jrtom | I wish they had a better picture of the D5.

Entry tags:

dice,
geek

I wish they had a better picture of the D5.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dice_by_number_of_sides

Having a little trouble visualizing that.

I have one of those D34s. I have no idea when or where I acquired it; I suspect it was accidental (i.e., used to be someone else's and ended up in my dice bag).

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Seems there are more forms for d6, d8, etc., than I previously had suspected.

It becomes clear that you can make a right-prism dN for any N, but geometrically they're not that interesting.

Above N about 30 or so the dNs just get silly. The d100 is spherical. Imagine the arguments about it being on an edge or something. Could make the difference between life and death if you're saving vs. food poisoning.

Is nobody else concerned that dNs for which not all the faces are congruent will be unfair? Certain faces might come up less often because of the dynamics of the way the die rolls. I wonder if anyone has tested those things.

(1) Yeah.

(2) OK, let's see you do it for N=1. :)

(3) I've seen a d100 before; you actually can read it pretty unambiguously.
(Not sure if it's me or someone else that has the spherical d6. It's a hoot. :) )

I was wondering that myself. I can't think of any a priori reason why congruency ought to be necessary for uniform distribution, but I assume that it would help, certainly.

Long before there were d100s I used 3 d20s of different colors as a d1000.

d20s or d10s? :)

Sure, I've used d10s to get decimal digits before*. I don't find d100s very useful myself, although (as

amnesiadust pointed out) they do present some mildly interesting design questions.

D20s with two sets of digits 0 thru 9. At the time (c1981), I think that was the only style available. If we wanted to roll something in the range 1 to 20, we'd flip a coin to determine 0 or 1.

I had a d10 in 1981, I'm pretty sure. Come to think of it, I probably even still have _that_ d10. :) As that was around the time that I acquired my first set of dice, though, I couldn't say how long they'd been around at that point.

Maybe, but it seems like a huge pain in the ass. The obvious things don't work. For instance, 2d3 is not the same as 1d6; the distributions are different. Nor is 1d2*1d3 the same as 1d6, for the same reason. You would have to use the d2 as one "digit" and the d3 as the other, build a grid of values (1, 2, 3 / 4, 5, 6) and translate the values of the d2 and the d3 to give you the correct number. I think that generalizes to an arbitrarily large number of factors, but there is no unique such scheme either, so the GM would have to arbitrate all the rolls.

In short, if the person is gonna be that esoteric I guess I can't stop them, and indeed that may be the fun part for them... but unless they're some kind of savant or have had a lot of practice, gaming with them would be pretty slow.

The expression for combining two dice is pretty simple, isn't it?

Let's say that d_2 is the value that the d2 gives you (in {1,2}). Then to get d_6:

(d_2 - 1)*3 + d_3

or, in general,

(d_i - 1)*j + d_j

It's just a very slight generalization of what you do to use two d10s to give you a d100.

I think the further generalization to n dice should be straightforward. If I had a couple of minutes, I'd work it out now.

Nah, I see it. Was just being obtuse. And thinking about hot sword-forging chicks. :P

I just saw that post. I can understand.

Feel like posting a link to her profile? This I gotta see. :)

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I wish they had a better picture of the D5.

d2 lol :)

oh yeah, and 4.

Re: d2 lol :)

Re: oh yeah, and 4.

Re: d2 lol :)

Re: d2 lol :)

Re: d2 lol :)

Re: d2 lol :)

Re: d2 lol :)

Re: d2 lol :)

Re: d2 lol :)

Re: d2 lol :)