In general, you want to do one-hot encoding whenever your number doesn’t really represent a quantity. For example, for the current state of a rolled die in Yah

In general, you want to do one-hot encoding whenever your number doesn’t really represent a quantity. For example, for the current state of a rolled die in Yahtzee, ‘2’ mostly (see below) isn’t smaller than ‘3’, isn’t between ‘1’ and ‘3’, and isn’t closer to ‘3’ than it is to ‘4’. So, ‘2’ isn’t a quantity there; it’s just one of the markings on the dice. About that ‘mostly’: the straights require the ability to order the values on the dice, but even then, it’s just an order, not anything about them being equidistant, or about (2,6) showing more eyes than (3,4) (again, there’s an exception there, with the ‘Chance’ score)