What's going on with GW and their dice?

[dice4thedicegod]

 

 

 

I am quite fond of the custodes dice

 

 

The Size is good , they aren't difficult to read , and I think they look pretty nice

Which is one and which is six? The skull or the imperial sigil?

Imperial Symbol is the 6 , Skull is the one , never had any complaints from my opponents on them being difficult the read , the imperial knight dice tho .. yea those are pretty bad.

I was just wondering as it seemed like the imperial symbol should be the six, but it looks kinda like a one!

[mel_danes]

The dice randomizer study was originally on Warseer, now gone. Modified and amended on Dakka.

https://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/That's_How_I_Roll_-_A_Scientific_Analysis_of_Dice

[Oxydo]

Interesting. Thanks

 

If bigger = better for dice then that explains why my SW killteam dice roll better than other (free) generic gw sets

 

 

 

 

 

My biggest problem with GW dice is that they don’t roll. The corners of them have become too pointy, and as such they bounce once or twice before standing. Back when the corners were rounded, you could actually roll them. These days there’s so little movement in the dice it feels half way to cheating.

[...]

But that's one of the best parts about their dice: they have actual corners. This leads these dice to be closer to the theoretical values. There's a reason casino dice are shaped like actual cubes. Small, rounded dice with holes for the pips tend to roll disproportionate amounts of ones.

Why do they do that (ones)?

 

 

Quite some time ago I read an article by (or about?) some who built a device to automatically roll dice and have some of his students evaluate the results. I think they had more than 100000 dice rolls. His theory was that it came from the uneven mass distribution (holes from the pips), and that the rounded corners could not prevent the resulting momentum to affect the result. IIRC the average was 29% ones, but went down to < 19% after "adding" corners to the dice. Also, bigger dice had better results, due to less of an effect the holes and probably also the manufacturing tolerances have. And translucent dice show you, if there is any air inside the dice.

 

It was not published as a scientific paper or anything like this, but it sounded plausible.

 

 

Right, lets start by clearing up some misconceptions about said "study".

 

First of all, they used quite a low number of dice giving them a pretty bad sample size. 144 Chessex and 36 modified GW dice.

 

Secondly, they compared random cheap dice with dice machined to a very exacting precision (this is the important part). And concluded that sharp corners are better than rounded corners when instead they should have concluded that expensive precisely machined dice are better than cheap budget dice with hollowed pips.

 

Thirdly, their modified GW dice are essentially just self-made precision dice. And yet again they confused the importance of sharp corners with the much more important parts of filling in the pips gives the dice an even weight distribution and quality manufacturing gives you a quality product with better performance.

 

All in all, they compared two different factors, sharp vs rounded and cheap vs quality, and didn't take the second into account.

If they wanted to compare sharp vs rounded corners they should have gotten, say 1000 dice of each type manufactured to the same standard. 

 

 

I've gotten slighty peeved over the years that the misinformation about "casino dice are the best!" keeps getting banded around, when what matters is buying so called precision dice. Which comes in both the sharp (Craps) and rounded corner (Backgammon) types, and they are both used in casinos for their corresponding games for obvious reasons. The manufacturing standard and process are identical (outside of the whole, shave down a corner part) and they are correspondingly expensive.

 

Pretty good write up that clears up quite a few misconceptions, and why you should avoid using the craps type for non-craps games. http://asl-battleschool.blogspot.com/2011/06/what-precisely-are-precision-dice.html

Edited January 21, 2020 by Oxydo

[Maritn]

@Oxydo: Thanks for the link, I'll take a look at the article.