But most gamers have encountered plenty of other dice: four-sided (d4), eight-sided (d8), d12, d20… and if you’re really geeky, you might have a d30 or d100 lying around. When most people think of dice, they are thinking of six-sided dice, also known as d6s. Let’s start with something simple: a die-roll. If a system includes a random input, we need to understand the nature of that randomness and how to modify it to get the results that we want. Understanding the nature of randomness is important for game designers because we make systems in order to craft certain player experiences, so we need to know how those systems work. But so far we’ve ignored a huge aspect of many games, the non-deterministic aspects: in other words, randomness. Up until now, nearly everything we’ve talked about was deterministic, and last week we really went deep into transitive mechanics and took them about as far as I can go with them. I affectionately refer to it as the “Orc Nostril Hair” article, but it provides a pretty good primer for probabilities in games. Read this article on Gamasutra by designer Tyler Sigman.

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