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Comment by yuye | Hacker News Reader

Thank you, I didn't really understand what they were talking about.

Personally, I feel there is an easier approach: Take a regular 12-sided die, assign numbers modulo N (N being the amount of players). Now you assign the first turn fairly for 2, 3, 4, 6 or 12 players. Add a d20 and that covers 5 or 10 players, too.

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That would preclude everyone from having a throw. Which is likely more fair but doesn't feel fair.

This made me think of a hypothetical game where the players roll dice to determine their order of turns. The rolling will continue until every player is assigned a turn. If some other player rolls multiple times in the middle then that player gets multiple turns. So for example with a 6 sided die and 2 players, faces 1, 3, 5 correspond to player 1 and 2, 4, 6 to player 2. They roll dice and the rolls come out as 1, 1, 5, 3, 5, 2. That means player 1 will get a turn 5 times per round while player 2 gets 1 turn. To make it fairer, player 2 would receive some sort of advantage corresponding to the lack of turns compared to player 1. The game would be designed in such a way that novices would prefer getting multiple turns in a round while experts would prefer to get a single turn for themselves and maximizing the total number of turns per round.

You mean you roll a single die and use the value to index an array of players?

That’s the pragmatic solution. The article is about an interesting mathematical puzzle, not actually solving a real problem.

Also, an n-sided die is fair for 2 to n players if you discard rolls above the number of players.

The article states:

  > The golf-ball-sized dice are now available to buy ...

So, not entirely just a math puzzle. But probably dice only math nerds will buy (:

I agree the math problem does not map well to a real problem players are having.

> But probably dice only math nerds will buy (:

You don't have to buy them to use them. For example I own a baggie of D(4-20) dice but I don't and have never played tabletop RPGs.

This set may end up too expensive for my "i know i'll never use it" budget, but other than that I'd get one.

But how do you choose who gets to throw that die? /s

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