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A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)

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Re: A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)

#11

Post by the_af »

shortercode wrote: post #8
the_af wrote: post #6

I found this fascinating, if true: > The reason casino dice have such sharp edges is to get the to stop rolling faster with fewer tumbling. The more a die tumbles the more likely it will present any issues with it. If I understand it correctly, the justification is this: if a die is biased (usually a heavier face), this bias will manifest with a higher chance the longer the die rolls. But if it stops abruptly, for wh…

I have quite a few sets of dice for D&D, nearly all of which favour aesthetics over balance. But saying that I prefer to use simpler plastic with rounded edges at a table. Sharp edge dice stop very abruptly and tend to show bias based on how they were held. The same is true of metal dice which are heavier, and tend to land instead of roll. This isn’t really the outcome you want.

Your explanation also makes sense. Why then do casinos prefer sharp edges? Casinos strive to remove skill as much as possible.

Re: A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)

#12

Post by brador »

the_af wrote: post #11
shortercode wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have quite a few sets of dice for D&D, nearly all of which favour aesthetics over balance. But saying that I prefer to use simpler plastic with rounded edges at a table. Sharp edge dice stop very abruptly and tend to show bias based on how they were held. The same is true of metal dice which are heavier, and tend to land instead of roll. This isn’t really the outcome you want.

Your explanation also makes sense. Why then do casinos prefer sharp edges? Casinos strive to remove skill as much as possible.

They stop sooner so more rolls per hour. House edge locks in as rolls count increases.

Re: A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)

#13

Post by mmooss »

For role-playing game purposes - not for gambling or serious competition or encryption of your super-valuable secrets - there is a question of what sort of randomization is needed:

* Truly random outcomes: Doesn't hurt

* Psuedo-random outcomes: Good enough?

* Unpredictable but unequally distributed outcomes: As long as nobody can know what will happen, is that sufficient?

* Unknown outcomes: As long as the players can't predict the outcome, that's what counts. If the game manager can avoid bias somehow, why not have them pick the number? Even use family birthdays, old phone numbers, etc., like people do with passwords.

All devices will output unequal distributions for most realistic N, and especially for shorter series. Games are played mostly in shorter series. Does it matter if, over the long run, the device outputs a perfectly equal distribution?

Re: A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)

#14

Post by mmooss »

the_af wrote: post #6

I found this fascinating, if true: > The reason casino dice have such sharp edges is to get the to stop rolling faster with fewer tumbling. The more a die tumbles the more likely it will present any issues with it. If I understand it correctly, the justification is this: if a die is biased (usually a heavier face), this bias will manifest with a higher chance the longer the die rolls. But if it stops abruptly, for wh…

At least in some games, such as craps, IIRC casinos require the dice to bounce off the back wall of the rolling area.

Re: A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)

#15

Post by ekropotin »

fecal_henge wrote: post #9

Is a 155 throws enough to evaluate bias? Seems more times than I'd like to roll some dice, but not enough to gain enough measurement confidence. By what criteria is the person assigning the traffic light ratings? What about face coplanarity? Get this enthusiast in a metrology lab.!

Sounds like a very fun hack project to build - automatic dice evaluator.

Re: A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)

#16

Post by exmadscientist »

Cute, but dreadfully silly.

The giveaway is the handling of uncertainty. That's too many decimal places for some of these measurements: 10um (0.01mm) is not reliably measurable by a cheapo caliper, and even trying to do it with a good caliper or micrometer, you'll find that everyday objects simply cannot be reliably straightforwardly measured with that level of precision. (You need cleaning procedures, standardized handling, standardized sampling, etc.) And quoting "4.1g (5.1% too heavy)" versus "4.0g (2.6% too heavy)" is just absurd: that last digit really doesn't mean much. So don't treat it like it does.

For example, on my random first d6 at hand, I get 4.47g from my nice scale and somewhere between 14.82 and 14.85 mm on the first face dimension, depending on how I measure, from my Mitutoyo caliper. I have a micrometer in the shop, but you can see that it'd be pointless to go get it. The next two faces are (14.79 to 14.84) and (14.76 to 14.87), so it's consistently like this.

Likewise, χ² to five decimal places isn't terribly useful... especially since you haven't really described the test you're running....

In general there's a lot of "look at me make measurements" here that might be impressive. There is very little "what is the true value of this measurement, and how well can we assert that", and simply not enough "is this the right thing to be measuring, and how much does that factor matter". That last one is critical: the actual weight of a die is, I think, not important at all. It's weight distribution that matters, so who cares about 0.1g of difference. Unless you're making a batch uniformity claim? But really this evidence just says more about your measuring equipment. And it's well known that different color resins, especially black, white, and red, are pretty differently loaded with pigments, so they have different properties. You can't just expect them to be the same, but the author seems surprised that they aren't.

And then we get to "These dice are safe to use" without any real description of the criteria or threshold. I say "this report is not safe to use (for serious purposes)"!

It's cute, it's a fun little minute to read on the internet this morning. But it's silly, and if my students back in the day or coworkers today sent it to me, they'd be getting red ink and remedial lectures in measurement uncertainty.

Re: A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)

#18

Post by cl3misch »

fecal_henge wrote: post #9

Is a 155 throws enough to evaluate bias? Seems more times than I'd like to roll some dice, but not enough to gain enough measurement confidence. By what criteria is the person assigning the traffic light ratings? What about face coplanarity? Get this enthusiast in a metrology lab.!

No, it's much too low. OP shows Pearson's X^2 for their results, but that alone is meaningless. p-value would be the interesting metric. I haven't computed it (although we could from the results) but I expect it to be very high, i.e. it's likely to observe these results even with perfect dice.

Re: A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)

#19

Post by pennomi »

mmooss wrote: post #13

For role-playing game purposes - not for gambling or serious competition or encryption of your super-valuable secrets - there is a question of what sort of randomization is needed: * Truly random outcomes: Doesn't hurt * Psuedo-random outcomes: Good enough? * Unpredictable but unequally distributed outcomes: As long as nobody can know what will happen, is that sufficient? * Unknown outcomes: As long as the players ca…

Need a d10 roll? Just look at the last digit of the current second on your clock. Is it random? No, but it approximates randomness if you only make a roll sporadically.
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