So how *exactly* do you tell whether dice are fair?

By Vorpal Sword, in X-Wing

The new tournament faq addresses this now. You can share dice as well as templates if you have any doubts.

(2) Wait, you're just telling people it's okay to cheat!

You know what's cheating? Taking a good post and spreading it out over three posts to farm more likes. Despicable.

Liked 'em anyway.

That's not why I did it, I swear! I knew I was coming up against the character limit for a single post, and three sections made more sense than two.

I play a few video game conversions of tabletop games. In the forums of every single one of those games, there are dozens of threads telling the devs that they need to fix their "broken" Random Number Generator. Nothing anyone can say will convince these users that the RNG is not broken, it's random...the devs can release their source code, and then the statistics can be explained in easy words, but still "There is NO WAY a random dice program should be rolling that many 1s so often!" (One game provider created his own Dice Rolling Machine, along with the promise "...if you donate to the site and are unhappy about the rolls, let me know and I will pull a die out of the machine, melt it flat and mail it to you, as an object lesson to the other dice", I was particularly fond of his solution).

But anyway, here I was thinking "at least real board/tabletop games won't have this problem!"

How wrong I was! :lol:

Edited by spacebug

Honestly, I don't even get how people can accuse others of having weighted dice if they're unmodified FFG x-wing dice. Like, if you're going to go through the effort of buying a ton of official dice to roll thousands of times each in order to find the ones that roll the best, sure, you can have that advantage.

Edited by Soshi

Tried the dice app.

It rolls green dice much better than I ever could.

I shall roll red dice with my hands and pray to the app for green dice.

Is this considered as cheating? ;)

X-Wing games overall roll a small number of dice compared to many tabletop wargames. 99% of this particular first world problem that does not really exist will disappear if players can learn some basic ideas about probability. Obviously, many players do understand dice probabilities but it is clear from reading this forum that many people do not. The statistics and ideas can be understood by anyone, you dont need to be a math whiz working at a nuclear power plant to parse out what you need to know.

1) No x-ray machine is needed

2) No salty hot tubs are needed for checking your opponent's dice

3) No slicing of dice is needed

4) No micrometers are needed

5) No sacrifices to the elder gods is needed to divine the fidelity of your opponents dice

There will be streaks, it is a mathematical certainty.

If your opponent is cheating, there will be abundant other signals. After a long teaching career I GUARANTEE that if your opponent is a cheater you will not need to evaluate their dice to make this determination.

TLDR: Your opponent is PROBABLY NOT using loaded dice.