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125

All this does is linearly adjust the normally-flat 5% probability for each number to occur. What results is a increased or decreased probability of any number above or below average to occur, positively for advantage and negatively for disadvantage. See this AnyDice function set, which yields the following: Black is d20, orange is highest of 2d20, blue is ...

125

No, It's Not You can use AnyDice to visualize dice rolls really easily and see what's going on. The links will show a table with the results for each one. Here's 3d6. Here's 1d18. Here's both on the same screen for easy comparison. Aside from the obvious issue of not being able to roll 1 on 3d6 because the minimum on each die is 1, the numbers in the ...

108

Buy some. The best "replacement" for not having Fudge dice is to buy some! Grey Ghost Press (maker of Fudge) sells a tube of four Fudge dice for about 5 bucks, or a bag of twenty Fudge dice for about 15 bucks, but a lot of places are sold out. However, Indie Press Revolution just started carrying Fudge Dice (four or twenty) to support the FATE-based games ...

91

What kinds of bias can dice have? Lots of kinds, actually. Perhaps the most common accidentally occurring types of bias are: "Shaved" dice, which are not quite symmetrical, but slightly wider or narrower on one axis than on others. A shaved d6 with, say, the 1–6 axis longer than the others will roll those sides less often, making it "less swingy" ...

80

There are two different styles of pyramid-shaped d4 dice: The purple d4 on the left is read by having the number at the bottom be the result of the roll (in this case, a 1). The light blue d4 on the right is read by having the number at the point be the result of the roll (in this case, a 4). In both die types, the result is the number that is right ...

72

Short answer: really, practice is the only answer It's like any kind of memorization task, eventually you're going to get it, and you'll have trouble until then. But there are ways to make the memorization easier. You are going to have to correct them sometimes. Don't think of that as a failure. Just make the correction and move on. Don't default to ...

71

A good way to analyze the differences between the two distributions is to imagine a head-to-head contest between characters. First, suppose you have two identical characters, A and B, rolling off against each other with d20. They tie 5% of the time; 47.5% of the time one wins; 47.5% of the time the other wins. In contrast, if you use 3d6, ties occur 9.2% ...

63

Playing Cards You need a source of randomness, and a deck of playing cards can do it. If you need to roll a d20, shuffle the following 20 cards and draw one: Ace of Hearts (1) 2-10 of Hearts (2-10) Ace of Spades (11) 2-10 of Spades (12-20) Essentially the hearts are the face value, and the spades are face value +10. The nice thing about this method is ...

63

Yes it does. Your instinct is right. The more dice, the more likely you are to roll some 1s. If I'm reading you right you're just interested in whether any 1s appear in your rolled pool. It may not seem obvious but the easiest way to think of this is to model the probability of rolling all 2s-through-10s. That is $$P(\text{not }1)=\frac 9 {10} = 0.9$$ ...

61

You have it -- roll the D6, if you roll a 6, roll again. You'll get a flat probability curve. Alternatively, you could roll a D10 or D20, and integer divide the result by 2 or 4 respectively (that is, 1 or 2 on the D10 become 1, 3 or 4 become 2, etc.) -- whatever is comfortable for you.

56

Yes, this works: in statistics, it's known as rejection sampling. The very slight problem is that you could roll a large number of consecutive sixes so you can't guarantee that the procedure will finish within any particular amount of time. However, the average number of dice rolls needed is just 1.2 and there's less than a 0.5% chance of needing more than ...

52

Yes, a d100 is the same as 2d10 with one as the percentile. A d100 goes 1–100, a d10 goes 1–10. Neither allows you to roll a 0, because of the way you count a percentile dice. (10 on the percentile and a 6 on the other dice forms 6, 10 on one and 10 on the other is 100, no option will result in 0.) Do remember to use different colors of dice, else you will ...

52

Given the example of (2d6)*2 (henceforth referred to as 'Doubled Damage') vs (4d6) (referred to as 'Doubled Dice'): When you double the damage rolled instead of doubling the dice rolled, you create a more evenly distributed curve. Using either method, you have the best odds of rolling the average damage for the dice you are using but in the doubled damage ...

47

You read one die as the 10s place and the other die as the 1s place. Traditionally, (00, 0) means 100 instead of 0. Your set is marked to make forgetting which die is which, intentionally or accidentally, impossible. 10s| 1s | Reads as 00 1 1 00 2 2 10 0 10 30 1 31 50 6 56 80 9 89 90 0 90 90 1 91 90 ...

46

First off, those little +1s and +2s are going to be much more important. Being flanked is suddenly a matter of, say, a 50% increase in their chance to hit you rather than a 10% increase. You noticed this with Aid Another, but it'll come up other places as well. Any power that forces an enemy to grant combat advantage becomes much, much more powerful. Being ...

44

There is no name for the full set other than "a set of polyhedral dice." If I need to distinguish it from another set of polyhedral dice: I would say a Set of polyhedral dice suitable for playing DnD, as compared to a Set of dice for playing L5R (10d10) or a Set of dice suitable for playing Dilettante (10 d8s and 10 d4s) History The d4, d6, d8, d12, ...

42

Whenever my players roll before they establish their actions in the fiction (my system is Dungeon World), I say something like: "Whoa whoa whoa wait a moment. What are you doing and how are you doing it? We do not even know yet whether a roll is even required for that." I then have them explain what they do and if it triggers a move (=rolling), I'll have ...

42

The d3 is a rare die, and the d2 is a coin. Substituting a D3 can be done with any die whose total number of faces can be divided by 3. These include in your case the d6 and the d12. The easiest way to do this is to use a d6 and say the following: 1 → 1, 2 2 → 3, 4 3 → 5, 6 Or in other words, divide by 2, rounded up. You can also work in cycles, with one ...

41

I appears that bySwarm is right. Here are the results: along the X axis is the total bonus over the six ability scores. Along the Y axis, the probability, obtained from 1 million runs. Results below a total bonus of +3 have been purged from the count, so the grand total of runs is less than the original 1 million. It appears that the twelve 3d6 ...

40

There are a few ways to replicate dice. Cards. You can divide cards up into groups to simulate various dice. A d4 can be 10,J,Q,K of one suite. A d6 can be Ace-6 of one suite. A d8 Ace-8. d10: Ace-10 D:12 A-Q D:20 A-10 of one suit (1-10), and A-10 of another suite (11-20). D100: A-10 of one suite for the 1's digit, and A-10 of another suite for the 10's ...

40

The two ten-sided dice used together to generate a number in the range 1-100 (or 0-99) are percentile dice (plural). The same term is applies to a pair of twenty-sided dice, each marked 0-9 twice, used for the same purpose. Back in the Before Time, dice sets didn't include a die marked with double-digits; you would just roll different-colored dice, having ...

39

Okay, so... You want to measure values from ~0 - ~90. You want even distribution, and high granularity (i.e. as many distinct values as possible). Well, that's easy. (Ceiling(1d6 / 2) - 1) * 36 + (1d6 - 1) * 6 + (1d6 - 1) AnyDice Provides values of 0 to 107, with even probability, and each value represented exactly once. Notes: Ceiling(1d6 / 2) is ...

39

I assume you can get your hands on a small bag and a bunch of identical beads. Take 20 beads and write the numbers from 1 to 20 on them. Put them in the bag and (optionally) write "d20" on it. To simulate a d20 roll, just shake the bag and pull out a bead without looking. Then return the bead into the bag for the next "roll". This is basically how ...

39

Average The Skills If he has to use two skills, average the two skills together and then make one roll. In this case, that'd be a single roll to get 50 or below, since he has 50 in both skills (so the average is 50). If he was better at one skill than another, it'd look slightly different. Say he has a 50 in Stonecarving and 25 in Artistry. That makes the ...

39

The more dice you roll, the more the outcome focusses on the average, as the high and low rolls start evening out. While there's a reasonable chance of getting a 2 on 2d6 (1 in 36) there's no chance in hell you're getting a 240 out of 40d6 (1/6^40, vastly less than one in a trillion, I don't even know how to describe this number) The copout The easiest fix ...

39

The rule on modifiers applies only after you've determined a base roll. And to do that you must first resolve disadvantage (PHB page 173): Use the higher of the two rolls if you have advantage, and use the lower roll if you have disadvantage. Therefore, you always take the lower roll. This is a direct inverse of this answer here for rolling a critical ...

37

Hmmm, the rewording of the question makes my and other's discussion about diceless systems mostly off topic... Rather than deleting that part I'll just expand on "Approaches/schools of thought on when to not roll or ignore dice in a dice-based system." Techniques Step one is don't require rolls when they shouldn't be necessary. I've had GMs that have ...

37

Let's see if we can illustrate this. First thing, lets discard the notion that 3d6 and 1d18 are potentially equivalent. We know this cannot be the case as 3d6 cannot roll less than 3. So let's compare to something slightly more comparable. The result set of 3d6 has the same numbers as the roll of 1d16 + 2. Rolling a 1d16+2, we get numbers from 3 to 18 with ...

37

D100 and d%+d10 have exactly the same probabilities. If all 3 dice involved are fair, then they should come up with very similar distributions when rolled repeatedly. Obviously this isn't always the case as dice aren't consistent and there is a lot of randomness unless you roll a lot of times. It seems there might be some confusion as to why d% doesn't have ...

36

I experimented with the methods proposed (except liquid white-out; couldn't find any), with the following results: Paint: I used acrylic paint to fill in the numbers and paper towel to remove the excess. Very good opacity with this method, but I could not get enough paint to stay in the numbers during the removal of the excess. I tried various drying ...

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