This is pure speculation based on how dice are manufactured, but it’s
entirely possible that transparent or translucent style dice may
technically roll more true than opaque dice.
I was talking with some dice manufacturers who told me that the
plastic used to manufacture dice is actually clear by default, and
opaque dice have coloring added. This seemed odd to me, and I asked why
basic opaque dice were vastly cheaper than, say, clear dice that
wouldn’t require additional additives.
The short answer: opaque dice have air bubbles inside them.
Why it Happens
Does it Matter?
Air bubbles can form inside the dice during the plastic injection
molding process when the dice cool too quickly. With opaque dice, since
the air bubbles can’t be seen, dice manufacturers deliberately cool the
dice too quickly, which allows them to run more plastic through the
molds per hour — thus the cost of the dice is cheaper.
Because the air bubbles form irregularly and in different sizes, an
opaque die may well have one side that is lighter than another side,
which could cause the die to favor one side.
Now it’s also possible that the premium opaque dice (like the one
pictured above) don’t have this issue: they are vastly more expensive
than your basic opaque dice, and indeed are more expensive than basic
translucent dice. Is this because they aren’t pushing them through the
molds as fast as the basic opaques, or just a factor of the difficulty
in combining multiple colored plastic in a consistent way?
It’s worth stressing that I don’t know of any tests that have been
done that demonstrate whether or not air bubbles or density differences
actually affect the rolling of the dice. In our dice randomness test,
we definitely saw that irregular surfaces on the face of the die
affected the roll, but we certainly didn’t test anything with irregular
densities.
Interestingly in that test we compared an opaque Chessex die against a
translucent GameScience die: the GameScience die rolled marginally more
true (other than the side with the sprue), but was it because of the
manufacturing method, or was it because the opaque Chessex die had air
bubbles affecting the roll?
If I had to guess, I do not think that air bubbles would make a
measurable difference. If they did, that difference would certainly be
miniscule and irrelevant to RPG gaming (much like we saw in Chessex vs
GameScience). But until someone does a giant rolling test of opaque vs
translucent dice, the possibility remains that opaque dice roll less
true.
Source: http://www.awesomedice.com/blog/649/do-transparent-dice-roll-better/
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