How is the RNG seed established?

[Keltyrr]

Question in the title, any have ideas?

[damned]

Not enough information.

FGU or FGC?
Are you referring to the Lua math.random or the physical dice?

[Keltyrr]

FGC and FGU, as I used both.

But, I am asking how the seed is determined as for what the dice results are.

[LordEntrails]

Depends on how the dice are rolled. If you use the virtual dice that roll, then the seed is generated off of the mouse movement. And a random number generator is not sued, instead it is a physics simulation of rolling dice. If its a non-virtual die, or not generated with the virtual dice, then it comes out of the lua random number generator, don't know the seed.

Curiosity or do you think it matters?

[Keltyrr]

Little of both.

The conversation came up today about possibly resetting the seed if we get a particular case of what some of my players call dice violence. There are times where a game can go 10 minutes and not see a 2 digiti number come up at all, then there are times my players are screaming because I am landing nat20s back to back to back. One of my players (whom is familiar with IT on the corporate IT security level) suggested maybe see if there is a way to allow a player to blow an action point to make me refresh the seed, or if there even is a seed to refresh. Most rolls are done from the sheet via the shortcuts given we play D&D 3.5e.


Truth be told I only understand this stuff on a superficial level I am being given suggestions on what questions to ask.

[Zacchaeus]

This comes up every now and again; and the reason it comes up every now and again is that just like any probability you are just as likely to get 10 1's rolled back to back as you are to get 10 20's rolled back to back.

Someone somewhere did a test rolling thousands of dice and collating the results and found that each number on a d20 comes up approximately 5% of the time which is exactly what you would expect. I can't unfortunately find the post now. Everyone has a story about how the dice rolled low or high all night.

The clear an obvious answer here is that if your players have a problem with dice rolls then they should change their dice colour to fix the issue

[damned]

It is not inconceivable that the software might glitch at some point.
If you think that has happened. Kick everyone close FG and relaunch and have everyone try to connect again.

[Valyar]

“Dice violence”. I love this phrase.

[SGL3386]

Hello there, the referenced IT person here.

Given that a lot of pRNG ends up relying on using something like LUA's OS.Time function, if you play at the same time every day, and the program were to call math.randomseed when the session is created using system time, then you could get the same seed each time depending on how the creator is using the os.time function. Hence, it becomes a point of interest. I have not looked deeper into LUA's pRNG code to see how it compares to other languages in terms of distribution. Maybe its solid, maybe its not. Different programming languages have various libraries with different feels to their pRNG. Being a scripting language, LUA makes me wince at the idea of it being used, but then again I use python a lot so maybe I shouldn't comment.

My more favored pRNG for things has been sidekickbot for discord which seems to go through fits certainly, but those fits of low rolls tend to last a lot shorter time. This made me wonder about how often sidekick is being queried and how often it would need to change seeds, and by extension how FG handles it. Not sure if I would believe the physics simulator, but I am also a bit too lazy in this line of inquiry to pull out a macro recorder and do the testing myself.

[damned]

What would a Macro recorder tell you?
If you rolled 10million times and you got 3s 11% of the time you could argue that its obviously not random or there would be only 5%.
Or you could argue that 5% is obviously not random....