Louis Zocchi, games industry pioneer, has died
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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.
I bought a Zocchihedron cos we were playing a game that used percentages (Icar RPG) but rolling it was hilariously haphazard as it was essentially a ball! Loved it tho. I later received the game science dice set as a gift, which I still have. Sadly little time to play these days.
That’s what people always say until science progresses. I remember when we believed HIV would not be treatable.
Science advances one funeral at a time.
And it still fits on a d100!
We had one for our AD&D sessions and we'd definitely be using it. AFAIR it didn't necessarily roll for very long but it was a bit hard to make sure what numbers was really the one at the top. Still: it had a cool factor.
I didn't see a picture of Zocchi's d100, Wikipedia has one
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Besides gambling games most dice in antiquity were used in rituals or soothsaying.
* 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.
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.
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.
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!
One bit I love from the early history of Gamescience is he didn't have the capital to make a full D&D set off the bat, so he'd get one dice mold made, release that one, then take the profits to make the next mold. Forget which was first but I think the d4 was early.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Somebody had to invent that too, right?
Problem solved.
(I am joking!)
(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.
Is that not equivalent to:
> (x-1) * 10 + y
or:
> x * 10 + y - 10
And some changes may have to been backported, and it has a lot of tricks with index of arrays of different dimensions, so I'm wrapping the formulas with +1 and -1 and hopping the best.
IIRC the python compiler does not optimize them (perhaps with numba?), but later steps in other programs are slow, so N <= 20 and whatever I do is bounded by 20^4.
[1] If the file says "1 2 7.0 \r 1 2 8.0 \r" should I keep the sum (15.0), the first (I never seen that) or the last? (Raising an error, nah.)
Usually you buy 1 D10 and 1 decade dice, and role both of them and add them. Most purchaseable dice sets come this way.
This is just the first result with a picture, but they are really common, all my dice sets have one: https://www.dicegamedepot.com/10-sided-tens-opaque-dice-red/