Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/06/check-the-balance-of-your-gami.html
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So now I know how to ‘cheat’ at 40k with store bought dice and a bit of testing.
Though I doubt that would stop my dice from rolling a ‘yahtzee’ of ones at just the time I don’t want it.
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Salt water? I thought it was nitric acid?
I’m stll pissed about a game of Imperium Romanum II from twenty years ago. I spent six hours carefully outmaneuvering the Eastern Roman Empire (played by a disliked acquaintance) with my Parthians, finally managed to bring them to battle in a situation where they were so hopelessly outmatched that the only way for their army to survive was for me to roll a one and them to roll a six, and…
Guess what the dice did?
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Hm, salt water shouldn’t harm any type of dice or the numbers printed on them, right?
if you don’t use sugar cubes with food colouring as dice it should be fairly safe
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Most dice are still too dense to float in salt water even when supersaturated. Salt water only worked for about 5% of my dice.
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In recent videos he switched to epsom salt, which I guess gives you a denser solution.
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D6s fucking hate me.
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Get some precision dice like the casinos use. They sell cancelled ones on amazon. Of course, the die might still hate you, but it’s balanced so it should hate everyone equally.
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Dang, finally had time to watch the video itself, and I wish I had known this before I bought 3-4 sets of dice half a year ago. Playing, we’ve had dice that really seemed biased towards 20s or low rolls, and this might explain it… And they’re Chessex dice, too, just like the problematic ones in the video.
Hey, I figured we have ourselves some technical types here on the bbs, and I have some custom dice I wouldn’t wanna end up having any damage to, but yeah sure, I am being overly careful, most likely…
The sick thing isn’t (just) that you can cheat by checking your dice to see which way they roll (and having multiple die, some that roll high and some that roll low)… it’s that you actually have to make a very hard conscious choice /not/ to cheat at least minimally. (And buy tons of dice and check them for fairness, then throw out all the unfair ones- ad opposed to throwing out the “bad” dice and keeping the “good” dice…)
My first set of dice were unfair low. That was exceptionally frustrating and we had no idea that our dice were intentionally crappy…
If you care [1], then online dice “rollers”. I haven’t tossed a physical die in years.
[1] OTOH, if you’re dealing with an RPG group where cheating is a realistic possibility, you need better friends. Cheating on a collaborative narrative game is just pathetic.
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Those are not so nice when you gotta roll like 40 of them… which I think evens out the ‘bad’ dice from the ‘good dice’
I use electronic dice, heathen that I am.
d20s also need to be changed fairly regularly because they wear down easier than smaller dice*, though d6s are more likely to have flaws because they are so common* (increased tool wear, larger cavatiy tools, etc.). If you are super obsessed about “fair” dice the best advice would be to use d10 dice pools*, or a d100 system*.
*This is all second hand information I have not verified, but it has some logic to it.
The missing link! http://makezine.com/2015/06/16/check-balance-gaming-dice/
sweat is a saline solution, if your custom dice don’t loose the coating with normal use the salt itself is fairly safe. though I wouldn’t dunk a wooden die, but less so because of the salt but more the water.
Check the balance of your gaming dice by floating them in salt water
I read:
Check the balance on your gaming dice by floating them in salt water
and then I was, like, Wait, what? Where do I get dice that get experience points? What does that even mean?
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The number pattern on the die is another way to balance it. Since opposing faces add to n+1 I’m usually skeptical of “high” or “low” rolling dice. Not that it can’t be a thing, but I think the superstitions overstate the actual impact.
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