31–40 of 55 posts
The amount of games that use those kinds of dice make his contribution to tabletop gaming incommensurable. Sad to see him passing. But 91 yo is more than respectable
And I happen to own at least one of each of those specialist dice. And many more still. I think I have a die with faces for most even numbers from 2 to 100 and also some of the odd ones too.
OK now you all know I'm a nerd.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah but that means there is no 0% on the scale
The point of percentile dice isn't to generate a string between "0%" and "100%", it is to test if action with chance of x% success gets done or not. For every o value of x, there are x out of 100 values which are strictly less than x, or if you count 0 as 100 then there are x out of 100 values which are less than or equal to x. Either way you get x% percent chance for event to happen. If the dice had 101 sides, the p…
Modern systems tend to come up with some more interesting consequences, so e.g. maybe success is the thing the player wanted to do succeeds as they expected, but failure shades from "Small snag" to "Technically it did work, but..." like from "The target's PA, Betty, noticed you take the key, so now you also need to bribe Betty" through "Our copy won't actually work, we're going to need to keep the original and hope the copy fools them for long enough"
Or maybe we have a timing adjustment, success means that you pilfer the key, duplicate it in five minutes like planned and slip it back, mild failure is it takes a half hour and everybody will need to improvise for those extra minutes, and bad failure is you'll need it all night, change your plans to accommodate that.
I've never played any games that require this, but the Wikipedia page makes reference to percentage rolls, but wouldn't you need 101 sides to get 0% and 100% for that?
> but wouldn't you need 101 sides to get 0% and 100% for that? There is no 0% in d100/d-percentile rolls. Every "how to interpret these dice" paragraph in games which use them will tell you to interpret 0-0 on 2d10 as 100, not 0. Or, hypothetically (but i don't recall having ever seen this), they'll have a stated range of 0 to 99 (inclusive). Either way, the numeric range spans precisely 100 digits.
Love that game, but it is a bit distracting that probabilities feel one-off. Rolling 5 or lower to hit is 60%, not 50%. And when rolling 2d10 the result is 0-18, not 2-20.
The amount of games that use those kinds of dice make his contribution to tabletop gaming incommensurable. Sad to see him passing. But 91 yo is more than respectable
91 is respectable for a reasonable man in the early 21st century. A few unreasonable people want a bit more.
The amount of games that use those kinds of dice make his contribution to tabletop gaming incommensurable. Sad to see him passing. But 91 yo is more than respectable
The "Zocchihedron" is a single die with 100 sides, but most games that use a d100 simulate it with two d10s instead (reading the ones on one d10 and the tens on the other). So the truth is that Zocchi's die is more a novelty and less influential than it might appear at first if you take the title as written.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of percentile dice isn't to generate a string between "0%" and "100%", it is to test if action with chance of x% success gets done or not. For every o value of x, there are x out of 100 values which are strictly less than x, or if you count 0 as 100 then there are x out of 100 values which are less than or equal to x. Either way you get x% percent chance for event to happen. If the dice had 101 sides, the p…
Not necessarily "done or not" because it's narratively unsatisfying to just "fail". Imagine you watch a heist movie and in the last 20 minutes the gang are like "Stealing the master key to make a copy was vital to our plan but we failed" and they disband and that's the end of the movie. Realistic but not satisfying and the dice are for a game, a fiction, so we can just eliminate that unsatisfying result. Modern syste…
The internet reports that D100 is impractical to use but it's cool if your game design calls for a relatively rare "ritual value".
The idea was that your starting circumstances would be modified by the d100 zocchihedron roll.
One time, my buddy rolled a 2; our DM grimaced. "Well, you aren't starting off dead... but you might wish you were".
His starting conditions?
Naked. In total darkness. Sealed in a coffin. But at least he wasn't alone: he had a rat nibbling on his toes!
It had never occurred to me that somebody needed to invent polyhedral dice. There must be so many inventions in the world that I’m completely unaware that there was a point in time before which something didn’t exist and after that it did, thanks to somebody.
There are only 5 Platonic Solids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid : D4, D6, D8, D12 and D20. There are 13 more solids with equal faces and vertex (but not equal edges) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_solid but none of them has 100 faces (It looks like a nice project for 3D printing.) You can cut the corners, but now the faces are different and ensuring all the faces have the same probability is a ni…
I also read a book about games from ca 1880 and it described 12-sided dice (the usual one, numbered 1-12) as if that was a thing some people used for playing games, but none of the games described in that book used them and I also have no idea about other old games using 12-sided dice.
It had never occurred to me that somebody needed to invent polyhedral dice. There must be so many inventions in the world that I’m completely unaware that there was a point in time before which something didn’t exist and after that it did, thanks to somebody.
* dice: exist for thousands of years
* me: what if these had 100 sides?
* d100: *invented*
A better term would be "creator", because actually creating a 100-sided die that that rolls nicely and each face being equally likely is a lot more difficult than imagining one.