why do (most) dice have the same face placements? As in, why is the 6 usually opposite to the 1, likewise with the 3 and 4? Does this affect the “fairness” of a dice roll, making it a 1/6 chance every roll as opposed to a different value?

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why do (most) dice have the same face placements? As in, why is the 6 usually opposite to the 1, likewise with the 3 and 4? Does this affect the “fairness” of a dice roll, making it a 1/6 chance every roll as opposed to a different value?

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15 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Each opposing face has 7 “pips” total – 6+1, 5+2, 4+3. This minimizes differences in mass per face pair such that each number statistically will appear approximately the same number of times. You’re looking for a even distribution of the 6 numbers over time.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If you’re rolling the dice properly, it doesn’t matter and it’s just tradition. But, it’s theoretically possible to hold and throw the dice in a particular way and have certain faces come up more often, or to have slight manufacturing defects that cause one half to come up a bit more often. It’s more of a thing with 20 sided or larger, more round, dice, but it’s basically impossible to hit one face in particular. So, if you have 20, 19, 18, 17 and so on all right next to each other, someone could roll it in such a way that that general half of the dice comes up more often. Scattering the numbers so the high and low numbers are evenly dispersed compensates for that possibility.

I.e. if you have a 6 sided dice, you could theoretically roll it like a wheel so it’s just rolling on 4 of the sides, and the other 2 will basically never be landed on. But you can’t control which of the 4 it lands on. If you put the numbers so the 2 impossible sides are 1 and 2, you can get an unfair advantage, but if they are 1 and 6, or 2 and 5, you’re eliminating both good and bad outcomes, not just bad ones, and you don’t really benefit from rolling it that way. It’s a pretty easily detectable method of cheating at dice, and pretty hard to execute, but it is possible, and placing the numbers the way they do helps to counter it.

Or there’s a bubble in the resin that makes one half of the dice more likely to come up. If all the high numbers are on that half, it could be considered loaded and cheating. If there’s high and low numbers on that half equally, there’s an increased chance of both the good and bad numbers, so it’s not as advantageous to the roller.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The pattern is so that the two sides opposite eachother will always add to 7.

Is there any real reason for this? Not really, it’s just how they have always been done.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s a bit more than tradition.

If your dice is not perfectly equilibrated (e.g. one half is heavier than the other and these faces will show up less often), then opposite face adding up to always the same number (7, on six-faced dice) will ensure that the mean outcome will still be the same.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You’re asking about rolling dice versus counting dice. While it’s not very obvious with a six sided dice, a 20- sided die is usually put together the same way, so that opposing sides sum to the same number, and adjacent sides are farther apart. Some such die have numbers next to each other so it’s easy to turn the top face from 20 to 19 to 18, etc. With some practice, you could roll the counting die to give your preferred high or low result.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Mostly it’s just tradition. It actually can affect the odds, if you aren’t careful about distributing the die’s mass evenly among all six sides, which is why casinos fill in their dice’s holes using a resin of the same density used to make the dice themselves. But for most gaming dice, the effect isn’t large enough for people to care about.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Tradition. And no, it in no way affects the outcome, no matter what you put on a face as long as the faces are identical in weight

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The sum of the opposing dice faces is always 7. So the center of mass of the die remains the same.

Anonymous 0 Comments

On 6 sided die, the opposing numbers add up to 7
You have 1-6, 2-5, and 3-4. This is just a convention, to make the dices uniform wherever you emcounter them; though it makes it easier to check if they’re not incorrectly labelled, having two sides of 5 or 6.
Plus, 7 is regarded as a lucky number