Monday, November 13, 2006

Dice and the march of progress

Alot of gamers like sparkly dice and weird-shaped dice and whatnot. There's nothing wrong with being a gamer and having a dice obsession. Diceless games raise so many rankles because of the visceral reaction to the suggestion that these primal totems can be easily discarded.

But I really like also looking at dice as a tool, a piece of technology. In that vein here are two of the niftier dice in my collection:
I need a new battlemat.  Maybe one of those hugeass big-as-your-table jobbies.The purple d10 marked 00 through 90 makes rolling percentiles a snap. You never have to remember to indicate which die is the tens die. And it discourages cheating by some of the more morally challenged players. I believe Lou Zocchi's company Gamescience first came out with this kind of die. They called it the deckaider. Lou Zocchi's influence upon gaming is probably vastly underestimated these days. As I understand it he was a major distributor in the early days of the hobby, as well as the source for the best dice. I've seen Zocchi credited with inventing the original d10 as well. Before he came along everybody used d20's marked 0 to 9 twice. I know a few of my readers work in the game industry. If you've got any good info on Mr. Zocchi I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

The green die is the new d10 that you can get in some Hasbro/Wizards products. I think mine came from a D&D Basic set. Not the new one with the cool blue dragon. I still need to get one of those. Mine is from the immediately prior version. I love this die because it actually has the number ten on it. All my other d10's are marked zero to nine. (Well, except for these goofy Werewolf: The Whatever dice that have claw symbols on them. I got them free at a con.) Teaching newbies that zero means ten is an unnecessary pain in the butt. Wizards' new d10 eliminates that part of the learning process.

Neither new ten-sider does anything to elminate the '00' problem. A roll of one hundred is still represented in a way that is both counterintuitive and different from every other result that percentile dice can generate. For a further look at this issue, I recommend this old Critical Miss article.

5 comments:

  1. Hey Jeff...

    I agree on your dice things. I have several "double-digit" Chessex dice because they came in a number of sets that I have purchased over the years. I also have a couple of D10s marked 1-10 that came in my old Shatterzone game I once owned. I sold the game, but kept the dice. Go figure.

    As far as other odd dice go... I have a d3 (also marked for Rock, Paper, and Scissors), a d5, a d7, a d14, several d16s, a d24, and a d34. I know for certain that the d5, the d7, the d14, and the d16s were made by Gamescience. The origins of the d3, the d24, and the d34 are unknown to me, although I do know that d34s are (or were once) used in the Danish Lottery.

    In regards to Zocchi, yeah he's been in business a while, and at one time he was THE MAJOR game distributor in the nation. I remember getting Gamescience catalogs sent to my house while I was growing up because I had gotten on their mailing list somehow. Anywho... It's also little known that he was a game publisher for a time as well. I know that Gamscience put out the Superhero 2044 game, which was a wretched piece of work that I believe had to be released due to someone losing a bet.

    Just my $.02...
    peace... Dave/RHM

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  2. I got a pile of d24's at home. I've got a game that uses 4d6 for stat rolls, which I hate so much that I'm willing to blatantly disregard any issues that might arise by switching from bell curve to linear probabilities.

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  3. Anonymous3:40 PM

    I have a d3 that I love. It is actually a d6 numbered 1-3 twice, but the numbering is in actual numerals (rather than pips) and the font is distinctive, so I have absolutely no trouble ever distinguishing it from my actual d6s.

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  4. That's a great idea for a die! I'd love a d4 done the same way, on 8 sides of course.

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  5. Anonymous5:08 PM

    Zocchi's influence on Encounter Critical is something I've documented elsewhere ... My obsession for "Zocchihedron" table-books is something I'm too embarassed to document anywhere ... and the rest of my really good Zocchi anecdotes are mostly from the retail perspective (as a teen in the 80s, I had a job at the first game shop I ever encountered, and we did a lot of business with Zocchi ...)

    Those anecdotes are best never documented in any permanent fashion, but ask me at a con sometime ;)

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