Balance-Testing the BattleSchool Precision Dice

Last year, Chris Doary debuted some ASL themed precision dice; since then, he has added a few more to the mix. Although I have never been one to be attracted to the precision dice lure, I don't have much willpower where ASL themed items are concerned. Since he started offering them, I have acquired a number of them and last October I started to use them as my regular ASL dice, replacing the standard MMP dice I had been using forever.

However, I will say that from the very first ASLOK when the first dice appeared, I was concerned that the BattleSchool dice, despite ostensibly being precision dice (i.e., very finely balanced dice), were rolling low an awful lot.

It's hard to get a true measure of that just from observing the die results of normal ASL play, because the main feature of the Battleshool dice is that the 1-pip face is replaced by an image. As a result, the eye is immediately drawn it, more so than would be the case for an ordinary 1-pip face. And, since you'll basically be seeing at least one of those dice 11/36 of the time, psychologically, it could be easy to come away with the idea that they were rolling low a lot, especially when some of those 1s will be paired with 2s or 3s, when in fact, the dice were really rolling normally.

I have always considered myself a crappy luck sort of guy when it came to ASL, with a stormcloud hanging over me, but last ASLOK, my dice were overall pretty good (I did get really diced on one scenario). Between ASLOK and Winter Offensive, I only played a few times, but my dice were good in every one of those times. And this year at Winter Offensive, my dice were good a lot, and I really really diced one of my opponents.

All of this cumulatively had me quite worried about my dice. Were the Battleschool dice actually not as balanced as advertised? Could I be inadvertently using dice that are unbalanced in my favor? This really dug into my conscience on the drive home from Winter Offensive yesterday and I decided to test some Battleschool dice.

I pulled out two different Battleschool dice to test, and picked a standard MMP die as well, sort of as a control. I was originally going to do a 4th die, from an altogether different source, but my arm got really tired.

I utilized a chi-square test, with 600 rolls for each die. With that many rolls, you can get a reasonable idea if the die is balanced (obviously, given the nature of dice, you can never be 100% sure).

I was very relieved to discover that both of the Battleschool dice easily passed the test.

Interestingly, the one MMP die I tested badly failed the test and seemed to be unbalanced (and unbalanced the unfavorable way, to boot!). I would not want to be using that die!

Anyway, I have uploaded the results of my testing, if anybody wants to take a look. For those of us who have been wondering about the BattleSchool dice (and it seems that I have not been the only one), this should be somewhat reassuring.