Dice Are Unprincipled Slouches

Last week, as the Origins Game Fair loomed and our minds grew heavy with roiling polyhedrons and status effects; friend Joe brought an Earth-shattering Truth to my attention: Dice, those instruments of statistically random destruction, are strikingly less random than we thought.

An Engineering Professor at ASU, his message read, has posted a riveting study here, which put D6s from Chessex, Games Workshop and others to the test. While the scientific rigors of the experiment can be found in the link, its results are simple to summarize: most D6s on the market tend to roll ones. This merits repeating. Your dice really do roll more ones than anything else, and by a vast margin in some cases.

The standard six-sided die should land on each side roughly 16.6% of the time. In this study, which included over 144,000 isolated rolls; full-cornered dice with pips representing each side's value (like you might find packaged in Monopoly) rolled a one 19% of the time. Chessex and Games Workshop dice, with pips and rounded corners rolled ones an astonishing 29% of the time, on average! This means that most of the sniveling, weak-cornered little D6s on the market will fail you nearly twice as often as they should. Worse still, when contacted, Chessex didn't deny the findings, but indicated that they achieve significant material savings by rounding corners.

Fuck you.

From there, our intrepid scientist applied some crazy engineering voodoo to add sharp and accurate corners to the Games Workshop dice, which continued to roll ones 19% of the time. WTF! This, mind you, is in contrast to casino dice, which are machined with crisp corners and no pips or imprinted numbers, and performed perfectly. They are also pretty expensive.

So after reading this, I had two questions: does this problem extend to D20s and other exotic breeds of dice? And, if so, how can I ensure that my gaming implements behave accurately in various make-believe worlds which are (presumably?) based on statistically perfect chance?

Colonel Lou Zocchi, founder of dice company GameScience, sort of answered both questions. Col. Zocchi is an eccentric older gentleman, who fits well into the old school table-top wargamer archetype, and his videos on the GameScience site offer colorful commentary on the relative integrity of his products and those of his competitors. In short, these videos further illustrate just how fucked up all varieties of dice are due to poor molding and excessive polishing. Unbalanced, warped and literally eroded by the gravels of industry, our fate is beseiged by a willingness to offer products that fail in the very task which defines them. Boo! Hiss!

But yes; science, Colonel Zocchi and Vegas do offer some solutions. Dice, it seems, are at their best when they exhibit as few deviations from their basic shape as possible. Crisp, full corners and edges will ensure uniformity of motion and minimize any impact that minor weight imbalances might have. Those weight imbalances can be further mitigated by using dice with no pips or imprints (though I've yet to find blank D4-D20 varieties). At the very least, shallow numeral imprints near to the center of each surface seem to offer the best option available - and yes, Col. Zocchi sells them. In fact, this brings us to the photo above, and to our very first crafts display.

This past weekend, I bought a set of dice from the GameScience booth at Origins (Col. Zocchi was there in the flesh!) for a very reasonable $6. They were also available uninked - allowing me to add whatever colors I like to the numbers without dealing with exhisting paint. Most importantly, after a little sanding here and there, the dice are looking good, and are likely to be the most accurate set I've ever owned. After a weeks-long rash of 4s from my loathesome old D20, Krum, the Orc Barbarian, and his companions are certain to be thankful on Sunday.