A review of dice that came with the white castle

mmooss 4 hours ago|

For role-playing game purposes - not for gambling or serious competition or encryption of your super-valuable secrets - there is a question of what sort of randomization is needed:

* Truly random outcomes: Doesn't hurt

* Psuedo-random outcomes: Good enough?

* Unpredictable but unequally distributed outcomes: As long as nobody can know what will happen, is that sufficient?

* Unknown outcomes: As long as the players can't predict the outcome, that's what counts. If the game manager can avoid bias somehow, why not have them pick the number? Even use family birthdays, old phone numbers, etc., like people do with passwords.

All devices will output unequal distributions for most realistic N, and especially for shorter series. Games are played mostly in shorter series. Does it matter if, over the long run, the device outputs a perfectly equal distribution?

pennomi 4 hours ago|

Need a d10 roll? Just look at the last digit of the current second on your clock. Is it random? No, but it approximates randomness if you only make a roll sporadically.

celsius1414 3 hours ago|||

Use minutes if you need a D12 and are playing very slowly. ;)

travisjungroth 3 hours ago||

Wouldn’t that be hours and really really slowly? Could do seconds mod 12 (or any other factor of 60, which is a lot).

mmooss 3 hours ago||

Use hundredths of a second on the stopwatch. With a little math, and throwing out invalid results, you can generate a random number in any range < 100.

Though I do wonder if the hundredths are true or just for show. Maybe they're randomly chosen. :)

mmooss 3 hours ago|||

How is it not random?

travisjungroth 3 hours ago||

It’s pseudorandom. It’s predictable in theory because if you had another watch, or an amazing sense of time, you could predict it. Is that realistic? Not really.

Computers use their clock to generate pseudorandom numbers all the time (hehe). It’s great randomness for something like shuffling songs or a sorting algorithm. You don’t want to use it with some “adversarial”, like online poker.