If I roll out all the bad numbers first, I'll only have good numbers when it counts!
Actuality: Every bullshit nonsense joke roll comes up 18-20, while every roll in the climatic finale combat scene is 1-4.
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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This kind of thinking is wasteful. Every d20 has a finite lifespan. It was created, and it will, at some time in the future be destroyed, as all things are. That means it has a finite number of rolls in its lifetime, with an equal distribution of all possible outcomes. When you "practice roll" and get a nat 20, you have wasted one of the limited number of nat 20s that die has in it. Think of the 20s. Don't practice roll.
This is like a common house fly worrying about the lifespan of Cthulhu.
I try hard to only roll my old fair dice on felt (in the past) or plastic (since 3d printers). They work by having hard corners, those wear down making the dice less fair when rolled on surfaces harder than ABS
I guess if your dice were pre worn by polishing you can't make them worse, and fair polyhedric dice are pretty much no longer available
Online dice simulators are probably fairer still
You haven't seen how some of the folks I play with roll.
And of course the traditional sentence for dice which misbehave one too many times.
Maybe the real Cthulhu was the impossibly mind-breaking irrational thought experiments we subjected ourselves to along the way! :D
On the contrary, it will not be the number of rolls that destroys it, but being thrown away. You should roll it as much as you can before then, any time spent not rolling is time wasted!
🎶These dice are spinning around me
🎶The whole table's spinning without me
🎶Every sesh sends future to past
🎶Every roll leaves me one less to my last
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That’s stupid. But obviously how the dice strikes the table impacts its balance and therefore the probability of rolling specific numbers. So we must figure out what side need to strike the table first to decrease the probability of getting an undesirable roll. Boom, I out physicsed you’re probabilities.
Louis Zocchi - The guy who made fair polyhedral dice - reckoned the problem is that polyhedral dice become unfair through the edges being rounded so they roll more easily from some sides than others and they become less than square/round
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The trick is to say "this is just a practice roll" where the die can hear you, but wink at the GM so they know it's the real roll. That way, the die will be a spiteful little punk and throw out the nat20 for the "practice".
But don't do that too often, or the die will figure out the trick.
I love my fair dice (I've been playing for a while, so they're gamescience dice, though I think I have only used the zocchihedron in anger twice) there's nothing like rolling 1s and 20s with equal chances. In d&d 3.5 our last fight started when I attempted to kick open a door the ranger was peeking through and rolled a 1
And when the Nat 1 shows up, rub your eye because you had sand in it.
Thats the same argument to use taking a bomb on a plane. What are the odds of having 2 bombs on board?
Monty Hall would love this guy
It literally doesn't matter whether you stick with your door or switch.
Takes mathematical model and shoves it in the trash
No! I won't listen! It doesn't matter, I tell you!!!
Man there's something about the monty hall problem that just messes with human reasoning. I get it now and it's really not even complicated at all but when you first learn about it you tend to overthink it. Now I don't even understand how I was ever confused.
I think the problem is that people forget Monty Hall has information that the contestant does not. The naive assumption is that he's just picking a door and you're just picking a door. The unsophisticated viewer never really stops to think about why Monty Hall never points to a door and reveals a prize by mistake.
One way I've had success explaining it is to expand the problem to more than three doors. Assume 100 doors. Monty Hall then says "Open 98 doors" and fails to reveal a prize behind any of them. Now its a bit more clear that he knows something you don't.
Maybe? I don't think that was my issue. I think I was overthinking it and using the second "choice" as an event with separate odds.
The thing you're getting by switching is the benefit of the information provided by the person who revealed an empty door.
Before a door is open, you have a 1/3 chance of selecting correctly.
After you select a door, the host picks from the other two doors. This provides extra information you didn't have during your initial selection. The host points to a door they know is a dud and asks for it to open. So now you're left with the question "Did I pick the correct door on the first go? Or did the host skip the door that had the prize?" There's a 1/3 chance you picked the right door initially and a 2/3 chance the host had to avoid the prize-door.
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Are you being facetious, or do you want a non-mathematical explanation?
Imagine if he didn't always show the other zonk. "So you picked door number 1. Let's see what's behind door number 2!"
Door 2 reveals a brand new car
"... So, do you wanna switch to door 3?"
The funny thing is that this logic assumes the rolls are independent (so you can just multiply probabilities), but the definition of independence is that past rolls can't affect future ones. So basically it's saying that past rolls can't affect future ones and therefore they must.
How did you manage to spell the same word differently in the same sentence?
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Me every time I think about this.
Weirdly enough, it’s just the way probability works.
Once something stops being a possibility, and becomes a fact (ie. dice are rolled, numbers known) - future probability is no longer affected (assuming independent events like die rolls).
e.g. you have a 1/400 chance of rolling two 1s on a D20 back-to-back. But if your first roll is a 1, you’re back down to the standard 1/20 chance of doing it again - because one of the conditions has already been met.
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The die need to warm up. I have to practice my release to make sure of a good number. Don't take this from me.
The same logic applies to a nat 20 though
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