I have actually seen a guy roll any number he desired on a pair of 6 sided dice. He could call what number he was going to roll, and even which sides would be up on both dice. It was some method of rolling the dice so you could decide how they landed. This is why you have to roll the dice against a backstop when playing Craps.
I'm watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a Terminator is playing D&D, and it's rolling whatever number it wants.
All of a sudden, I think the stopwatch is a much better method.
(Doing Therapy)
The Terminator could possibly stop the stopwatch where it wants too because it have an accurate inner clock. Random is not so random anymore when someone knows how to manipulate the dependent variable.
I hadn't thought of that. The Terminator could probably sync it's internal clock with the stopwatch, so it would roll all 3 GE rolls.
Dice cheating like that is something that a human being could do. As I said, I've seen it done. For a human being, I'd like a stopwatch better.
(Doing Therapy)
Insert appropriate emoticon here.
I'm actually using dice at present, despite the fact that I keep dropping them on the floor. The stopwatch on the electronic watch I got last time does not do hundredths (and I cannot think why it wouldn't, it seems foolish to include a stopwatch that does not), and the band broke anyway so I'm not wearing it.
For what it's worth, I could in theory cheat with a stopwatch. With a bit of practice I can start and stop it in exactly one second, to the nearest hundredth. I'm out of practice of late, but I use to play a game based on the idea. I could do it easily in my office, because the clock atop the bookcase clearly ticks very accurate seconds, so I can check my pace against that. I avoided that, though, in part because once I started the watch I kept it running in the background and used lap times for die rolls. That prevents me from knowing what the time on the watch is when I pick it up, even if I look at it (because it's still showing the previous lap time), which I didn't.
It's kind of odd for me, because I don't believe in randomness (even at the quantum level). What makes die rolls useful is that they are unpredictable, and thus as good as random for our purposes. However, not all things that are unpredictable by us are as good as random. Most computer random numbers are based on a sequence stored in ROM, such that if you give the computer the same initial randomizer it will return the same sequence of supposedly random numbers. That's a useful feature for some applications, but it's important to know that it's happening, and how it works. For example, with dice ten ones in a row is highly improbable; with the computer string, it might be impossible.
The Commodore 64 had three systems for random number generation, and thus somewhere in the appendices of the Multiverser Referee's Rules you'll find a mention of using clock-based randomizers instead of system-based ones, to ensure randomness. I'm not certain whether that's something you can do with a PC, but I never found a command for it in QBasic.
--M. J. Young