Lawfuldice.com FAQ

What does “Die Fairly!” mean?

“Die” is the singular of “dice.” “Die Fairly!” means that if you roll a “1” and your PC “Ragnar the Mighty” goes to Valhalla at level one, blame the universe for wanting him dead not our dice.

Are “Company X’s” dice fair?

We do not comment on any specific company’s dice offerings. The reason being is Lawfuldice.com tests individual dice. We make no claims about dice we have not tested.

Can you test my die?

No. We do not have the ability to accept dice for testing from outside sources.

How can you prove you rolled my die 1000 times?

We have a “Show Me” guarantee. As part of the process to evaluate each die, we capture an image of each roll. Just send us your die’s serial number (under the barcode)and we will send you a link to a file download. Open the file and you will find the image of all 1000 rolls.

How do you roll the dice?

We built a robot named “Fortuna.” She rolls each dice exactly the same way, with exactly the same force every time. Each roll is captured by a camera, the die face identified and logged. At the end of the testing sequence, a calculation is performed. Any dice that fails is destroyed. Successful dice are offered for sale on this site.

Do you test D12, D10, D8, D6 or D4?

D20 are the only dice type we can test for now. Testing additional dice types is in our road map, so check this space for updates!

Do you roll every die 1000 times?

Yes. We provide, on request, an image of all 1000 rolls of your die as proof we did the rolling.

Why do you test dice?

I started playing “Dungeons and Dragons” when the only dice you had came with the books in a red, cardboard box. Even then, you have to color in the numbers with an included crayon! As time went on I moved on to acrylic dice and many flavors of other plastic. Over the years I heard endless players either claim a specific die was “lucky” or “unlucky.” I saw players roll so many consecutive high numbers on a d20 that people complained it was a “loaded” die. “Unfair” dice really do impact a game. Some failure is expected in a tabletop game, but ongoing, crushing defeats suck the fun out of any game. Conversely, having a player that cannot fail is arguably even less fun. Defeat and victory must be balanced.

After many years of this I realized no one had offered “tested” dice for sale. Of course, some companies purport to sell better manufactured, more precise dice that are “fair,” but those are hollow claims.

The only way to be sure is to roll the dice many times and do the math. So I built a robot to do the rolling, capture the numbers and do the statistics. I call her “Fortuna.” Named for the Roman goddess of luck and fate.

I test dice to keep the chaos in a tabletop game chaotic, not predictable.

What happens to the dice that fail your tests?

Dice that fail during testing are humanely destroyed. It really is quite painless. They never know what hit them.

How do you evaluate the dice?

Add the question in the title field and answer in the post edit area. On your right hand column, you will notice the FAQ Groups box. These groups are like categories in WordPress posts. You can use groups to sort questions into topics or sections.

Why roll the dice 1000 times?

It takes roughly 100 rolls to get a statistically significant result on a D20 die. That said, more rolls are more data and more data gets a more accurate score. 1000 is a nice, round number, so we went with it.

How do I interpret the graph for my die?

We roll each die 1000 times in our “Fortuna” dice rolling robot. The graph above represents the results for an example die that passed testing. The left side is the quantity of each die face rolled, represented by the vertical, light blue bar. The bottom has the die faces (1-20). In this example, “Fortuna” rolled 58 “20” and 50 “11.” Note the dark blue line. This represents a perfect result. Each face comes up 50 times during 1000 rolls (50 x 20 = 1000).

You will note that the graphs for all our dice have a “saw tooth” appearance. No die will exactly conform to the “perfect” outcome above. We use a “Goodness of Fit” statistical analysis to determine if a die rolls in an expected way as compared to a statistical benchmark. Please refer to the “Goodness of FIt” section of the FAQ for more information on this.

In case you are wondering, this is what a die that failed our testing looked like.

Rest assured, if we sell it on Lawfuldice.com, your die will never have a graph that looks like this!

What is “Goodness of Fit?”

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Are Lawful Dice fair?

“Fair” requires some explanation. Whether it be a tiny defect in the surface, an air bubble hidden within the die structure or some extra paint on the “1”, no die is perfect. When rolled these tiny factors will impact the likelihood that the die will roll one face more than another. Collectively, these factors make the die “unfair.”

Some dice are so unbalanced that you can roll them only 100 times and see an unfair pattern. However, it may take thousands of rolls for another die to show its unfairness. As no die is perfect, roll any die enough times and it will become unfair eventually.

No one can promise a “fair” dice, but what we can do is guarantee that any die you purchase on our site rolled numbers in a distribution that fell within the expected outcome to a statistically significant number.

Promising any more than that is just not possible.

What does “P-Value” mean?

Fair warning, this part of the FAQ goes into the statistical weeds, so you are warned.

First, it should be made clear that a “p-value” is not a measure of die “fairness.”

“P-value” is defined by Wikipedia as follows:

In statistical hypothesis testing, the p-value or probability value is the best probability of obtaining test results at least as extreme as the results actually observed, assuming that the null hypothesis is correct.

https://www.graphpad.com/guides/prism/6/statistics/stat_compareoande.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value