[Math] Normal distribution with dice

dicenormal distributionstatistics

I'm wondering how to control the normal distribution that comes from summing dice rolls only using different numbers of dice, different combination of types of dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20) and simple math (+,-,•,/ and perhaps ^)?

I know that if you only use one type of die the mean value and the standard deviation increases linearly with the number of dice with a constant that depends on the number of sides on the dice.

I also realize that I can shift the distribution with plus and minus. But I don't know if there is a equally simple way to control the standard deviation.

In summary: how do I control the standard deviation of a normal probability distribution only using different combination of dice and simple math?

Best Answer

Here is a blogpost that gives you an overview of the distributions of summed dice as the number of dice increases. In short, as the number increases, it becomes increasingly well modelled by the normal distribution.

However, there is a small gap between the analytic solution that we get for the probability distribution of dice and the normal distribution. My intuition is that this will not be important - because rolling the vast number of dice that would allow statistical tests to detect this gap is probably not something you will do in this game.

If you are happy using d6s then a roll of $n$d6 is relatively well approximated by

$ \mu = \frac{6n+1}{2}$, $ \sigma = 0.175\sqrt n $

when $n$ gets sufficiently large. I imagine I would use $n=4$ or 5.

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