Oh boy, here we go again. I'll repost a previous reply I made on the topic, which contains bunch of facts and links on the subject, which should cover most things. At the bottom is also listed several previous threads where this same things have been rehashed a good number of times in the past. No, the dice rolls are not broken Human intuition on randomness is flawed, and here is an attempt to explain why Roll20 has a page to show how random the rolls are.
The thing about randomness that people don't often get, is that
streaks" of "good or "bad" luck is to be expected. Truly random
doesn't feel random. Steve(Original poster) says: But there is something bugged about the way the rolls are distributed over a short period, like 200 rolls That
is unlikely, but expected to happen to someone, at times, given the
large number of rolls made on Roll20. You know how there exist people
who have got hit by lightning more than once, or have won the lottery
more than once? It's unlikely to happen to any given person, but the
chance of it happening to someone , given large enough pool of samples, is extremely large. The chance of something happening even at small scale is something we don't have an accurate intuition about, for example the Birthday paradox , which is the statistical oddity that with a random group of 23 people, it's a 50% chance at last two people share a birthday. Math & Science behind randomness Gambler's Fallacy - wikipedia Law of Truly Large Numbers - wikipedia - "With a large enough number of samples, any outrageous (i.e. unlikely in any single sample) thing is likely to be observed." Independence of Events Probability, Random Events, and the Mathematics of Gambling - 20 pages Then
there is also the fact that when the results are given instantly, it
feels less random than if we see numbers flutter a bit before they
appear. Slot machines and gambling games likely uses this trick of
slowly showing the result to feel more random and increase the
anticipation for the result. Psychology behind randomness (and why we're bad at perceiving it) Randomness is Random Numberphile video on how humans think randomness looks like Apple Made Their Shuffle Feature Less Random, to Make It More Random - DaxThink.com Humans have hard time with randomness - Daily Mail article Why random shuffle feels far from random - Independent UK article The Near Miss Effect - Wired - why seeing near misses feels better(and why physical dice might feel more random) Why random hero selection doesn't feel random - LoL wikia rambling If
you watch the " Randomness is Random " video, it demonstrate quite well
how we think streaks of "good" or "bad" luck are longer and more
prevalent than if we'd try to make a random sequence of numbers
ourselves. That's why some random shuffle features on music playlists
aren't always completely random, as they might prevent longer streaks of
songs from appearing in their original order, or bias the system to try
not to have too many songs from the same artist/album to play back to
back. Previous Forum Threads on the topic This
come up every now and then, and is repeatedly explained every single
time. Here is a fairly long comprehensive list of previous discussions
on the topic: Roll20 RNG Testing (Previous Thread) Dice Are Not Rolling Randomly Random Rolling numbers maybe not so random? Roll20 Dice are not True random (Pro forums) How random is quantum roll random number generator Dice results broken? Spring Update: Meh (users comments how pseudorandom where good enough even before Quantum Roll, and think it's overkill) Multi-dice rolls averaging out? Three Critical Failures In A Row! Dice Rolls - Come in Three's fix die roller Questions about Quantum Roll "Quantum" rolls aren't. Dice roll randomizer (6 years ago, from before Quantum Roll feature, but explain why normally created randomness is already pretty good) Random dice roller (6 years ago, same as above) TL;DR: Humans have a bad intuition on what is or isn't random, and this have been debunked every time it's been discussed here.
