5 ms·
Louis Zocchi, games industry pioneer, has died
- guyzero 6mo agoMore 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/ http://www.1000d4.com/2013/02/14/how-true-are-your-d20s/
- sgbeal 6mo ago> 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.
- bombcar 6mo agoI remember reading his original page - what fun insight into something nobody "really" cared about (casinos care about honest dice but only six-sided).
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 6mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zocchihedron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zocchihedron I didn't see a picture of Zocchi's d100, Wikipedia has one
- pcblues 6mo agoInteresting they had to redistribute the numbers to take account of its natural bias.
- philipallstar 6mo agoSort of crazy they didn't test it for bias before they released it!
- pcblues 6mo agoI just throw 17d6 and subtract 2. Problem solved. (I am joking!)
- klez 6mo agoJoking aside, is throwing 2d10 and using one for tens and one for units different from throwing 1d100?
- bovermyer 6mo agoI 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.
- gus_massa 6mo agoThrowing 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?)
- klez 6mo ago> (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.
- throw0101a 6mo agoE.g. * https://boxcarsandoneeyedjacks.com/product/10-sided-decade-dice-each/ https://boxcarsandoneeyedjacks.com/product/10-sided-decade-d... * https://extrememathgames.com/product/10-sided-decade-dice-001020-90/ https://extrememathgames.com/product/10-sided-decade-dice-00...
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- benj111 6mo agoI'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 6mo ago> 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 6mo agoyeah but that means there is no 0% on the scale
- Karliss 6mo agoThe 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.
- tialaramex 6mo agoNot 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.
- tgrover 6mo agoThe 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 6mo ago91 is respectable for a reasonable man in the early 21st century. A few unreasonable people want a bit more.
- jrflowers 6mo agoAnd most of them will die before turning 91. Like most people.
- zulban 6mo agoNothing unreasonable about wanting to live healthy and longer. It's not likely tho.
- melling 6mo agoA guess? 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.
- tonyl 6mo agoThose of us already over 40 already thats maybe the best we can expect, for 20 y/olds who knows..
- TacticalCoder 6mo ago> But 91 yo is more than respectable And it still fits on a d100!
- bombcar 6mo agoAnd it's a respectably high roll!
- sd9 6mo agoIt 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 6mo agoEverything 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.
- gus_massa 6mo agoThere are only 5 Platonic Solids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid 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 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_truncation_in_regular_polyhedra_and_tilings_and_higher 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teetotum that allows any number if you don't care too much about the polyhedral property.
- vikingerik 6mo agoThe 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 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.)
- G_o_D 6mo agoThe 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
- praptak 6mo agoThe internet reports that D100 is impractical to use but it's cool if your game design calls for a relatively rare "ritual value".
- sgbeal 6mo ago> 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.
- eutropia 6mo agoWe 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!
- pavlov 6mo agoHere I was thinking he invented throwing two d10 where the other one is marked with tens. Somebody had to invent that too, right?
- YeGoblynQueenne 6mo ago>> By far, his most significant contributions to the games industry came in the realm of dice design. Zocchi founded Gamescience in 1974. He was the first to create polyhedral dice for the U.S. market, and is credited with designing the D3, D5, D14, D24, and D100. The D100 was named the "Zocchihedron" in his honor (see "Have A Nice Day!"). 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.
- brainwipe 6mo agoMet him at GenCon UK in the 1990s. His Doc-From-Back-To-The-Future energy was absolutely mesmeric. He had five towers of D10s in a plastic tubes. Three towers was the standard dice we all had in our bags and two were towers of his Game Science d10s. The standard dice towers all had different heights but the two game science towers were identical heights. He explained that for the regular dice, the smoothing process (which made them nice to hold!) changed the shape enough that they weren't regular sized anymore. The Game Science dice weren't smooth (sharp edged) and so they kept their shape. Of course, if you want a die to roll fairly, it needs to be a regular shape. 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.
- oh_no 6mo agoSo I think this article is a bit misleading, he did not invent the polyhedral dice, he just made them better. "He was the first to create polyhedral dice for the U.S. market" is a weird sentence, I'm not sure what it's going for, but I think it's referring to the fact that early D&D dice were I believe imported, but I forget the details. 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.