I was playing a game the other weekend with a DM I've never played with before. And unlike some players I know I prefer to roll my dice out in the open in front of everyone, and let them decide my fate. Well in this game I was on fire. I couldn't miss and was critting more than ever before. The DM wasn't liking this and accused me of using loaded dice. Dice by the way that I just bought earlier that evening from his very store since I forgot to grab my dice. He demanded that I use different dice or leave the game. I didn't want to cause any drama so I grudgingly bowed to his demands and used some of my friends dice. I still rolled well but not as well as before.

Can a DM make you change dice?

DMs cannot make you do anything, unless you let them and want to continue to be in said campaign.  You are hopefully a person of sound mind and thinking.  DMs run the game and the table, part of the social contract that is built is deciding on table rules.  You can either stay at a table and continue and deal with a DM who demands things like this OR as he said you can walk away.

No D&D is better than bad D&D.

I didn't want to walk, we were all having fun. I honestly think the DM was having a bad day and taking it out on the party, We all had fun, the battles were quite challenging but we all made it out alive. And in the end I shook the DM's hand and said "Good game."  I'm willing to play there again, with the hopes that this was just a bad day on his part.

So I fail to understand now why you posted this question.....

DMs are running the game, technically they can ask you to do anything - but most tables follow a social contract to prevent the aforementioned "bad DM" practices like this.  So my reply really was a blanket answer because there is no limit to the power of the DM, their power is derived from what the players let the DM get away with and vice versa.

The man sold you dice from his own store, that you paid for with your own real money. Then turns around and accuses you of cheating. I don’t know anything about the guy having a bad day, but that doesn’t excuse his behavior. I would have lost my patience to say the least. Boggles my mind that he took your money, insulted you, then preceded to make arbitrary demands.

im happy you had a great time, all I can say is that you’re much more agreeable than I am. I probably would have said things unacceptable to talk about in this forum. Damn sure wouldn’t have shook the individual’s hand. Would have at least been petty about referring to the quality of the product the guy just sold you and accused you of cheating with. Hell I would have gone out of my way to test the balance of the die in front of him in water with sugar. Out of balance, I want a refund and an apology for being sold a defective product. Balanced, then he can STFU.

I must agree that, given you had just purchased the dice from his store, accusing you of cheating is way out of order. I would have demanded my money back at the end of the game at the very least, seeing as he basically told you that the dice he sold you were defective.

I completely support the fundamental Rule Zero principal, but there's "The DM has final say", then there's "The DM is a tool". 

Man every time I hear one of those "Bad DM" or "Bad Player" stories it has a twofold effect on me. First, it makes my blood boil from anger and injustice and stupidity. And second, I cannot for the love of Mystra imagine encountering those kinds of situations myself. 

It is true that not all dice are created equal - as with every manufacturing process, mistakes can be made that make the dice roll better or worse in some cases. It can be easily tested in a glass of salted water (if it's not metal of course). 

So yes, if the DM is suspecting that you have a loaded one, they can request that you change it - it's better to comply and jail it for the session and inspect it later.

The spice here is the fact that the DM himself sold you the dice. So it all depends on the way the DM framed his request. If he was firm but polite, I would comply, inspect later. If he was a dick about it (accuse me of cheating for instance) then I would be very quick to point out that it was he who sold me the dice and if this is his opinion then I'd like a refund. 

While a lot of dice are biased very few unless deliberately constructed that way are biased to the extent you would notice the difference.  If you had a dice that rilled a 20 10% of the time (and I doubt any are that biased) you only have a 1.3% chance of rolling 4 or more 20s in your first 10 rolls (compared to 0.1% with a fair die)

Most occassions that are referred to as being on fire when rolling are not to do wiuth a single numbwer coing up frequently but (nearly) all the roills being realtively high. The odds of rolling at least 11 on 9 of your first ten rolls is only 1% and such rolling can result in accusations of biased dice but a dice that is biased towards a 20 will also roll more 2s, 8s and 14s then you would expect so such rolling sequence is no more likely with biased dice than fair dice. Swquences such of these are either down to pure luck or player cheating by means other than biased dice (e.g.hidden rolling, rolling and picking the dice up before anyone else has had a chance to see it, or not rolling at all just placing the die in the palm of the hand then placing it on the table)

If a store holder told me he had just sold me defective merchandise I would certainly ask for a refund at the very least.

I think it is not unreasonable for a DM to get suspicious when a player gets oddly high rolls. In your situation, no (you purchased the dice there, you were rolling in a highly visible area). However, if the dice were from some other source the answer is that the DM should make the call.

In one of my groups, a player rolled really high with surprising frequency. 50% of their rolls were 19s or 20s. There was significant worry on my end that he was cheating, but they were using google dice, and when asked they screenshared to prove it (naturally, the sessions were over Zoom because pandemic). I am sure plenty of my fellow DMs have had to make tough calls like this.

On the other hand, "defective" dice can be a fun experience. In another group that I am proud to be part of, the resident dice-hoarder had a pair called the "blood dice" due to their deep red hue. The d20 seemed to roll a shocking proportion of 1s or 20s, and rarely any middling numbers (we actually tested it once, out of about 50 rolls 17 were 1s, 2s, or 20s). Instead of banning the dice, we treated it as a unique part of our group's culture. Even when the DM rolled four crits in a row and killed a character in the third session. (ToA btw so not so surprising)

I think I would have asked for my money back and left the store.  Accusing you of cheating when you are rolling in the open is a bit much.

Quote from Mr_Muppet >>

he DM wasn't liking this and accused me of using loaded dice. Dice by the way that I just bought earlier that evening from his very store since I forgot to grab my dice.

 

Hand the dice back, ask for a refund, and suggest that he stops selling that brand of dice because they are obviously loaded!

In game? Infinite power. In life? Only as much as you lend them. But look, the DM is in a way, the host of the game. They can ask you to do pretty much anything. But if your DM demands that you stop using seemingly overly powerful dice, then they are either concerned about the balancing and flow of the game, or they are potentially a sore loser and should not be a DM, which is a position reserved for the mature and is predisposed to lose the game.

Note, the latter is an extreme case. It is far more likely that your DM is simply concerned that a player they've never seen before is rolling too many critical successes, which is justifiably suspicious without context from your perspective and character as a person.

Additionally, not all dice are made equally. Perhaps those dice were intentionally loaded by the producer, maybe a factory inconsistency weighted them improperly, maybe you were REALLY lucky, who knows?

I think context is really important here. The concept of 'hot' and 'cold' dice is not uncommon amongst many D&D groups - more of a superstitious thing than an accusation of cheating. Our group has consigned many a d20 to the 'penalty box' both from the DM and from players. For us it's a kind of joke, but some people take their superstitions very seriously. I think in a group that doesn't know each other well - and one that may have people with varying degrees of social skills - this kind of thing can be miscommunicated and taken in the wrong light.

Certainly if you feel insulted you have the right to stand up for yourself. But if it was not a blunt 'you're cheating!' accusation, you can also give the guy the benefit of the doubt, shrug and use your buddy's dice for the night. I've made similar concessions in the past for folks that had some level of awkwardness or lack of tact, and they turned out to not be terrible people.

At any rate, I think quitting the game for good over being asked to use different dice might be a bit hasty. Of course if there are other signs this guy is a jerk, by all means head out.

In some ways this is lose/lose. You are forced to change your dice, which people in general dislike (to put it mildly). And if you quit, you would have "proven him correct" that you were cheating. I think you might have been in your rights to ask if you could exchange the dice for another set since you bought them from the guy.

As long as in the end, you had a good time.

DMs can't make you do anything. They equal to a player, they're both part of the same team to tell a fun story around a table. So to reiterate: The DM has no more power than a player does.

One of the DMs role is to act as referee and this means he does have more power than the other players. 

If a player wants to use a spiritual weapon to burn the webbing restrained him the dm decides if it succeed and whether it hurts the player, this is a lot more fun for the party than spending 20 minutes debating what happens and possibly still not agreeing.

If a player is rolling behind a screen and is rolling really hot, I would have no problem with the dm asking for the player to roll in the open. 

A player always has the right to stop playing, and a good dm will always listen to his players for example if they want the campaign to be more combat focused he should take that on board but that sort of thing should usually be outside of the game itself and the final decision is always the dms 

Yeah, that was a jerk move by the DM and I would ABSOLUTELY have called him out on it. If ya buy the dice from his store that day and they are messed up and you are rolling insane, he should either have kept your rolls and used it as marketing or offered you a free new set to roll if he thinks they are loaded. Not taking a players roll that is out in the open is wrong. Now there is the debate on DM's fudging rolls which is a whole other debate, but if ya make a player roll and there is a result, the result is taken, period. If a player fudges or cheats then it's the same thing as not allowing a roll that was asked for. I feel the same way about DM rolls, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, but that's another topic.

Jerk DM for sure.

I’ve never understood the frustration.  Put the dice into the penalty box or whatever and move on.  It’s all good fun.

The concept of loaded dice, skewed dice, lucky or unlucky dice is so overblown in the DnD community that I think players and DMs have gone overboard in thinking that X crazy rolls in a row is somehow impossible. 

They’re dice.  Swap em out.  I don’t care if you want to be superstitious about it, I don’t care if you want me to change dice, it’s literally irrelevant to the game at all so I would just swap it out and move on.

did you point out to him that you just bought the dice from him that night?

But keep your posts user friendly here.  YOU FORGOT TO BRING YOUR DICE.  <shivver>

Quote from Lyxen >>

Quote from KanedaSyndrome >>

DMs can't make you do anything. They equal to a player, they're both part of the same team to tell a fun story around a table. So to reiterate: The DM has no more power than a player does.

 
Even without getting into a conceptual debate, this is totally contradicted by the RAW, which (at least IMHO is correct) says that they are absolutely not equal. Some simple quotations that show you that, in the game designers' intents (and from absolutely every edition of the game, including 3e), the DM has powers and prerogatives that the players do not have:

• This section
• The Dungeons & Dragons game consists of a group of characters embarking on an adventure that the Dungeon Master presents to them.
• The DM is key. Many unexpected things can happen in a D&D campaign, and no set of rules could reasonably account for every contingency. If the rules tried to do so, the
  game would become unplayable. An alternative would be for the rules to severely limit what characters can do, which would be counter to the open-endedness of D&D. The direction we chose for the current edition was to lay a foundation of rules that a DM could build on, and we embraced the DM’s role as the bridge between the things the rules address and the things they don’t. In a typical D&D session, a DM makes numerous rules decisions—some barely noticeable and others quite obvious.
• And so many others...

The campaign is the DM's creation, from his own sweat (and blood in some cases :D ), and the DM has the absolute right to have anything happen in there to the characters who enter his world. If a god from the world decides to eradicate the character, that's it, the character is eradicated from the campaign, and the player can say whatever he can, there is no way he can reverse that on his own. Of course, a DM would be wise to use his power only to benefit the greater fun of the participants of the campaign, including his own. But if a player is being obnoxious and needs to leave so that the others can continue to have fun, then fortunately, his power will not be equal to the DM's by far.

And if the DM, again in the spirit of fun play, has mighty adversaries and one of them charms or controls a PC (for example because of a failed saving throw), then, in turn, it's the player's duty to roleplay this properly and not to say "but it's my character, you can't force me to do anything". If that happens, it's absolutely the DM's prerogative to seize control of the character, transform it into an NPC and have it do exactly what should have been done in the first place.

Finally, from a more personal perspective, and after decades working in associations for TTRPGs and LARPs, there is something that the players should always respect, above and beyond everything else, because without it there would be no game: the amount of work that the DM does to start the campaign and keep it running. 

 

 Within the game world they're not equal, but outside of it, at the table where they sit as people telling a story together, they're absolutely equal. In this situation with the dice being rolled, they're equal and the DM has no right to dictate which dice the player uses, at least no more right than the player has to dictate the DM as well.

If either disapprove of the other, it may be time to leave the game.