The “Dungeons and Dragons” problem

My kids have suddenly been drawn into D&D. They are having a ton of fun with it and I thought that there was at least one fun little math problem we could talk through that related to the game.

At the start of the game you create a character with various properties. To determine the value of some (maybe all) of those properties you roll four 6-sided dice and add up the three highest numbers.

The question we looked at today was what is the expected value of that sum?

First we introduced the problem and come up with a few ideas about what the answer might be.

Next we did 10 trials to see what average we’d find:

Now we had a longish talk about how you might solve the problem. The boys jumped to a computer simulation pretty quickly. After talking about how that simulation would work we talked about how to solve a similar problem with two dice.

Finally, we did go the computer to see what the answer would be. Talking about how to write the program was pretty fun.

Nice project – I might revisit this one to talk through the geometry of the solution of the 2 and 3 dice problem and see if the boys can figure out how to generalize to the 4 dice case.