xkcd

The math is easier if you look for the probability that the arrows are safe. If you do it that way, it's simply 1/2*4/9, or 2/9.

Its xkcd so I assume Randall et al did the math.

From a play session perspective? If the GM is that good that they can mental math it, I would much rather be given one roll than a series of rolls. Ask anyone about their horror stories about grappling in 3e about how much that kills the game flow.

Also: The verbiage is ambiguous (less so if you have the context of how many attacks per round a player has and what feat they are using) but I think you can represent "I grabbed two at once" and "I grabbed one and then one" with a binomial coefficient. Been more than a minute but poking chatgpt to remember the notation (nCk) and it is likely representable as (5C2)/(10C2) which is approximately 22.2%.

As for the dice? I forget if the type of die meaningfully impacts this but 3d6+1d4=4-22. Whether a 16 maps to that 22.2% range is beyond my brain right now as this comment was mostly because I forgot the difference between nCk and nPk and felt like googling that.

I dm Call of Cthulhu, so simply roll a luck check.
The chance doesn't follow maths, it follows the whims of That Which We Do Not See.
And Randall has pushed his luck with them too far already.

Yeah, d10 (1-5 cursed, 6-10 normal), then repeat with 1 or 10 being a reroll. I’m curious what the intent of the character was, whether they’re looking for a simple answer or something contrived like the DM’s answer.

The second you let fly the arrow, you feel the burning in your fingers. The world around you fades as you look down in horror at the crimson thorns that dance on the surface of your hand. You hardly notice that the arrow met its mark - the goblin falls to the ground, pierced deep through its eye - as you, too, fall to your knees. You bellow in pain, the howling echoing through the cavern as the magical vine constricts, the thorns piercing into your flesh.

Roll for wisdom.

Absolutely!

The rules are a base framework for the DM to build upon.

Also the scenario in the comic isn’t actual DnD it’s really a math problem phrased in a DnD setting using standard DnD dice. In a real game the DM would probably do something like what you described.

You play the game with humans, you are "allowed" to do what ever you want and doesn't annoy the others. I like your idea with the tokens.

Dices are only used if there is a fail condition.

Folding a paper doesn't have one.

Folding an crane for an origami competition does.

I'd absolutely allow something like that at my table. Something like this isn't going to have explicit rules, so even in a serious RAW (Rules As Written) game, the GM is going to have to come up with something. It's just that we all have dice and may not have the right setup for tokens, etc.

Really, the simple way to do it is have arrows #1-5 be the cursed ones. The player then rolls a D10 to see which ones are pulled, rerolling on repeat "arrows".

The dm can make up whatever rules they want! That’s the great thing about it. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, but in this case it sounds like a great idea to simplify the whole thing.

Edit: that’s also the terrible thing about it and if you have a bad DM they can make you miserable. That could be why you had a bad experience?

2d10 would be used if each arrow had a 10% chance of being cursed. But that's not the case. There are 10 arrows, five are cursed, and 2 are selected. Therefore the first arrow would have a 5/10 chance of being cursed, while the second selection would have either a 4/9 or 5/9 chance of being cursed depending on whether or not the first arrow was cursed.

To solve this, requires using combinatorics. There are 10 choose 2 (45) ways to choose two arrows, of which there are 5 choose 2 (10) ways to choose 2 arrows that are non-cursed. This works out to be 2/9 odds to pull two safe arrows. Which means you need to get funkier with the dice.

irrational numbers will always be out of reach for a finite set of dice. I think if you restrict the set to the rationals, you will still run into trouble because there's a finite number of dice and an infinite number of primes, so there will always be a big enough prime whose value you will be unable to get on the denominator. E.g. if you restrict to only a d2 and d3, you can't get a denominator of 5 for your probability. So add a d5. Now you can't get a denominator of 7, and so forth.

But all the primes would suffice especially as you've excluded 1 in the set. Otherwise, include a D1 and you're golden.

To be extra clear, if you have an infinite set of dice, one for each prime, then you can attain a given probability using a finite subset of those dice. If you allow for the use of infinite dice and infinite rolls, my intuition says you can get the whole interval but let's think about it.

It's true that every real can be expressed as a convergent sequence of rationals, and that between any two real numbers there is at least one rational number. You can use this to construct a sequence of rationals that approaches the real numbers we want in the interval, and because we have all the prime dice and I have (not rigorously) proved this is enough to get any rational, we can roll any probability in our sequence. So we can get as close as we like to the real number.