Rolling the Dice: Randomness and Probability in Gaming

Strategy gamers are drawn to video games that test their mental capacity and decision making ability, whether that involves finding the perfect build for a character or working out the odds of making a critical hit that will win you a fight in a roguelike.

Video games often utilize randomness to offer variation in gameplay, tougher challenges, and greater replayability. To thrive and advance in these games, you’ll need an understanding of probability and how it can impact outcomes.

One of the oldest and most influential ways to achieve randomness in a game is by rolling dice. They have been used for thousands of years and are still used today in tabletop and casino gaming. In modern video games, dice have been replicated and replaced by random number generators, which serve the same purpose of randomizing outcomes.

The Origins of Dice and Chance Games

Humans have long been fascinated by probability and randomness. In early civilizations, dice-like objects were used for gaming and wagering long before theories of math and probability had been established.

Up until recently, evidence dated the oldest dice objects back to around 3,000-3,500 BC. Recent discoveries in North America now show that dice are at least 12,000 years old.

Back then, dice were two-sided objects made of natural materials like bone, ivory or shell, with one side marked for differentiation. The earliest dice were used for the purpose of divination before they were more widely used for gaming and wagering.

The Role of Dice in Early Games

Played as early as 3,000 BC, the Ancient Egyptian game of Senet used throwsticks to indicate how many spaces a player could move, functioning in the same way dice do in modern board games.

The earliest cubic dice, meanwhile, dates to around 2,500 BC and was found as part of a backgammon-like game set in what is now Iran.

Although then outlawed, by the Roman Ages gambling was widespread and dice used for wagering on outcomes. The standard configuration used in gaming nowadays, with opposite sides of the dice adding up to 7, appeared later in the Middle Ages.

The tradition of wagering on dice still exists and is now thriving due to casino culture and online casinos. Craps, in which players bet for or against the “shooter” on dice rolls, is a popular table game in casinos. Players can also join a craps game online for a modern experience of a game with ancient origins.

As with earlier forms of dice gambling games, craps involves payouts that are weighted based on the odds of hitting various outcomes. For players to fully gauge and embrace the game, they need both an understanding of probability and an acceptance that they are playing what is essentially a game of chance.

Although craps is a game of chance, understanding the probabilities allows players to choose bets that have more generous odds and payouts, while avoiding expensive side bets that more strongly favor the house. This is a similar decision making process that appeals to strategy gamers.

Dice Mechanics in Video Games

Every RPG title under the sun takes directly from the dice mechanics of tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons, in which dice rolls influence or determine outcomes ranging from damage output and critical hits, to loot and the direction of storyline events.

The mechanics of dice that were present in tabletop games still play a major role in modern gaming, sometimes directly and often indirectly.

In tabletop games, players roll the dice themselves to decide their fate. In video games, the “dice” is rolled behind the scenes by a random number generator (RNG) and the outcome is visually represented on the screen.

Occasionally, dice are still used to show the outcome of the RNG. For example, in Baldur’s Gate, a direct adaptation of D&D, the player still sees dice being rolled when they attack or make a decision.

In other video games, the dice no longer plays a direct part, yet the randomness that humans have always toyed with remains.

Randomness plays a part in nearly every aspect of modern video games, including loot drops, critical hits, matchmaking, the availability of accessories and cards in roguelikes, and sometimes even the procedural generation of levels. Effectively, you’re still rolling a digital dice every time you play.

Why Dice Mechanics Will Always Play a Role in Gaming

Dice mechanics bring an unpredictability that has appealed to humans since the early days of divination and wagering. Before we even understood why, we somehow knew that dice represented randomness.

In modern video gaming, randomness is used to keep games fresh and enhance their replayability. As a player, you can’t simply familiarize yourself with one environment or master a single strategy. Instead, you have to be able to adapt to various conditions and overcome different circumstances.

The best video games combine probability with strategy to give you a perfect balance between randomness and control. Skilled players come to understand the probabilities associated with each action and manage the elements of chance rather than relying on the roll of a dice or the outcome of an RNG. That’s the essence of all strategy games that involve randomness.