OK, I’ll own up to “strange and mysterious”.
Astute observation. Is he doing it that way because he feels that he’s almost not cheating? (If he did it because he thinks it buries the evidence of cheating, he’s wrong, as you imply.)
We used them to randomize (with the obvious drawback) the day of the month, and the phase of the moon.
And… Amateur Barbarian: huh? D20s illegal in California? That’d sure be news to all the local game shops! Were you taking a pull at our collective leg?
Another way he might be “cheating”… using a Magic: The Gathering life die instead of a regular D&D 20-sided die. The latter has numbers spread out evenly across the die; the MTG die has the numbers in consecutive order (because they’re not meant to be rolled, but used as a tracker). So if you pick up and roll the die in a certain way each time you can guarantee a high roll.
Some of the math above mentioned a 1% chance.
Give all of such play, what are the odds that one of them would not have a lucky streak that might occur with a 1% chance sometime?
Or use a Formula De 5th gear die which has 20 sides, but only the numbers 11 through 20. Use it only half the time and 3/4 of your throws will be above 10 with enough randomization in the short term to not having to try to make your throws seem random.
Well, they are known to the state of California to cause cancer.
The chance of getting 14 or better on at least 15 tosses out of 20, as OP’s friend did, is 0.031%, a 3219-to-1 longshot.
The average toss was 15.1, compared with expected average 10.5 (s.d. 5.766). This puts the series of 20 tosses 3.57 standard deviations above the average. This is 4400-to-1 against.
This was more than a 1-in-100 lucky streak.
I have used Rolz in the past. It’s great. I highly recommend it if you’re concerned about cheating. It also makes keeping up with stuff a lot easier.
That’s interesting. I haven’t had a chance to roll dice in a real game in well over a decade but I do have some M:TG D20 counters and likely would have scooped them up if I was going to play, unaware that they differed from traditional dice.
So in tens of thousands of plays, wouldn’t you still expect the longshot to occur sometime?
we use https://dicelog.com
all but one player that is
I asked whatsapp to incorporate a dice roller, no answer yet
Just like google hangouts (browser version) you can type /roll1d20 in it and it rolls a dice in your chat
But rolling physical dice is way more fun than punching a button.
And playing in person is way more fun than doing it electronically - but if you’re going to play via email it helps having a system for dice rolls.
Right you are. I see now the OP is indeed talking about email.
Certainly. Now, can we guess whether the result was due to
- selectivity by OP
- chance fluctuation
- organized cheating by OP’s friend.
We’ll need prior probabilities: @ OP, do you think the guy might be a cheater?
I’m going to ignore OP’s answer and play the hunch, cheating being commoner than some think, that OP’s friend was cheating.
But to be confident we need OP to accumulate more data. Please also record, for each toss, what number was hoped for. (Would the guy be so brazen as to continue cheating after that “lucky” streak?)
If I can piggyback on this for a moment (I didn’t think this deserved its own topic):
A local gaming store has a discount offer: Spend $50+ and the next visit you can show your receipt and get either a flat 10% discount or roll a d20 and get a corresponding discount.
By my thinking, it would make more sense to roll the d20: you have nine chances of getting a lower discount (1-9), one chance of an equal discount (10) and ten chances at a greater discount (11-20). Although slight, over time you would statistically get a larger discount than staying with the 10%
Of course, the actual savings are likely insignificant (11% vs 10%?) and you’d need to spend a lot of money to make the rolls average out (so the store as a whole would lose slightly more if everyone rolled but your individual results could vary wildly unless you’re making 100+ $50 purchases) but rolling is still the best option, right?
I think you’re right that it makes much more sense to roll. Not only do you have 11 chances of getting a better discount, but rolling a few points under 10% probably wouldn’t bother you much for most purchases. Would you really be all that upset paying 92 (8% discount) dollars instead of 90 dollars (10%) on a hundred-dollar purchase?
This is an obvious goof but I feel compelled to pick my own nit rather than let a Doper do it for me. I meant 11 chances of getting an equal or better discount.