Back in 2021, I recorded Season 9 Episode 2: “The Magic of Dice”. Most of that episode script was also published here in a blog post of the same name. The bit I missed out of the blog was this:
I can’t bear digital dice. Computers can’t do random – I learned that from the parallel hobby Dad shared with me of building our own computers and learning to programme them. You can seed numbers into a sequence and get the computer to throw those numbers out, but it’s not truly random…. I can’t bear digital dice. Nor can I bear diceless games for long – I have tried, but I miss the point of decision, the rattle, the clatter, the rush of possibility and uncertainty.
Dice. At least two in my hand, please.
Which brings me to the experience of playing the Cypher System with the school students the other week. As I commented to some friends afterwards, the weirdest thing was that I felt disconnected from the game because, as GM, you don’t roll dice. Although we had a great time playing, I was left with a strange sense of having not really played.
In a recent online game of Dungeon Fantasy RPG, we used the dice roller from the otherwise super-useful Owlbear Rodeo VTT and, well, there were problems. All the players were rolling badly and they were making their displeasure known: it was the fault of the “dodgy” digital dice roller. It appears none of them trusts it’s fair.
Like I said, computers can’t do random. It really shows whenever I play online with VTTs and I generally feel that the lack of trust players have of the digital dice roller might offset the convenience of seeing the dice rolled on-screen. I’ve even heard players claim the digital dice are “more swingy” than real dice. Perception is important.
When I got back to playing face-to-face earlier this year, rolling dice was a very great part of the gift: the rattle, the clatter, the rush of possibility and uncertainty. The tangibility of actual dice in the hand is, at least for me, a big part of the gaming experience. It’s the same when I play solo: dice get rolled because that’s part of the pleasure.
It’s interesting to me that I trust a human rolling dice behind the screen over a computerised set of digital dice. Perhaps it’s a more deep-seated mistrust of programming in an age that aspires to bypass our humanity with so-called AI. Certainly I don’t enjoy the experience of taking the dice out of my hands when I play.
Dice. At least two in my hand, please (because, yes, I like to feel them clatter).
Game on!
Roleplay Rescue’s Blog 
I agree that computer faux-RNG is terrible.
We use Roll20 for our online games, which uses Quantum Roll, “based on the quantum fluctuations in the power of a beam of light”.
Like you, I do prefer using real dice at the table. Physical dice can’t be beat for gaming fun.
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Real dice, real books…yeah, I’m old. But we’ve used the digital dice rollers on-line as we have one min/maxer who, when rolling dice, always had a critical success when attacking. So we ended up using dice rollers, despite the rest of us really liking to roll actual dice.
To your point about computers and random numbers (AI Answer from Google when I asked):
No, computers cannot generate truly random numbers, so no die roller is truly random. However, virtual dice rolls are likely more random than most physical dice because they are based on pseudo-random number generating algorithms. Some say that the results of online dice rolls may be more random than real dice because real dice can be unbalanced or not shuffled enough. Others say that virtual dice rolls are as close to random as real dice because they have uniform mass distribution and geometry.
having written a few dice rollers, I never ran any statistical analysis on them so no idea if they matched reality or not. Of course, reality itself may not be real! But they were good enough for my purposes.
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I’m a programmer and most of my hobbies involve a computer. I’ve even built a couple of apps to help run games online (mostly during lockdown), but even with all that, I have to agree – pencil, paper, and real dice are the best. Having friends around a real table if you can is also much better!
There’s also the little stories you build up around dice. A lot of players and GMs I know have the “special” d20 that they only use for important rolls, or that they won’t use anymore after it killed three characters, or something along those lines. It’s all very silly but also very human, and you can’t replicate that with a button on a VTT.
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