically you steal the best rolls from some part of the multiverse. Sadly the shops that sells them doesn’t exist on this universe for a probabilistic embargo of the multiversal probabilimancers guild 🙁
https://www.memesmonkey.com/images/memesmonkey/eb/ebe4aa7e9369b072a5cc86b79c2c3dbf.jpeg
I’ve never held any particular dice superstitions.
On the other hand, I’ve certainly had characters that the dice seemed set on treating a certain way.
Some couldn’t roll well to save their lives, some couldn’t roll poorly, and some would always roll well for specific things even though mechanically they shouldn’t be good at those things. (For example I had a wizard who had a whole +1 to perception but the die never came up lower than a 15 for perception checks.)
I have a theory about this… Tell me, do the folks with bad luck tend to be the “I want to play wacky characters” types while the high rollers tend to be optimizers?
No, no pattern at all I’ve ever noticed about it.
Everyone knows that dice can be recharged when touched to your left earlobe. Also if someone else touches your dice, then they would only roll good for them, and you have to cleanse them (by touching them to your left earlobe, for example).
Oh and dice have memory, thus when you don’t use them, always set them up with their highest value on the top so they learn what should they roll.
What happens if you touch them to your right earlobe?
Nothing, obviously. Everyone knows the magic is in the left earlobe! 😉
I do a Grand Tourney where I roll all my dice several times to figure out which ones are in the mood to roll high, and which ones are in the mood to roll low. The low rollers go back to the bag until the next tourney; the high rollers will get to participate in real die rolls.