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Is there an issue with the dice rolling algorithm after roll20's outage today?

April 17 (4 years ago)
Cerl
Pro

Dice rolls seemed to cover the usual gamut of possibility before the outage.  We returned and continued our session a couple hours later, once the outage was over with, and the dice seem to be now be rolling ridiculously low.  Case in point, one of the players has scored TEN 1's out of 20 rolls.  A full 50% of his rolls are a 1.  That is beyond statistically improbable to the point he would have had better chances of winning the Publisher's Clearinghouse, Powerball lottery, AND Irish Sweepstakes all in the same year.


Seriously, what is going on here?

April 17 (4 years ago)
Cerl
Pro

In the following 10 minutes after posting this, with less than a dozen additional rolls performed, 4 of them were 1's

The status of the dice roller seems fine to me: https://app.roll20.net/home/quantum

Check to see that you're rolling d20s and not d2s. Otherwise ... oof. That's quite a run of bad luck you've got there.

April 17 (4 years ago)
Cerl
Pro

It was definitely d20's, they were attack rolls off weapon/spell cards that we've been using for over a year now.

April 17 (4 years ago)
Kraynic
Pro
Sheet Author

Something you might have them try is to run something like [[999d20/999]].  If it comes in around 10.5, then things are pretty normal.

One thing that is hard to keep in mind is that we aren't seeing consecutive rolls from the program.  If I am calculating correctly, Quantum Roll is generating 90+ rolls per second at the lowest rate of usage during the day, and doing about double that during the peak (according to what the tracker had on the graph when I looked).  That means that it looks consecutive to the poor person rolling those ones, but the generator has probably created at least several hundred rolls to possibly thousands of rolls between the 1's given to that person.  Doesn't make it "feel" any better, but it really is just very bad luck.

April 17 (4 years ago)

I find it hard to believe that your players luck was THAT bad, so maybe something in  your game is messed up, or on his sheet.  The chances of rolling 50% 1's on a 1d20 in a total of 32 rolls is about the same is sneezing out a chunk of gold, so if he did in fact roll that many 1's then you have some troubleshooting to do. 

I tested multiple character sheets as well as NPC sheets and the rolls seem normal to me.  

April 17 (4 years ago)
vÍnce
Pro
Sheet Author


Vizual said:

I find it hard to believe that your players luck was THAT bad, so maybe something in  your game is messed up, or on his sheet.  The chances of rolling 50% 1's on a 1d20 in a total of 32 rolls is about the same is sneezing out a chunk of gold, so if he did in fact roll that many 1's then you have some troubleshooting to do. 

I tested multiple character sheets as well as NPC sheets and the rolls seem normal to me.  

Not denying that it could be a technical issue or the unluckiest series of rolls, but I like what Andreas has posted about such things in the past.

https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/7945624/

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.

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

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)

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:

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.