You could, but that would just dodge the problem they want to solve. They're not actually interested in determining who goes first or anything practical like t

You could, but that would just dodge the problem they want to solve. They're not actually interested in determining who goes first or anything practical like that. The article even implicitly admits as much. After all, you could just use normal dice and roll again on ties or, like you suggested, come up with an extra protocol built on top of them. "We want dice that determine who goes first without a tie" is just a catchier way of saying "We want N dice that all have the same probability of showing the higher number but zero probability of a tie," which is an interesting mathematical problem.