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Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

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Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#4
Interesting, and at first I was excited about the possibilities in something like D&D, where a series of bad rolls can have you feeling down. "I'm due for a critical hit any swing now..."

Players would love that! Make my hero feel more heroic! The inevitable comeback!

But then I thought about the inverse case -- you are doing really well, and now you are due for a failure. Or series of failures. That would feel awful.

We have a lot of emotions around dice rolling. I wonder if players really want from their dice. Would players prefer dice that are secretly unevenly weighted towards good rolls? Would they still want those dice if they knew they were weighted?

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#5
post #3

This "unfair RNG" issue was big in Dota 2 (a popular video game) for a while. They ultimately implemented something similar and AFAIK now all "random" effects use it.

You mean the pseudorandom distribution? IIRC that was even a part of DotA 1.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#6
post #3

This "unfair RNG" issue was big in Dota 2 (a popular video game) for a while. They ultimately implemented something similar and AFAIK now all "random" effects use it.

I googled "RNG" because I wanted to know what it meant, but was presented with an interactive widget that generated numbers.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#7
post #4

Interesting, and at first I was excited about the possibilities in something like D&D, where a series of bad rolls can have you feeling down. "I'm due for a critical hit any swing now..." Players would love that! Make my hero feel more heroic! The inevitable comeback! But then I thought about the inverse case -- you are doing really well, and now you are due for a failure. Or series of failures. That would feel awful…

I made this specifically for my online D&D sessions. I can tell you that nobody was suspicious when I replaced the standard Math.random() with this version, and all of the "I think your dice function is broken" statements all the sudden stopped happening.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#8
A great application for this is in randomizing playlists. My friends, who are also CS grads and should know better, have often complained that their MP3 players, CD carousels, etc play the same music too often claiming that the random is broken, when a song repeating in a short period of time or other songs never playing is what you would expect from a truly random selection. Using this algorithm, you'd be sure to hear all of your songs. I'm guessing most music services already do something like this.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#9
post #4

Interesting, and at first I was excited about the possibilities in something like D&D, where a series of bad rolls can have you feeling down. "I'm due for a critical hit any swing now..." Players would love that! Make my hero feel more heroic! The inevitable comeback! But then I thought about the inverse case -- you are doing really well, and now you are due for a failure. Or series of failures. That would feel awful…

Better have games without dice rolls. Unexpected events could come from other non-random sources (like the combination of a lot of factors involving other players actions).

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#10
post #3

This "unfair RNG" issue was big in Dota 2 (a popular video game) for a while. They ultimately implemented something similar and AFAIK now all "random" effects use it.

You mean the pseudorandom distribution? IIRC that was even a part of DotA 1.

yeah but now it applies for I think everything. The last one to go was Spirit Breaker's bash. Prior to that PA's crit. Funny thing is that with PRNG you can "warm up" via farming creep camps so if you don't crit in say 5 attacks you can go look for a fight and be "guaranteed" a crit with your first swing.
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