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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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.
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