Expected characteristic in Tunnels & Trolls character creation, with generalizations

Abstract

In the roleplaying game Tunnels & Trolls the characteristics of player characters are determined by rolling dice in the following manner: First, one rolls three dice and calculates their sum. If the three dice all give the same result, another three dice are rolled and added to the total. This is continued until the three dice no longer match. We calculate the average result of the stochastic sum: 10 + 4/5. We also consider a generalized dice rolling scheme where we roll an arbitrary number of dice with arbitrary number of sides. This generalization is motivated by various exotic dice that are used in many roleplaying games. We calculate the expectation, and how much it differs from the situation where we only roll the set of dice once, with no rerolling and adding. As the number of dice increases, or the number of sides the dice have increases, this difference approaches zero, unless there are two dice (with the number of sides increasing), in which case the difference approaches one.