Random Rolls

Every dice game gets the same accusation, usually right after a bad turn: the dice are rigged. They are not. This is the long answer.

The server rolls, not your game

Every die in Portentum is rolled on our servers. Your game never generates a number of its own. It asks for a battle, gets the results back, and animates them. There is nothing on your machine to patch, and nothing on your opponent's either.

Every face is equally likely

Each die is an ordinary fair six-sided die. A 1 is exactly as likely as a 6, on every roll, for every player.

We do not weight them. There is no quiet bonus for a losing board, no penalty for a winning streak, no comeback mechanic hidden in the numbers. Your team, your record, your opponent and how badly the fight is going make no difference at all. A roll knows nothing about the game it is in.

Streaks are what fair looks like

Fair dice clump. Two dice come out every turn and a fight can run a long time, so a streak of the same face is normal. It happens to everyone, usually at the worst possible moment.

The idea that random should look evenly spread is the mistake. Dice that never clumped would be the rigged ones.

Where the numbers come from

Most software rolls dice with the random number generator built into its programming language. Those are fast and perfectly good for shuffling a playlist, but watch one long enough and you can work out what it will say next. Portentum uses a cryptographic generator instead, the same class of tool that protects passwords.

That generator needs a seed, and the seed is where this gets strange. Once a minute our server pulls a fresh number from drand, a public randomness beacon run by the League of Entropy: more than a dozen independent organizations around the world, including several universities, the Ethereum Foundation, Protocol Labs and Cloudflare. Every three seconds they jointly produce one number that no single member can predict or steer, and they sign it so anyone can check it is genuine. Our server checks that signature before it trusts the number.

Cloudflare generates its share of that number by pointing a camera at a wall of lava lamps in its San Francisco lobby and reading the chaos off the pixels. So yes, some of that wax ends up in your dice.

Because the beacon is public, we never use it on its own. Anyone can read the same number we just read, and a die seeded only from that would be a die anyone could predict. It gets mixed with secret randomness generated on our own machines. The public half means the seed is not something we made up in a back room. The secret half is what keeps the result unknowable in advance.

The same dice everywhere else

That one generator also decides what the shop offers you, what comes out of a card pack, and which opponent you meet. It is all one source, working the same way.

See it in action

Now you know where the numbers come from. Dice & Triggers covers what your cryptids do with them.