I dabble in my own crap gamey stuff, and I use random [mostly 0-1] to power of something all the time; not because I know what I'm doing, but because it's simple and often good enough. I don't know math, but multiplying all sorts of things with each other to see what happens I can do; that and getting random numbers from perlin noise can cover a lot of sins, or at least make for a lot of fun :)