i just saw this and am going to test all my dice

Back in my day we played without looking for good dice. and we liked it

55 minutes ago, Fuzzywookie said:

Back in my day we played without looking for good dice. and we liked it

Once a player in my role playing campaign brought a d6 which was visibly distorted, did not even looked like a cube. I tried it and rolled 6 like 9 out of 10 times. In the system we played, projectile weapons used exploding dice for the damage rolls. The guy was trying to convince me that there was nothing wrong with that dice. I told him that he could use it in the game, but I will use the same dice against him. He decided to get another one...

Yep. Tested mine, and was sorely tempted to keep the "loaded" ones, the "hot" ones, but kept only the dice that presented a fair balance of results. Tested 4 complete sets of dice, and kept only 7 reds and 5 greens. Then, one day, during a game against a regular opponent, he mistakenly picked up three of my greens and jumbled them into his pile, then again with four of my reds before I realized what he'd done. And guess what? I'm back to rolling crap. Absolute. Utter. Crap.

The fever edges a dice have, the more uncertain the watertest is.

The dice that come in Illuminati Deluxe Edition (by Steve Jackson Games) are loaded or more spesificly "filed". There are two six sided dice which have flat "ones" and convex "sixes" and that gives you higher results. And because in that game high results are bad and it is THE game of conspiracy it might be intentional technical conspiracy and not just bad production values...

32 minutes ago, Arthur_McGuire said:

The dice that come in Illuminati Deluxe Edition (by Steve Jackson Games) are loaded or more spesificly "filed". There are two six sided dice which have flat "ones" and convex "sixes" and that gives you higher results. And because in that game high results are bad and it is THE game of conspiracy it might be intentional technical conspiracy and not just bad production values...

That is hilarious.

Sadly I don't think the watertest works with D8s. The only way for us to test our dice is to build a valid dice throwing machine, I think I saw someone do this. Personaly my appraoch to keeping down dice bias is to randomly pick them every roll from a massive pool of 12 of each. It is a bit of a mess , but I usually can keep them off the table.

Re-rolling on X-Wing D8s also tends to produce the same result. This is because they are simply picked up and dropped, and rotate along one axis. Ask for opponents to give the dice a thorough shake if you are forcing them to reroll.

2 hours ago, Admiral Deathrain said:

The only way for us to test our dice is to build a valid dice throwing machine, I think I saw someone do this.

Seems a good moment to remember the awesome Dice Roller 3000.

It's almost never your dice.

Randomness is clumpy. People see patterns in randomness that don't exist.

1 hour ago, Tlfj200 said:

It's almost never your dice.

Randomness is clumpy. People see patterns in randomness that don't exist.

I've read that this 'ability' of humans to recognize patterns where there aren't any is a survival trait. It behoved our ancestors to see false positives. If you were walking in the bush and thought you saw a tiger where there wasn't one, you would be more likely to survive and pass your genes than if you were walking along and missed the real tiger.

14 hours ago, Alekzanter said:

Yep. Tested mine, and was sorely tempted to keep the "loaded" ones, the "hot" ones, but kept only the dice that presented a fair balance of results. Tested 4 complete sets of dice, and kept only 7 reds and 5 greens. Then, one day, during a game against a regular opponent, he mistakenly picked up three of my greens and jumbled them into his pile, then again with four of my reds before I realized what he'd done. And guess what? I'm back to rolling crap. Absolute. Utter. Crap.

I am OCD about that, either we use only my dice or only yours. Segregation is a thing.

It's all confirmation bias. This is a game about positioning, it happens to have dice too.

23 hours ago, Tlfj200 said:

It's almost never your dice.

Randomness is clumpy. People see patterns in randomness that don't exist.

But FFG have confirmed that the dice ARE weighted in unpredictable ways due to production inconsistency. It's possible you really do have 'bad dice'.

What about vassal? I know my RNG is out to kill me. Sozin and his wonderful Lady Luck site really help verify the atrocity.