d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20. Have any other numbered dice ever been made?

[cyferwolf]

think Dradel.

My d5 is an extended triangle. the sides are 2-4 and the triangular faces are 1 and 5. according to the maker all the faces have equal area, but of course that does not necessarily mean it they all have an equal chance of coming up.

in practice the faces come up fairly evenly, though i haven't ever really tested it.

 

[rangerjohn]

If Zander (Alexander Simkin) still posts here, ask him about his dice collection if you see him. If there's anyone who knows what dice exist, it's him.

I have a d3 (d6 numbered twice), and I even have an odd 2-5 dice (2,3,3,4,4,5) that I've never figured out what game it's for.

I don't know what game it was made for but it sound perfect for magic missles.

 

[woodelf]

More importantly, you couldn't really make an effective d16 geometrically speaking, unless you went the route of those crystal dice (I personally hate those things, especially when they get up to d12 and higher). A d16 would have to be done like the d10 if I am not mistaken, but putting 8 triangles to a side would probably not roll well (unless the die was enlarged to the size of your average jumbo d20).

Actually, at roughly the same overall size as a standard d10 (or any other die), they roll just fine, and stop on a particular face more stably than a d20 does. And, yes, they are somewhat like a d10, but with two "cones" of triangles, rather than kites--you have to use triangles if the number of faces is divisible by 4, and kites if it's only divisible by 2, or there isn't a face "on top".

The d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20 are the perfect solids, which is why they work out so nicely. Any other number of sides is going to give you a somewhat lopsided die, or have bent or rounded edges (i.e. the d10).

I trust, then, that all your d10s are icosahedrons, right?

 

[woodelf]

[Fudge dice]

What, exactly, are these supposed to be used for?

For Fudge. One of the niftiest features for cutting down on teh mechanical workload in an RPG is having an auto-success mechanism. Various games do it in various ways, but it often comes down to something like "if your skill exceeds the difficulty" or "if 10+ your skill exceeds the difficulty", or something of the sort. What's even niftier is if the autosuccess and rolling mechanics produce the same results, or at least the autosuccess mechanic is just a simplification of the rolling mechanic, rather than something distinct. Fudge (along with Feng Shui, TBP, and some other games) accomplishes this by using zero-centered dice. That is, the average result on the dice is 0, instead of 10.5 (D20 System) or something else. So you don't have to add anything in to the roll to calculate autosuccess, since "compensating" for the roll you're not making just means adding 0. To this end, the fudge die was invented: it's a (d3-2), so it generates a number from -1 to +1 with equal probability. However, in those situations, you can just drop the numbers and simply have -, +, and <blank> on the die faces, because the 1 or 0 are redundant. When you add up a whole bunch of dice, it is heavily center-weighted. When the range of those dice is small, especially when it's small in relation to the number of dice being added, it is very strongly center-weighted. And when those dice are themselves 0-centered, the whole result is. So you end up with this nice, tight, heavily-center-weighted bellcurve, ranging from -4 to +4. And, 4d3 gives you roughly 1% odds of either of the most-extreme results, and sufficient center-weighting that taking the default is merely a natural progression from rolling, rather than a sudden jump: When you roll, roughly 1/3rd of results are a zero, and another 1/3rd are +/-1.

 

[woodelf]

Still? I never went away.

If you want to know what dice shapes are out there, check out Kevin Cook's dice page at: http://www.dicecollector.com/diceinfo_how_many_shapes.html

I have some, but not all, of the dice in that table. A few of the odd-sided ones pictured were co-invented by me and are from my collection.

If you want to ask Kevin or other dice collectors questions, check out the Dice Maniacs' Club, the world's largest society of alealogists (dice collectors). The URL is: http://groups.msn.com/DiceManiacsClubakaTheRandomFandom

Hope that helps.

Glad you jumped in there--i was just about to say "didn't we just have this thread?"

 

[woodelf]

Ummm... why not just create a small electronic device with an LED display, programmable with several buttons. When you hit the button a result pops up on the display...

[snip]
I should patent it before someone else does and makes millions of dollars.

Sorry, you're about 2 decades too late. "Electronic dice wands" were all the rage in the early '80s. Haven't seen one in at least a decade, however. Most people seem to have either figured out that actual dice are easier, or just use their PDA. And there are some really great PDA-based software dice rollers, too.

 

[woodelf]

One thing I noted about the Simkin/Hurley and Crystal Caste dice is that they are basic cylinders with flattened faces the numbers can appear on. In short, you don't need to use every available surface. What you do need to do is make sure the die lands so that a single number appears on top, and that results are random.

Actually, the crystal caste dice have more in common with a "standard" d10 than with a log (except for the d4): they're not simple cylinders, they're two cones. Sort of. Rather than actually make them double-cones, they've made them very elongated kite-faced double-cones, but then chopped off half the kite face and capped them with a shorter actual cone.

 

[woodelf]

Does anyone know if there are any d5 ,7 etc that aren't just long prisms? Die like d16s or d24s.

GameScience makes two style fo d5: a doubly-numbered decahedron ("d10"), and a 20-faced polyhedron that has 2 triangular faces, 3 rectangular faces, all numbered, and then 15 itty-bitty faces that are between the "real" faces and make it roll better. So it's not "just a long prism" if you mean a pentagonal prism with each face numbered and teh ends rounded or otherwise not result-worthy, but it is a triangular prism (albeit with truncated edges and vertices). Similarly, the Gamescience d7 is a pentagonal prism, with all faces (including the ends) used.

 

[woodelf]

I have a d3 (d6 numbered twice), and I even have an odd 2-5 dice (2,3,3,4,4,5) that I've never figured out what game it's for.

Averaging dice. AFAIK, invented for wargaming--you roll one averaging die and one d6 to generate a slightly-more-centered result.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I used to have a d34. You spun it like a top rather than rolled it. On a glass surface it would spin for over a minute... I wish I still had it, the thing rang a 9.3 on the neat-o-meter.

The Auld grump, there was a d50 like that as well, but I didn't get that one...