My Attempt at Dice Theory
This post originally appeared on October 30, 2008.
On a lazy lazy lazy Sunday afternoon my husband and I were rolling up a new Star Wars character. Because it was a lazy day we were doing this from our bed. After some terrible rolling on the comforter I decided that the prudent course would be to do it again and this time on a hard surface. The results in that moment were quite astounding. There really was a difference in the overall scores not to mention that I wasn’t dealing with cocked dice.
Here are the different numbers I rolled up:
Comforter ~ 8, 15, 12, 14, 9, 9 and 10
Book ~ 14, 16, 14, 14, 9, 6 and 15
Overall it was much better. This got me wondering… Do surfaces really “control” the outcome of dice rolling or is it really just strictly statistical? Once again I mention how boring and lazy a day it was…
I grabbed a random blue d6 and went crazy. I picked surfaces all over the house, rolled each die 30 times and then did all kinds of math/charts! Woo. Below I will give descriptions and the charts that correspond. Have fun and enjoy!
This first chart lists the different surfaces that I used:
Hard Surface Book: Book of Exalted Deeds, Soft Cover Book: Hackmaster Gamemaster’s Guide, a glass table top, a wood table top, carpet, standard battle mat and a gingerbread man cookie plate. If there is a small ‘c’ next to the number it means that the die was cocked.
These next two little charts show how many times each number was rolled on each of the surfaces.
Then the final one is the big one. It breaks down “number rolled” over the number of times rolled and then gives a percentage of the time a number came up on that particular surface. The graph compares all the surfaces at the same time.
What does all this mean? Well here it is:
1′s were rolled 36/210 times on multiple surfaces equalling 17.5%
2′s were rolled 41/210 times on multiple surfaces equalling 19.5%
3′s were rolled 35/210 times on multiple surfaces equalling 16.6%
4′s were rolled 42/210 times on multiple surfaces equalling 20%
5′s were rolled 36/210 times on multiple surfaces equalling 17%
6′s were rolled 20/210 times on multiple surfaces equalling 9.4%
If all numbers were rolled equally, it should have been 16.6% for each number. As you can clearly see, it was not. Does this just mean I don’t have good experimental controls? Does it mean that it was just a flawed die? Or does it mean that surfaces really do matter? To be honest to figure out the answers to those questions would require a lot more time, energy and math than I feel like doing. But it was an interesting study and I think for fun I’ll roll on the Gingerbread Man Cookie Plate and let people look at me like I’m crazy.
What’s the biggest lesson I learned?
Easy……. I’ve got way too much time on my hands!
Does changing the surface you roll on really “control” the outcomes?
( surveys)
