alt Hacker NewsCan somebody explain why not just make a die with 5! sides, and roll it once to decide the order? With each side having a unique order printed e.g. 12345 -> 12354 -> ...
Especially, that 120-sided dice are already invented and commercially available.
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Because the question isn’t can you make a rice with 5! Sides but can you make it so 5 players can roll simultaneously individual dice with a minimal number of sides per dice and never tie and always be fair.
Sure you can fly a helicopter to the top of Everest, but it’s not the same as climbing Everest even if the outcome is the same.
120 sided dice roll for a long time and don't have much room for printing
Or, like my gaming group does. Just roll again between whoever ties. And in the extremely rare event that you tie again, roll again. And if youve managed to get to the heat death of the universe and have tied three times, roll a fourth time.
And for the pedants, you arent rolling every microsecond for millennia to make it plausibly likely that you have that many ties. You are rolling a handful of times before a game.
Its an interesting math problem to solve, but its way more effort to solve than the real world solutions.
> Can somebody explain why not just make a die with 5! sides, and roll it once to decide the order?
Hey, that’s a good idea—now we just need to decide who rolls the die. …Well, if we had a set of die that each player could roll one of, and the highest number rolled gets to roll the 120-sided die. Of course, we’d have to ensure that there’s no chance of a tie.
Hmm… this idea has legs…
And how do you decide who is going to throw that one die?