Why is only 3 new dices in new JSA pack?

The USArdiadna box came with three dice. Icestorm and Red Veil had 3 for each faction. It's a box meant to get people started playing, not be completely comprehensive.

 

Don't use the faction dice, they're all horribly weighted. If you run a saltwater test on any of them they always fail it. Get some machined dice, or some translucent ones with no air bubbles.

My red veil YJ dice were biased towards 20, 19, and 3. The only thing the faction dice are good for is paper weights if you glue them into a stack.

 

Add salt to weigh the water so the dice float, then poke them around and check if they always turn up a specific number when not on flat surface? Or did you mean something else?

 

That's it.

 

The dice sold in the store are different than those in the starter sets.

 

Yep, I rely on my Haqqislamite dice when playing Tarik Mansuri, because they roll more ones than usual and thus cause crits.

3 is the usual number of dice per faction in a box, USA got three, RV/Icestorm get three per faction. And they're kind of cheap/better of replaced so getting more dice shouldn't be an issue as it's something you'd want to do eventually anyways. If those are really your only dice, re-roll your failures or remember your other results when you're Burst 4 or 5. Then again, I don't exactly see an HMG or Spitfire in the box so is it really necessary?

 

There are faction dice that were part of the RPG. They're made by Q-Workshop, of a higher quality than the starter box dice, and that is what CB sells in their store, or what you can buy online from other places. To my knowledge, you cannot get the dice of Icestorm, Red Veil, USAriadna box, or the upcoming JSA box outside of the box.

The Q-workshop dice look like this:



Icestorm dice look like this:



Red Veil dice:


USAriadna dice:

 

I use the onecolour starter dice all the time. Even got me 3extra of haqq and yj from a split box seller. Can't say you realise the unbalancing

 

I think its a quality control issue... personally I've got a set of Red Veil dice that seem to have pretty even distributions, and I'm sure a lot of people have similar experiences. But while not EVERY die leans to 1s, any flaws or uneveness inside a die influences the roll, and I think the production of the one-colour starter dice definitely let more flawed dice slip through than the 'fancier' ones from q-workshop.

But the JSA red-on-white colour scheme is distinctive, and the sectorial has always been different even before this change, popular independent of the main faction... I dont know if you do custom dice for a sectorial like the Druze or even a 'faction' like NA2 because there might not be a massive market for it, but someone up in the decision-making circles is surely pushing for release of some nice JSA D20s.

 

D20s in general have poorer quality control than D6s. They tend to have messed up insides with bubbles.

 

Essentially, the standard Burst for all this boxes is three or less, sometimes an exception happens but it's not the norm (like a Spitfire or the like), the only problem being when you fire a B2 DA or Plasma weapon.

And yeah, d20's are a nightmare to evenly distribute rolls, not only because of the innards, but because of the corners and lines suffering more stress than a d6. However, since they roll with more ease, even dices who are "unbalanced" for a number or corner tend to not be as noticeable as with other dices.

Aside from that, remember this is a "blackjack with a variable number" kind of game, so while the randomness of results is much higher, the reliability of any "weighted" dice is quite bad, aside from Armor rolls or CC rolls for specialists who will always want 19+.
And that's not really a theoretical position on my part... I have even dice I checked with the salted water test some time ago, and just this saturday I managed to roll "opposite to what I wanted" with those dice all the time (more than 200 rolls... only sucess on 12 or so... and I managed to get about 20-30 twenties on the dice. All for FtF or normal rolls, with the Armor ones going into the "less than 10" rolls... Worst of all, I touched my opponent's dice at one time, and he made a mock roll to check if I had "cursed" those... 3 twenties and a 16...).
The RNG is not pleased with me these days xD

 

I think the thing that makes weighted dice less useful in Infinity is that the small sides makes even a weighted dice unreliable - right next to 20 you'll have 2, 14 and 8 and the likelihood of these numbers being preferable to a 20 is fairly low, let's call it a 50-50 that the result is preferable on a fairly heavily weighted dice.

There is something to be said for not playing with MTG-style "roll up" dice (since a faulty weight will produce numbers that's close to the "target" for the weight), but as a general rule of thumb just avoid the two-coloured D20s and you they'll be good enough to not be predictable at all.

 

Will definitely need to pester Q Workshop to make some specific JSA dice. But not due to cheap make. The faction-specific dice look better than the ones in the starter sets!

While you can mess with d6s pretty easily, I've noticed a much bigger effect on numbers rolled with increasing weight of d20s. I have a solid silver d20 that a friend of mine made, it's dang near 20grams of silver despite being ~8mm across the flats (he used one of the mini sets as the lost-wax master). And it's heavy enough that I can control how it rolls like throwing a curveball. The monster 25mm d20s are the same, you can control the outcome by what number you place on top (throw with the same force every time, you get the same number of turns in the roll).