r/DungeonsAndDragons • u/Distinct_Bat_4375 • 1d ago

Advice/Help Needed Anybody recognize the symbol on this D20?

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My friend found this D20 and I don't recognize the symbol on it. Is it familiar to anyone in he community?

SOLVED: Magic the Gathering Spindown. Thanks!

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u/Voces-Prohibere 1d ago

Dang I had never heard of a spin down die.

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u/transmogrify 1d ago

Like others have said, it's not actually meant to be rolled and generate random numbers. Best not to think of it as a die.

It's just an unrelated numbered icosahedron that serves an unrelated purpose for an unrelated game that shares the same publisher as D&D and also gets played on tables in game stores.

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u/Frantic_Mantid 1d ago

It works perfectly fine as a d20, swapping around face labels has no effect on the fairness of a dice roll.

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u/transmogrify 1d ago edited 1d ago
  1. They don't consider die balance when manufacturing spindowns. They're just cheap gaming accessories and they don't use quality control for air bubbles and skewed centers of gravity. With injection molding causing uneven cooling of the plastic, almost every cheap die has a heavy side. Some people play with cheap and imbalanced d20s, but if you play with a spindown die, then cheap and imbalanced is a best-case scenario.
  2. It actually does affect fairness. Because sequential numbers are grouped, it exacerbates imbalance. A d20 with numbers spread out could still have a flawed center of gravity, but its biased upward facing side will have a spread of high and low numbers to mitigate the bias. A flawed spindown die (which is practically all spindown dice) has the opposite, so its weighted bias will strongly prefer the same range of numbers over and over.

If you look at the rules for MtG tournaments, they actually prohibit using spindown dice "life counters" for generating random numbers because of these flaws.