Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Unless you're rolling an impractical number of dice for every attack having your attacks do random damage (and not 22-24 like in MMORPGs but 1X-6X) is incredibly random. Even if you are rolling a ridiculous number of dice the game can still be decided by one roll leaving a creature on the board or killing it by one or two points of damage.
What maths says that rolling dice doesn't make the game more random? Maybe he means the game is overall less random, but I don't see any argument for that, or reference to evidence of that claim.
If the reason for the game's failure was that people thought it lacked skill less additional randomness is not a decision to defend even if people were slightly overestimating the randomness.
Having to roll dice in a card game is kind of a slap in the face too. In other card games you draw your cards then make the most of them. There's 0 randomness to worry about except right when you draw your card or your opponent draws theirs (but you are often happily ignorant of whether they play a card from their hand or that they drew except in certain circumstances.) You can count cards and play based on what is left in your deck, or you know is not in your deck anymore.
Also, unlike miniature games, card games pretty much never start pre-deployed. You start with nothing on the board. If your turn one card kills his turn one card because of a dice roll then he has nothing on the board and you have a creature, giving you some level of control over the board (depends on the game, often quite high) In a miniature game if you kill more of his guys on turn one because of dice rolls you still have an army, though smaller.
Why is this quote upvoted?
The more precise statement of "math says rolling more dice makes things less random" is that if you roll ten six-sided dice and add up the answer, the result will be less random (on its scale) than if you merely roll one six-sided die.
Even more precisely: the outcome of 10d6 is 68.7% likely to lie in the range [30,40], while the outcome of 1d6 is only 33.3% likely to lie in the corresponding range [3,4].
I think the quoted portion of the article addresses exactly this point: people were scared of rolling many dice because this meant lots of rando... (read more)