Dice Distributions Revisited

Recent thoughts about calculating the distribution of the maximum sum of several dice (ex: roll 3, sum the highest 2) made me realize I needed a better tool for calculating the distribution of sums of dice in the first place. I first wrote about this some time ago in Dice Distributions, so I knew how to do it better, I just hadn't gotten around to doing it.

Tangent: While researching this I can across a great set of mathematical Dice Problems from Doctormatt (Web Page, Blog).

And now back to our story -

I first set up a spreadsheet to give me Pascal's Triangle, which looks like this:

This gets used in lookup functions to calculate (in a second worksheet) what I'm calling the "Dice Triangle", The number of dice [N] rolled is indicated in the column headers, and the sum of N D-sided dice [X] rolled in indicated in the first column. The number of ways to roll that sum is indicated in the table. The number of sides on the die [D] can be changed by entering a different value into the green shaded cell.

The first D rows of the table come directly from Pascal's Triangle. Subsequent rows are calculated from previous rows of this table. A few more details of how this is done in my earlier post (Dice Distributions), otherwise you can ask me, or dig into the spreadsheet for yourself (sorry, in a hurry today).

Here is the spreadsheet: Dice Distribution Calculator
I have not made this public, so you cannot change it directly online. You can download a copy for yourself (under the File dropdown) and play with it to your hearts content.