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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1652818" data-attributes="member: 10201">First of all, you want to read <a href="http://hjem.get2net.dk/Klaudius/Dice.htm" target="_blank">http://hjem.get2net.dk/Klaudius/Dice.htm</a> . It'll tell you all the dice you can make that are fair.Gamescience actually sells two styles of d5. One is a kite-faced decahedron--i.e., a d10, numbered 1-5 twice. The other is the one most people here seem to be talking about: triangular prism with all edges and vertices truncated (so it actually has 20 sides, but 15 of them are so small that, while you can balance the die on them, it'll never land on one of them. I'll take his word for it that the mixture of face shapes, face surface areas, and between-face angles renders the die fair--i haven't the patience to test it out.As for validity of patents: the d24 is a tetrakis hexahedron, a well-known 2nd- or 3rd-order solid (i'm probably goofing up the terminology: it is not a Platonic solid, but is based upon one, does have all faces identical, but does not have all vertices identical, and the faces are not regular polygons (they're icosceles triangles)). It is also the only one of the "weird" dice that Gamescience makes that one of the competitors (Koplow) has copied, which, given the non-obvious usefulness (yes, yes: hours in a day; how often do *you* need to randomly generate, with non-waited probabilities, which hour of a day something occurs?), and the relative usefulness of some of the others (d3, d5) makes me think that the patent issue has at least some validity. [Koplow and Chessex do sell doubly-numbered cubes as d3s, but, AFAIK, nobody but Gamescience makes a d5 of any sort.] edit: actually, it looks like Koplow has licensed the d24 design from Gamescience, so maybe they aren't interested in challenging that patent, either.On quality of dice: he's right. Koplow and Chessex dice are noticably uneven by comparison. Gamescience dice are near-casino in quality and consistency. Also, unless this has changed in the last few years, the rounded edges of most Koplow and Chessex dice are achieved by tumbling them--i.e., rolling them around with something abrasive to take the edges off, same as polishing rocks. This is bound to introduce unevennesses. So his claim isn't bogus or unfair. But it might be unrealistic: given the pseudo-random toss involved in rolling a die, only really glaring imbalances are likely to matter in the end, and then probably only on d20s, d30s, and other large dice with shallow between-face angles. I mean, strictly speaking, a decahedron isn't fair, either--the odds of the die rolling over the long edge between two faces that share an "end" vertex is considerably greater than for it to roll across the "equator", given equal impetus. If you really care about fair dice, you should only be using those that have all faces and all vertices identical (d4, d6, d8, d12, d20--doubly-numbered icosahedron for d10). But, again, every die roll starts with a pseudo-random toss, so the d10, frex, should have equal odds of landing on either "hemisphere", and thus the fact that it's not likely to roll over to the other hemisphere is moot.And, to sort-of-answer the question: numbered dice i'm aware of (well, and own):d3 (doubly-numbered cube)dF (cube numbered -,-, , ,+,+)d4 (regular tetrahedron)d4 (square prism with conical ends)d4 (doubly-numbered octahedron)d4 (triply-numbered dodecahedron)d5 (doubly-numbered kite-faced decahedron)d5 (truncated triangular prism)d6 (cube)d6 (sphere with weight inside)d6 (truncated trapezoidal dihedron?--i'm not even sure what to call this--the "log"-style d6 from, i think, Crystal Caste)negative d6 (cube numbered -6,-5,-4,-3,-2,-1)averaging die (cube numbered 2,3,3,4,4,5)backgammon die (cube numbered 2,4,8,16,32,64)d7 (pentagonal prism)d8 (regular octahedron)d8 (isosceles octahedron)d8 (truncated trapezoidal dihedron)doubling die (octahedron numbered 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128)d10 (kite-faced dihedron)d10 (truncated trapezoidal dihedron)d10 (doubly-numbered icosahedron)d12 (regular dodecahedron)d12 (truncated trapezoidal dihedron)d16 (triangular dihedron)d18 (no idea what shape it is--mixture of rectangular and rhomboid faces)d20 (regular icosahedron)d20 (truncated trapezoidal dihedron)d24 (tetrakis hexahedron)d30 (rhombic triacontahedron)d34 (triangular dihedron)d50 (rounded triangular dihedron)d100 (um...spherical with circular faces equally spaced about it, and a freely-shifting weight inside)and of course decahedral d10s numbered 00,10,20,30,40,50,60,70,80,90; ditto for hundreds and thousands; and 00,00,10,10,20,20,30,30,40,40,50,50. I've also not mentioned the near-infinite variety of labeling schemes available on cubes (such as assorted fractions), other than a couple of game-significant ones.and some i don't have:d4 ("stretched-out" tetrahedron)pseudo-talus (regular octahedron numbered 1,1,3,3,4,4,6,6)d20 (square, diamond, and pentagon sides, IIRC) & d26 (octagon, trapezoid, and rectangle faces), neither of which makes any claim to be fair--they come with probability charts to tell you exactly how fair they aren't.</blockquote>

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