The general requirement for this approach to be optimal, is called "dynamical consistency". A good description is in [1]. It is the situation where, suppose you have a budget B , and you search until your budget is exhausted. Then you are informed that there is an additional budget, B2, and you can continue searching until that is exhausted. A situation is dynamically consistent if, for any B,B2, the optimal strategy is such that you would make the same choices whether you know that you will get B2 or not.
So you are correct that discreteness is a problem, because if you are nearing the end of the budget you may optimally prefer to get more dice rolls than take bigger bets. But the optimal solution is then often analytically intractable (or at least it was - I last read about this a while back), and the entropy approach is often reasonable anyway. (For cases where search effort is significant, a good search plan can be found by simulation).