Dice rolls do not seem random - New thread that someone else reported and was dismissed. HEAR ME OUT, PLEASE.

I'll admit I'm new to roll20, but I'll a consummate observer and have hundred upon hundreds of hours of tabletop rp experience to compare against. Were 5 sessions in and on EVERY SESSION one or more players are cursed with crap rolls. ALL game. It's like cookies or member hours logged are tracked and influence the dice to roll at different tiers poor, average, good. and you're stuck in that tier for the who game. It not like you can grab another die out of the bag. It's like it chooses to invalidate on or more players for that session--Like to spotlight the others or generate it's idea of an off day for someone. If it happened one or twice, or the curse seemed to spread around it would be one thing. But that's not it. LITERALLY 1-3 players per session don't hit ANYTHING the ENTIRE SESSION!!!! People keep talking about this for a reason. There's REALLY something happening here. I fired about 20 shots with +7 to hit against 15 AC and never landed a hit and failed all but one ability check. The two session prior to that there had been a player in each session that had the same thing happen and they were remarking on their bewilderingly poor rolls from about mid-session on. Never hitting anything or just once or twice the whole game. I just thought they had weak sauce characters, until it happened to me. Then our campaign picked up two more players, The next session 2 players were cursed. and only hit once between them all session. Last night 3 players were cursed and NONE of them hit ANYTHING ALL SESSION!! This resulted in a TPK as the only players that could roll worth a crap were targeted and disabled and the remaining players couldn't have hit an elephant with a hand grenade if it was sitting on their lap with the rolls that THREE (3)--a trio of players were making. It was like watch a platoon of storm troopers trying to hit Han Solo!  Oh, btw, did I mention. it was 6 players against a single foe... AC 15. The last player that could roll worth a crap left it with 2 HP. After that, just popcorn and storm troopers. Cute. Again, I've played tabletop D&D, Rifts and Heros Unlimited for nearing 1000 hrs--maybe more. I've seen a player be cursed, I've been cursed. I've even seen 2 - 3 players be cursed for at least part of a session--even at the same time. But I have NEVER seen 1 - 3 players have a curse EVERY SINGLE SESSION FOR FIVE FREAKING SESSIONS IN A ROW FOR THE ENTIRE FREAKING SESSION!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I've Never seen it! You'd use another die, throw that one away, burn it. Something! It's like there's an ill-weighted die / dice and, depending on your party size 1 to 3 players are stuck with it all game. (Roughly 1 out of 3, 1-2 out of 4 and 1-3 out of 6). Now the opposite IS also true. The players that are rolling hot, have almost never missed. I--and other party members have gone entire session without missing A SINGLE shot or saving throw. But feeling like superman at the expense of others feeling like storm troopers is not realist, fun, or worth it. If unrelated people keep saying the same thing, it seems more than reasonable to consider the possibility the there is an unexpected issue or bug that has corrupted or influenced what, I'm sure, is a randomized program--or is intended to be randomized. Every player in my group has had it happen to them. They have all commented on how they just cant get a decent roll all game, one session or another. And always one or more players EVERY SESSION. It's not in my head. It really doing this. It is true that randomness naturally includes the odd appearance of seeming patterns. I know that. But it is EXCEEDINGLY rare that randomness generates the seeming of CONSISTENT pattern. THAT it what has me concerned.

We all hear you, and we all feel for you, but this has been discussed many many times before: 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.

Starfyre said: ... If unrelated people keep saying the same thing, it seems more than reasonable to consider the possibility the there is an unexpected issue or bug that has corrupted or influenced what, I'm sure, is a randomized program--or is intended to be randomized. ... Given that Roll20 has well over a million active users by this point, the sample size of people who have noticed a potential problem, taken time to investigate it and then provided evidence of it is about the same percentage of people who have been abducted by aliens or seen bigfoot. I personally am cursed, both physical and digital dice hate me... but that's just the price I pay for the deal I made with my patron being. The problem seems to be more than with an online system you have a semi-permanent record of the rolls and can look back at them and draw conclusions based on small sample sizes which is just plain human nature... we LOVE to try and make sense of the chaos or draw parallels in the random results... we simply can't help it. I recommend writing down every roll made at a physical table over a few sessions and see if the same conclusions are made. Again though, we all feel your pain!

Your perception of the randomness is skewed because you have a human brain which does not do well with randomness. Track every roll in your game until you get at least 100 rolls, then analyze them (find the average, find the mean, find the standard deviation, etc. You can do this in Excel.). And the 100 rolls is still a very small sample; the more rolls you analyze the more reliable your results will be.

First roll of last session was a double fumble. The last roll was a double crit. Weird stuff happens. If it had happened with physical dice, players would pretty much accept it, even though physical dice have a much larger bias than than digital randomness using virtually any algorithm. (With the exception of precision Casino dice.) The responses so far are spot on WRT tracking. And yeah, 100 rolls is still a very small sample. I hope you don't feel you are being dismissed, but this subject comes up a lot, and there is never any demonstrable evidence of bias, other than anecdotal. Because it comes up every couple of months when someone has a bad luck streak (never when they've had a good luck streak, oddly), we're used to seeing it, and see little point in investigating again . I feel for you, but sometimes you just get a lot of lousy rolls.

Starfyre, your campaign log should record every roll rolled openly. You could gather data from the log to run a statistical analysis on.

I have to admit I'm suspicious of the randomness of the rolls. Not because of the amount of poor or high rolls in a session, but because me and my group are getting the feeling the results are very much tied to the timestamp. For instance, when the DM asks the whole group to roll for a check, and we all happen to roll at the (almost) same time, we all get very similar results. Of course, I'm not stating this happens for sure, I'm aware we tend to see patterns where none exist and our perception of randomness is poor, but I can't help to feel the growing suspicion that dice rolls are tied to the timestamp ( more than usual as I'm aware that using the timestamp is a way of getting pseudo-randomness in computing). keithcurtis said: Starfyre, your campaign log should record every roll rolled openly. You could gather data from the log to run a statistical analysis on. Thanks for reminding me of this, I'll have a look!

Keep in mind that if your group rolls over the course of 10 seconds, an average of 555 rolls are served during that frame.

I've rolled the same result on a d20 four times in a row (making attacks), a natural 1. They were the four consecutive die rolls made in the game.  What's the likelihood of that? Super low, right?

I've done the same with a natural 20 on physical dice. I've also rolled thousands upon thousands of rolls that were not duplicate runs. Run tests. find real anomalies.

The same result on a d20 four times in a row = 1 in 160,000

For four identical results of any kind 1:(20*20*20) = 1:8000 You would only count the first roll if it had to be a certain result. The odds of four 20s or four 11s in a row would be  1:(20*20*20*20) = 1:160,000 Statistically, this happens a little over once per hour (200,000 rolls per hour). The odds of any one person seeing duplicates would be based on how many rolls they have individually made. Distributed over 6 million+ users, the odds of it happening to multiple people is a virtual certainty.