Louis Zocchi, inventor of the d100, has died
60 points - today at 6:19 AM
SourceThe 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.
jrflowers
today at 10:29 AM
And most of them will die before turning 91. Like most people.
More than just the d100 he was a pioneer of being very exacting when it came to making polyhedral dice. See http://www.1000d4.com/2013/02/14/how-true-are-your-d20s/
> More than just the d100 he was a pioneer of being very exacting when it came to making polyhedral dice.
Absolutely, but i couldn't fit all of that into the subject line ;) and he's best known for the d100. Many of us remember the articles and ads from the 1980s describing the effort he put into that particular die.
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.
literalAardvark
today at 9:36 AM
Everything you've ever seen that isn't sky, water, air, ground, life was invented by someone.
Heck, many specimens of the last two are inventions, that are insignificant as a % of species but are in the worldwide top by biomass.
It's quite difficult to leave the anthroposphere in much of the world.
The internet reports that D100 is impractical to use but it's cool if your game design calls for a relatively rare "ritual value".
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
today at 7:22 AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zocchihedron
I didn't see a picture of Zocchi's d100, Wikipedia has one
Interesting they had to redistribute the numbers to take account of its natural bias.
philipallstar
today at 8:55 AM
Sort of crazy they didn't test it for bias before they released it!
I just throw 17d6 and subtract 2.
Problem solved.
(I am joking!)
Joking aside, is throwing 2d10 and using one for tens and one for units different from throwing 1d100?
gus_massa
today at 10:49 AM
Throwing 2d10 of different colors is equivalent of trowing 1d100. It's nice they have different colors to avoid discussions, but you can throw them in two different bins or one at a time or something. Remember to sum them as (x-1) * 10 + (y-1) + 1, that is a clear indication of why zero-based indexing is better.
(Does someone sell "decade" dice, which faces say: 10, 20, 300, ..., 90 and 100?)
> (Does someone sell "decade" dice, which faces say: 10, 20, 300, ..., 90 and 100?)
Yes, they do. I used to use them for this exact purpose.
bovermyer
today at 10:34 AM
I would say yes, because the physics of rolling two objects is slightly different than one object. I don't have any idea, though, if that would affect the distribution of numbers rolled. It's not an experiment that can be done through simulation.
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.
PunchyHamster
today at 10:01 AM
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 other 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 probabilities would be x/101 which aren't nice round percents.
It even works correctly for 0% and 100% chance events. Assuming 0 is counted as 0 - For 0% there are 0 numbers less than 0 on dice so chance of throwing number less that is 0/100=0%. For 100% all 100 numbers are less than 100 so no matter what the result of throw is you will succeed.
PunchyHamster
today at 10:03 AM
No, because in d100 based systems you success is rolling at or below a chance.
So the fact there is no 0% (0 is interpreted as 100) is necessary because if your modifiers are giving it 0% chance, you need dice to start at 1 for that to work
The study of imperfection in dice that makes them settle on certain favoured numbers by Louis, helps clear superstitious story of Mahabharata whereby the character named Shakuni, had dice made of his dead father's ashes who/which always respects/fall on numbers he desired,threby winning/cheating in game of Chaupad, that ultimately lead to biggest war in human history