> 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.

> The internet reports that D100 is impractical to use...

It's a nice novelty but it's not terribly practical. Despite having a d100, 2d10s are invariably more comfortable to use and easier to read. My d100 was purchased back in 1998-ish for its novelty and nostalgia value, not its functional value.

We had such a ritual in our games back when I was in high school: the start of the campaign luck roll.

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!

> 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.

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.

Joking aside, is throwing 2d10 and using one for tens and one for units different from throwing 1d100?

91 is respectable for a reasonable man in the early 21st century. A few unreasonable people want a bit more.

Those of us already over 40 already thats maybe the best we can expect, for 20 y/olds who knows..

> But 91 yo is more than respectable

And it still fits on a d100!

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.

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

There are games that use a d100 with 0-99 range, and games that read a d10 as 0-9 for that matter. First that comes to mind is Ambush! from 1983 that did both those things (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1608/ambush).

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.

yeah but that means there is no 0% on the scale

Yeah, a real d100 is just too impractical for actual gameplay. Super neat, but two d10s is far more usable.

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.

And most of them will die before turning 91. Like most people.

Nothing unreasonable about wanting to live healthy and longer. It's not likely tho.

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?)

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 nightmare. Some info in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truncation_(geometry)#Uniform_... (This include the soccer ball.) (I have no idea if this include the D100.)

You also can "cheat" and use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teetotum that allows any number if you don't care too much about the polyhedral property.

Interesting they had to redistribute the numbers to take account of its natural bias.

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 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.

E.g.

* https://boxcarsandoneeyedjacks.com/product/10-sided-decade-d...

* https://extrememathgames.com/product/10-sided-decade-dice-00...

> (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.

Martin Gardner wrote an article on platonic solids in Scientific American, December 1958, and mentioned this in passing: "All five Platonic solids have been used as dice. Next to the cube the octahedron seems to have been the most popular". I have no idea what games using 8-sided dice were somewhat popular (or existed at all) in 1958 or earlier? I wondered about that since I first read that article some decade ago.

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.

Sort of crazy they didn't test it for bias before they released it!

The Zocchi d100 isn't face-symmetric and thus isn't a fair die. It's as close as he could get. It's really effectively a golf ball with 100 dimples, but they aren't and can't be arranged perfectly symmetrically.

Any even number dX can be made as a fair die as a bipyramid or trapezohedron. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapezohedron These would be the only fair face-symmetric d100s. The standard d10 is this, and you sometimes see a d14 or d18 or something like that constructed this way. It becomes impractical with very thin faces past 20 or so. An odd-numbered fair die is also possible by using one twice as big and duplicating the numbers (like 1-5 twice on a d10.)

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 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.

The usual RPG response to the failed critical skill check is that the party just slaughters everyone in the casino instead.