tools – Finding a Cheat-Proof Online Die Roller

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I am looking for an online die roller that works similarly to the following:

The GM provides a string identifier to the player. E.g., "gandalf attacks balrog #12"
The player enters the id on the roller site, which checks it for uniqueness vs the DB, then generates the results, lined to that id.
The GM can check the results by id.

An alternative implementation would be for the GM to request a range of pre-generated ids from the site and hand them out to the players for rolls.
E.g., "please roll 5d8 with id #314159265"

Is there anything similar?

Notes and Clarifications:

As Thales Sarczuk inferred, this is indeed for "play by forum/email" games. The idea is to have "verifiable" rolls, preventing "roll until you you get a good result" scenarios.
However, it will be used on forums that are not gaming-specific so using plugins is not an option.

Thank you!

Best Answer

The website Invisible Castle had this exact functionality, and with this exact purpose in mind. It saved the rolls with tags for character, campaign, etc. You could look up the entire roll history of a player.

However, Invisible Castle seems to have gone down, possibly permanently. The site has apparently changed hands and now tries to install suspicious browser extensions, so links to it have been removed.

Other websites that have similar functionality are Rolz and Unseen Servant.

If you take the first option you must trust your players and accept what they tell you!

You need to be able to trust them and work with them, and they need to be able to trust you and work with you. The game experience is going to be quite toxic otherwise - I'll talk about that later. You've chosen a method which requires trust, so provide that trust.

If they are fudging, accept it for the fun value. You can't tell if they're doing it anyway. This is exactly the same as DMs who roll behind the screen: the players may suspect that sometimes the DM went easy on the nearly-dead target and fudged a miss, but the players should be able to trust the DM to make the game fun for them. That doesn't mean you need to pretend it isn't happening - just accept it and be okay with it, and continue playing.

Higher than average results are entirely possible.

They're improbable, yes, but not impossible, and doesn't suggest cheating.

Today, I played my first Pokemon TCG game with a friend. We did a lot of things that called for coin flips, and out of ~25 flips, only four were tails. It's highly improbable, but it happened.

Some players somehow roll quite well on average. I recently rolled several sixes on a series of challenges, some of which only a six would beat. We have a member here who's the opposite: he consistently rolls improbably low, with any set of dice, even with a dice tower. (It's incredible, but it's been happening for years; here's the records from one session which was played in person - no fudging occurred.)

Some don't have precision cut dice, and the common types of dice manufacturing can make vulnerable dice by accident. Ilmari explains at the beginning of his answer here. This isn't conscious cheating, it's just a flaw of the manufacturing process. You probably have slightly weighted dice!

Bottom line: If you want to use a dice rolling method requiring trust, extend that trust, or don't use that dice rolling method.

What if you can't provide that trust and accept their rolls?

If you keep going like this and can't trust your players, you'll end up relating to them as cheaters and you'll probably be irritated by their cheating - whether or not they really are. That's going to be really fun for them being treated like cheaters, and I say that with massive amounts of sarcasm. They won't be able to trust you to be impartial with them because you won't trust them. The experience will be very toxic and toxic experiences destroy groups and any fun value in games.

So, if you cannot trust them, tell them you want to switch dice rolling method.

Be straightforward and honest in telling them why: the results they're getting bugs you, and you have no way of knowing they're cheating or not, and you'd prefer to trust them but you'd rather just find a rolling method that eliminates any reason to be suspicious to begin with - that way, you can all have fun without you needing to be concerned.

Find a dice roller that lets you view each others' rolls and use it.

If you do this and the average results change, don't use that as a reason to suspect they were cheating. The success rates they were having were entirely possible, however improbable, and they may not have been cheating at all.

Dice – Does Microwaving a Die Significantly Alter Its Balance

It doesn't do anything.

As a chemist, I had to give this a try.

First, I started with a die that had a clear bias toward ~18, according to the saltwater test. The first picture is the initial drop into the water, and the second is after poking the die.

I put the die on a paper plate, and microwaved it for 4 minutes. I made sure to put it on its "side," so that if there was some kind of difference on the top and bottom, it would affect the balance.

After microwaving, I put it back into the salt water, to see that there is still a rough bias toward 18. As before, the left is pre-poke, and the right is post-poke.

This is not surprising.

I could have microwaved it even more, but I don't think that it's necessary: while the paper plate got hot, the die hardly warmed up at all.

This is because microwaves work through dielectric heating, which requires the molecules to have a dipole moment. Dice are made of polymers, and while I don't know exactly which polymer my die is made of, many polymers don't have a permanent dipole moment and thus wouldn't warm up significantly in the microwave. I suppose you could microwave for a really long time, or submerge it in something that does heat up, but that's an awful lot of effort for a single loaded die.

If you want to melt your dice, you're better off putting them in the oven. If you want loaded dice, you should just buy one.

I don't even think that melting your dice would affect their balance anyway. Most things, including microwaves, heat from the outside in. In the case of, say, a hot pocket, the interior heats up a lot faster because it has a lot more water to get heated, compared to the relatively dry pastry outside. However, gaming dice are pretty much uniform throughout, and so any melting that could plausibly affect the internal balance would mean that the outside would be obviously melted.

What if we put it in something that does heat up?

In true Mythbusters fashion (and because this answer is getting a lot of attention), I wanted to see if there was a way to get the microwave to affect the die. We know that water heats up a lot in the microwave, so what if we put the die partially in a layer of water, so that one side of it get heated and the other doesn't?

I put the same die back in the paper plate, and added a layer of water to submerge half of the die. I then put it back in the microwave for 4 minutes, and measure the temperature of the water. As you can see, the water definitely heats up (it was actually at boiling when I first measured it, and cooled slightly before I took the picture):

212 F is the hottest that liquid water can get. Any extra energy that goes into non-superheated water at 212F will go toward evaporating the water, not increasing its temperature. Therefore, 212F is the maximum temperature we can apply to the die with this setup.

After the die was partially boiled, I noticed that the surface that was under the water had a slightly chalkier texture. Is this heat enough to affect the balance of the die?

Unfortunately, no--the die still shows a bias toward 18.

What about the oven?

This is a bit outside the scope of the question, but I was curious to see if the higher temperature of the oven would be able to change the balance of the die without obviously changing its appearance. I preheated the oven to 300F, and put the poor d20 inside for 20 minutes:

This melted the bottom of the die:

Which was enough to significantly change the balance in the saltwater test:

So yes, the basic principle of melting your die to change its balance works. However, you need to melt the die in the higher heat of the oven, and not the microwave. It also obviously changes the appearance of the die, so you're not going to make any secretly loaded dice this way.

Just buy a loaded d20.