Are you being cheated out of your critical hits?
That’s what the people at Game Science claim. Their founder, Louis Zocchi, says that because modern dice companies roll their dice in rock tumblers and use sub-standard plastics to make their dice, that they are not as statistically accurate as his dice are.
I tested several of the dice I purchased this year at Gen Con and I have to admit, Zocchi’s claims appear to be true (as “proved” by my very non-scientific test). I tested dice in groups of three to reduce the amount of time I spent rolling dice.
Results: Out of 150 rolls (tested 3 times), the Game Science dice rolled 15 20’s, while his competitors (three other large dice companies) only yielded 8 20’s.
I have conducted other similar tests for the unbelieving gamers in my groups and come up with similar results. Granted that a much larger data set would be needed to come to any firm decision, but the dice seem to yield more 20’s.
Has anyone else out there done any testing of their own? If so tell us about it.
-Andy
Boccob's Blessed Blog 
February 24, 2011 at 11:55 pm
Confused by this comment. So when you’re doubling the expected value of a particular roll on a d20 means that the others are LESS statistically accurate?
If one rolls 150 times, there should be about 7.5 20’s rolled (5% of 150, or half of 15), so 8 on the “substandard” dice is almost perfect in terms of expecte results. It’s the GS dice that appear off.
By this testing, your conclusion about which are more accurate fails your own test. The GS dics are generating double the number of 20 that it should. Maybe those don’t hold up after a few hundred rolls, but the conclusion you should’ve arrived at should be the opposite based on your sample.
Maybe this works for players so they can get what sounds like loaded dice, but if the DM the same dice as the players do, his won’t work out in their favor in net fashion.
Making sure in any game that the DM and players roll the same set of dice is what should happen is you want to keep it fair and eliminate any random anomolies, i.e. if any set of dice are inaccurate, the kinife cuts both ways…like in sports you switch the side of the court or field half way to factor out any uncontrollable or inconsistent conditions such as wind speed, basketball or goal size, etc. — same concept should apply to a DM using his common sense.
February 28, 2011 at 4:46 pm
A valid point that I also came to when I did the test. I think a larger test would need to be done and find a way to remove the “human factor”, as my (anyone’s really) rolling technique is biased.
March 17, 2011 at 7:55 am
I haven’t tested them but one of my DMs and I only use game science dice (He bought me mine) and we tend to roll a more even spread of numbers than other players who seem to hit a ‘sweet spot’ with one or two of their dice every once in a while.
March 17, 2011 at 8:34 am
I love mine too. Only thing…more even spread means more 1’s! If you go to Gen Con they will hand paint your dice any way you want. I had them make a critical threat die where my threat numbers (17-20 in this instance) where painted bright red and the rest of the numbers white. I haven’t forgotten to confirm a crit yet.
March 17, 2011 at 4:17 pm
All of ours are unpainted. I had problems confirming crits last night, actually, all three of my dice kept doing 20s followed by 2s or 3s.