How is this different from keep-highest?

It keeps the worst of the rolled dice instead of the best, so the kept total is pulled downward and narrowed rather than pushed up — the exact mirror of the keep-highest roller, used for disadvantage rolls and house rules that penalise a result.

Keep-Lowest Dice Roller

Rolls a set of dice and keeps only the lowest of them, summing just the kept results — the mirror of keep-highest, for disadvantage-style rolls or 'roll extra and keep the worst' house rules.

Sides per die

Number of dice

Keep lowest

Seed (optional)

Replays the same rolls. Deterministic, not cryptographic.

Your roll will appear here, with the odds of getting it.

✓ The probabilities add up to one — 126 distinct sorted rolls, weighted by how many ways each can come up
✓ Dropping the highest pulls the average down — 1.76 against the 3.5 that 1 plain die would average — which is why treating this as 1 die is wrong
✓ The range is what the kept dice can reach — 1 to 6, from all ones to all 6s on the kept dice, and those are the first and last totals any roll gave
✓ Every possible roll is counted exactly once — 1,296 ordered outcomes counted, which is exactly 6^4, gathered into 126 sorted ones
✓ Each total's chance is the share of rolls that make it — counted again a face at a time, without listing a roll: all 6 chances, the average, the spread and the most likely total agree

What this generator does

Rolls several dice and keeps only the worst result — rolling with disadvantage. The counterpart to the keep-highest roller, and the reason both exist separately is that the discarded die matters to the story at the table.

How to use this tool

Set the dice sides, count, and how many to keep.
Press roll to see every result and which were kept.

Understanding the controls

Sides per die: The size of each die. Every die in the roll is the same size, and the odds are worked out exactly for whatever you choose.
Keep lowest: How many of the rolled dice are counted. Two dice keeping one is the usual disadvantage roll.
Seed: Empty for ordinary random rolls. Type anything to replay the same sequence. Deterministic, not cryptographic.
Number of dice: How many are rolled before the lowest is taken. More dice pulls the kept result downwards.

Worked examples

Disadvantage on a single d20: Roll 2 dice, keep the lowest 1. This is the 'roll twice, take the worse' mechanic some games call disadvantage.
A punishing house rule: Roll 4 six-sided dice, keep the lowest 3, for a stat generator deliberately harsher than standard 3d6.

Common use cases

Disadvantage-style rolls
House rules that penalise a stat
Teaching probability with skewed outcomes

How this generator works

The dice are rolled, sorted, and the worst few summed — the mirror image of the keep-highest roller. The exact distribution of that kept sum is enumerated rather than sampled: every sorted combination of faces is weighted by how many orderings produce it, the weights are checked to add up to the full sample space, and the session panel compares the running average against that exact expected value.

Randomness and fairness

Every die is rolled independently with your browser's cryptographic random number generator, so each face is equally likely before anything is discarded. Keeping the lowest is what makes the result unfair by design — it drags the distribution downwards and narrows it, which is the point of rolling with disadvantage. A seed replaces the generator with a deterministic, non-cryptographic one that replays the same dice from the same word, so a roll can be reproduced rather than argued about, and so it must never decide anything that has to be unguessable.

For how randomness is produced across the whole site, see how Generate Random works.

Limitations and good to know

The exact odds are enumerated rather than approximated, so very large numbers of large dice are refused instead of estimated.
Each session's rolls are counted in the page and nowhere else — reopen it later and the observed average has no memory of the run before.
Keeping the lowest pulls the whole distribution downward and narrows it — this is deliberately unfair, which is the point of a disadvantage roll, not a defect to correct for.

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from keep-highest?: It keeps the worst of the rolled dice instead of the best, so the kept total is pulled downward and narrowed rather than pushed up — the exact mirror of the keep-highest roller, used for disadvantage rolls and house rules that penalise a result.