My brain was hurting from reading a gaming post earlier this week. It was a fluff post asking if people prefer d20 or d100 (for the uninitiated, d20 refers to a 20-sided die and d100 refers to two 10-sided dice determining tens and ones [or there is literally a 100-sided golf ball die]). Since many gamers started with D&D and it uses a d20, they declared a fondness for that die. Not too surprising.
But then one guy said he prefers d20 because it's more random than the d100. I sputtered and explained that they're both random. There's no "more" about it. He elaborated that you're more likely to get a 7 or lower on a d20 than a 35 or lower on a d100 because of the d100's bell curve. To my credit, I managed to say that the d100 did not have a bell curve while not exploding. Mostly I was still trying to figure out what premise he was working with because he called it 2d10 (again for the uninitiated, that's two 10-sided dice added together). I found his terminology confusing because while I concur that 2d10 does have a bell curve, you can't get 35 with that. I mean, technically, you have a 100% chance of rolling 35 or lower on 2d10. So I really wanted to know what this guy thinks is being rolled before going all mathy on him.
Someone else beat me to the punch and explained the probability distribution. The original guy never responded back, which I read as him realizing the error and not pressing the issue. A part of me kind of hoped he clung to his original idea and tried to defend it, but that was just my asshole side wanting to get into an argument.
