I thought about titling this post “I’m a geek.”  This isn’t a secret at this point even if I don’t have any impressive nerd arguments to brag about.  The thing is I’m several kinds of geeks as is fairly common and a tiny bit of a math and statistics geek so this post at Delta’s D&D Hotspot about calculating values for randomness wasn’t news to me.  The follow up post largely supports the evidence of the gentleman at Game Sciences’ assertion about sharp edged dice. (Nor is it lost on me that I am obsessively testing my dice, that thing the poster above is afraid they will do.)  It doesn’t make sense to me that sharp edged dice would be more random than soft edged ones.  In fact it would seem to me that sharp edges would primarily just kill the energy of the roll sooner.  My own experience does in fact indicate that soft edges make the dice roll further and perhaps that makes any flaws in the dice more apparent by exaggerating their opportunity for influencing the roll.

Now, I am a bit of a statistics geek but this is going into an uncomfortable area where statistics meets physics and beyond reading some Stephen Hawking I am no Robert Oppenheimer.  In fact let me refer back to that Shameful Topless Robot Post above and let you read about the arguments between physics and engineering majors that eventually involved a vaccuum tunnel and randomoness tests until it took 4 montsh to get the game actually going. No, for the record, I won’t be going that far.  Nor am I qualified to.  But my experience in statistics largely involves databases and populations – tracking randomness in traits that are already occurant in the environment (collection or population) and I don’t have to wonder how it got there until I find a pattern.

The dice are different because these aren’t naturally occurring incidents – I’m experimenting.  So, the question comes up about the state of the experiment.  I had originally detailed out an excruciating exact plan of holding the die/dice (there is a valid linguistic argument about the singular being die or dice, more on that another time) a certain way, rolling it, positioning, etc…  Then, I began to get concerned that I was becoming too precise and might skew the results by the sample not being allowed enough naturally occurring randomness.  The answer I think is to control the force, use a dice rolling tray (White Wolf’s dice do have worn edges), grab the die/dice as it lands, take it back to roughly the same starting place and throw it with roughly the same force in roughly the same direction.  In other words, keep the environment for the roll consistent but not precise allowing the dice to act as they should ‘in the wild’ and do a large enough sample that it will create a representative sample.

Rolling with the right force but not controlling it may take a tiny bit of practice but I think will work.  Ideally I should do the test for a full set but I think I’ll start with a single one.  50 is the minimum sample for something like this (5 * 10) for a chi squared test.

500 I think will do it.