"I've pre-rolled the ones out of it."

[alexxkay]

Darths & Droids is a pretty funny webcomic, which recasts the Star Wars movies in terms of role-playing games. Today's strip is most notable, however, for the commentary about dice superstition:

Pete, being the highly logical, calculating person he is, rejects all of that as superstitious nonsense. He instead applies the scientific approach. Over the years, he's collected somewhere around a thousand twenty-sided dice. Every so often, he gathers them all together. He sits down at a table and carefully and individually rolls each of the thousand dice, once. Of course, roughly a twentieth of them will roll a one. He takes those fifty-odd dice and rolls them a second time. After about an hour of concentrated dice rolling, he'll end up with around two or three dice that have rolled two ones in a row. He takes those primed dice and places them in special custom-made padded containers where they can't roll around, and carries them to all the games he plays.

Then, when in the most dire circumstances, where a roll of one would be absolutely disastrous, he pulls out the prepared dice. He now has in his hand a die that has rolled two ones in a row. Pete knows the odds of a d20 rolling three ones in a row is a puny one in 8,000. He has effectively pre-rolled the ones out of the die, and can make his crucial roll with confidence. Furthermore, being scientific about it means he knows that it doesn't matter who rolls the die for the third time, so he has no qualms about sharing his primed dice with other players, if that's what it takes to avoid disaster.

ETA: This reminded me of another story. I knew a fellow once who believed in operant conditioning for his dice. He'd roll a whole bunch of them at once, and the ones which rolled critical failures, he would smash with a hammer, "in full view of the others".

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Uh huh. The best part is how many people believe this. "Let's start a land war in Asia! The last few have gone so badly, surely the odds are with us and we're due for a success this time!"

[freerange-snark.livejournal.com]

OK, I don't read this comic, so maybe I'm just failing to recognize the tone, but is this being presented as actually logical or as a joke of the "even super-rational people have superstitions, no matter how much they dress them up in logic" variety? Because the odds of rolling any given number on a 20-sided die are always, always 1 in 20.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Is joke, yah.

[freerange-snark.livejournal.com]

Then it seems my tongue-in-cheek detector is malfunctioning. I'll send it out for repairs immediately.

[londo.livejournal.com]

Linked to from said comic:

http://laeren.zoggins.net/rpg/dice.shtml

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

Isn't this officially known as "Gambler's Fallacy"? Note that this is more superstitious than "lucky" or "unlucky" dice; if a die rolls consistently higher (or lower) than expected in the long term (and it's not just a case of you only remembering the memorable rolls), then there's a chance that it isn't really a fair die, and so it would useful (though dishonest) to use in certain situations.

Conditioning the dice

[metageek.livejournal.com]

I used to punish them by putting them in the freezer. Works even better with my d6 that changes color when it's cold.

[siderea]

Dude, can I just quote this post in its entirety in my journal? Cause it's full of win.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Any unlocked post is fair game by me. Especially ones that are 90% me quoting someone else in the first place :-)