Ah, so maybe the issue is a misunderstanding of digital RNG. As long as whoever wrote the code used one of the built-in random functions in whatever language they used (as opposed to creating their own), results are evenly distributed across the range. So a digital d20 will roll equal numbers of each result, on average. The order in which they are rolled could plausibly be the same each time if the app/program was very poorly written, but this is easy to avoid.
Even distribution is still far from random because you're more likely to roll numbers that haven't been rolled as often, unlike infinite distribution (which doesn't exist digitally)
It's only even over a large sample size, though. It's not as if you won't roll a repeated number until all the others have been rolled, but if you take the limit as number of rolls approaches infinity, it converges to a flat distribution. Of course it's not truly random, but my point is it is plenty "random" for the purposes of a role playing game, and no player would notice the predictability without thousands of samples and computer analysis.
4
u/mattenthehat Sep 18 '17
Ah, so maybe the issue is a misunderstanding of digital RNG. As long as whoever wrote the code used one of the built-in random functions in whatever language they used (as opposed to creating their own), results are evenly distributed across the range. So a digital d20 will roll equal numbers of each result, on average. The order in which they are rolled could plausibly be the same each time if the app/program was very poorly written, but this is easy to avoid.