So basically, I need to repeat the test with:
1000 rolls for each die.
More rigorous controls (e.g. ratting it around in a cup before rolling) because something fishy is going on with rolling these heavy dice by wrist flipping them the normal way.
It is certainly true that they just don’t roll that well. They spin in the air, but basically just kind of stab the table and flop onto the first available side.
The shaker would have to have a non-magnetic, highly durable backboard. Otherwise the gouging and chipping of the board by the sharp corners of the dice would continuously change the experimental setup. That is already happening in Rob’s test, BTW, but is probably not as much of a factor as it would be in a dice tower or other repetitive re-rolling mechanism.
I’ve used medieval chinese jade dice and medieval brass dice. The latter did not appear to be anything approaching fair, at least judging by the shape and quality, but we used them anyway. If you want a fair medieval game, play knucklebones!
Fair? Life isn’t fair. Even if you have your dice geometrically balanced and symetrical, odds are you pissed of the old gods or the new and they will fuck you up.
Some day my RPG players will die because I keep beefing up opponents and they keep having more than half their hit rolls under 10. I keep using different dice. I am just cursed with low rolls. Some day the law of average will keep up and they will all go down in flames.
Here’s what it’s like trying to roll these things.
Ouch! That table isn’t doing you any favors, and the dice aren’t doing the table any favors either. I wonder if some kind of rolling box would help, perhaps something that approximates a craps table?
Apparently due to common usage, “Dice” is now both the singular and plural. 
And when they do, don’t forget to dance around the room, shouting, “TOTAL PARTY KILL!!!”
Fuck. That. Noise.
That is the wonder and glory of the English Language; a constantly mutating thing with a voracious appetite. 
I’m usually cool with it but there are certain points of pedantry that I hold dear.
“Honey, I can’t find you. Where are you?”
“I’m busy! I’m holding my pedantry!”
There should be a pedantry thread, such as using traditional pronunciations to differentiate Primer (paint, things that go bang in cartridges) vs. Primer (instructional book).
I should make a small trophy with an engraved plaque and pull it out of my bag.
And yet the table may be a good real-world test with qualities that exacerbate the bias of the dice…which is what we want to find. A “perfect” rolling box might not simulate actual use.
“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.”
-Jamie Zawinski
“Alright honey, just be sure to clean up after!”
I don’t think that’s a valid approach. AIUI, these dice are essentially hand-made, so it is very likley that there is measurable variation between any two individuals. In fact, in the photo you can see variation between the two of them.
I doubt the dice are intentionally biased, but with something hand made it’s practically impossible to get the required degree of consistency to make summing results from different instances a ‘safe’ thing to do. IMHO.
Yeah, ignoring the pips-causing-different-weight issue, if you summed over a large enough set of dice, the random variance in the defects would make it appear that the dice were fair, when it’s really that each die is unfair but in a random way.
Thanks, that’s a much better way of saying it 
Edit: and actually, we’ve already seen an example of that approach in this thread, when @beschizza summed up all the results to get an average for each die. taken to the extreme, using that approach, if he’d rolled 150 '1’s and 150 ‘6’s’ the average would’ve been exactly 3.5. Is that a fair die?
It seems better to analyse the results separately, since one die could be biased, while the other may not.
If you add rolls for opposite sides of the dice together (resulting in 3 categories) do you see a pattern?
