Astro Hacker News - Louis Zocchi, inventor of the d100, has died

tgrover |next [-]

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

melling |root |parent [-]

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

jrflowers |root |parent [-]

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

guyzero |next |previous [-]

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/

sgbeal |root |parent [-]

> 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.

sd9 |next |previous [-]

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.

gus_massa |root |parent |next [-]

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.

literalAardvark |root |parent |previous [-]

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.

praptak |next |previous [-]

The internet reports that D100 is impractical to use but it's cool if your game design calls for a relatively rare "ritual value".

G_o_D |next |previous [-]

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

01HNNWZ0MV43FF |next |previous [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zocchihedron

I didn't see a picture of Zocchi's d100, Wikipedia has one

pcblues |root |parent [-]

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

philipallstar |root |parent [-]

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

pcblues |next |previous [-]

I just throw 17d6 and subtract 2.

Problem solved.

(I am joking!)

klez |root |parent [-]

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

bovermyer |root |parent [-]

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.

benj111 |previous [-]

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?

sgbeal |root |parent |next [-]

> 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 |root |parent [-]

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

Karliss |root |parent [-]

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 |root |parent |previous [-]

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