A friend of mine thinks it's possible to remove "bad" d20 rolls by exhausting them - continuously rolling the dice during the game, leaving only good rolls.
It appears true - he seems to roll an unusual number of 20s.
is this plausible?
Tell me more
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No. Unfortunately, superstitions about dice do not actually impact probability. However, a die can be unbalanced and thereby generate uneven results. What your friend is experiencing is confirmation bias, wherein he is looking for bad rolls, and finds them, and then looks for good rolls and finds them. In order to falsify the claim of "exhausting bad rolls" have him, over the course of 5 sessions, track every single roll he makes in an excel spreadsheet or on a piece of paper. However, over those 5 sessions, use 5 different d20s. This should demonstrate if any given die is unbalanced and the falseness of his claim. There may also be elements of positive bias(HP:MoR) as a component here, as your friend has an explanatory theory that seems to fit his observed confirmations and thereby has positive confirmation of that theory. A third potential explanation is methods of rolling dice. There are techniques to make certain types of numbers more probable in a roll (this is cheating, of course...). Another test is to use a dice tower to generate the random numbers for rolls during a game, something I'd recommend anyways just because of the almost ritualistic elements of dropping dice into the top and awaiting their result (and not seeing the board disrupted due to errant dice.) |
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