Different dice make me feel differently even when my chance of success is the same.
When I roll 2d6 and add them against a target, I feel like each die is part of my effort to prevail
When I roll 1d20 I feel like I’m throwing caution to the wind
When I roll a dice pool I feel like I did my best (building the pool) and now I’m finding out what happened.
You?
For me it depends on the math. If it’s a 50/50 chance I do not care what the dice are and usually just even/odd the roll. If it’s 10% increments then a d10, d20, or % don’t really make a difference.
But a 12 sided d4 is better than a dCaltrop.
When I roll a 2d6 sum I’m always slightly surprised by the result, but when I roll 1d20 that almost never happens.
2d6 gives you bell distribution which is bound to be more surprising than linear roll with a single dice (whether it’s d20 or something else), no? 
Maybe? I mean, even when I roll a seven which is much more likely than any result on a d20, I’m still vaguely surprised.
For some reason, it is more annoying to me to roll “low” on a d20 than 2d6, probably because it happens more often, or something. Or maybe that’s the PbtA success brackets in action.
That’s the real problem for me making a meaningful post here – I can’t separate my feelings on “dice” from my feelings on systems. -_-
I can see that. When I design a game I consider many different randomizer options. Sometimes it’s even a matter of who gets to do the rolling. If the player touches the dice, they have a feeling of control that they wouldn’t have if someone else rolls them, even if it’s the exact same roll. That can be leveraged in a powerful way to affect the play experience.
If you’re on Twitter I recommend following @ammorazz. They often do threads on probabilities related to various mechanics and usually also breakdown how it feels to them and why.
In addition to dice feel, there’s also “number feel”. Adding five to a dice really l result feels satisfying in one way, rolling a few dice and taking the best two is satisfying in another.
Once I made a card based game, and there were two character options. One meant that Aces were high when trying to beat a DC (normally they were low). The other meant that you won ties, where normally you lost.
Probability-wise, these are identical. Both mean that you will succeed once out of 13 tries where you would otherwise fail. (You’re using a different deck than the GM, and reshuffle cards often.) But they feel very different. Aces being high feels more random and like a bigger difference, whereas winning ties feels like a small effect that is always reliably helping.
Ultimately, the difference in feel is much more important that what the math says. The whole point of having these die rolls (or card draws) is to create those feelings in your players. The dice and cards and probability math are just tools to help create an emotional experience.
An interesting dimension of this might be to consider people’s experiences with face to face gaming vs. online gaming?
I’ve only actually played face to face games using physical dice a handful of times in my life. The vast majority of my gaming experiences have been on roll20 or some other online setup.
So for me, rolling different dice hasn’t ever felt all that different? But I feel like that’s because I hardly consider the actual dice I’m rolling. I can mostly just click the button on the roll20 sheet, or type in “2d6” or whatever, and have the system figure it out for me. You could probably do some ridiculous like “take best 526 of 1000d2” and I wouldn’t notice all that much as long as it was obscured behind a button that said “Attack.” on a character sheet XD
Do other people who play online a lot feel like they don’t really have a ‘dice feel?’ Maybe it’s just me not being a very math-minded person and ignoring the dice regardless of whether they’re physical or not.
Yes this. I’m interested in the “irrational” - not the probabilities so much as how things with the same probabilities can feel different.
For online play, maybe once you cross into the non-physicaL dice, all dice feel the same? (I.e. it becomes all about probability)
I’d disagree to an extent. During gauntlet con we literally opened a new roll for your party room because the first room “felt unfair”. I think there’s still an element of feeling online, though perhaps less concrete.
Whenever I have really high probability (~95+%), I get mad when I fail because I should succeed.
Whenever I have really low probability (<10%), I’m more satisfied if I succeed than if I had a good chance (~70%).
The first point is why I kinda removed failure all together if people are really good at what they are doing.