Do your dice seem to roll a lot of 1′s?
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
I came across an interesting forum post over at Warseer. In short, a college type did a project to test that theory and the normal Games Workshop dice came up with about 29% 1′s out of 1000 rolls. Check out the full post here
Now, is this post for real? Honestly, I couldn’t find anything official with a quick bit of looking. But it did provide some sound reasoning. If a die has airbubbles in it, it can affect how it rolls. Likewise, rounded edges might have an impact. Therefore, they suggest using only clear corner edges dice like Las Vegas.
But it got me wondering, are my dice showing patterns? My little black GW dice have always seemed friendly to me… So I’m doing my own little experiment.
I rolled my 32 GW dice. A lot. First seperately by color at least 300 rolls of a die for each color. A Statistically small sample, true, but as sample size grows abnormalities should only decrease. Each face should come up an average of 16.67% of the time. The results were pretty close to that, with the highest being less then 19%. A far cry from the 29% claimed in the forum post.
But, we’ll give the benefit of doubt, so I tried then rolling all 34 of my GW dice together several times (netting over 700 rolls total). Again, pretty close to average. In fact, when compiled together with eariler rolls of the same dice this is what I got:
Grand totals (out of 1328 rolls):
1 – 16.9%
2 – 15.6%
3 – 17.4%
4 - 16.6%
5 – 16.6%
6 - 16.6%
As more rolls were added, it kept getting closer to the mathematical average. No massive deviations. It’s interesting to note that the original post tried squaring off the edges and it had a great effect in reducing the errors. It’s also interesting that not even a single person was able to reproduce the huge 29% result for any single facing.
My conclusion? They probably just had some bad dice. It’s a matter of quality control vs cost, and for simple table top wargames cheaper is typically better. Vegas, on the other hand, uses very preciely made dice that roll very consistently with the mathematical averages. Those dice are also a lot pricier. It’s the difference between store-brand batteries and Duracells. Store brand is a whole lot cheaper and will generally do fine, but Duracell will always be consistently good without any weak ones in the mix.
Still, if your dice seem to betray you a lot on the table, it could be worth your time to roll them a couple hundred times and see if it’s just your imagination, or if you might actually have some shoddily made dice that slipped through QA. It’s human nature to remember the bad rolls more frequently after all, so sometimes it’s just a matter of perception. At any rate, enjoy your gaming 
