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Louis Zocchi, inventor of the d100, has died

35 points by sgbeal 3 hours ago | 9 comments

tgrover 15 minutes ago

The 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

guyzero 3 hours ago

More 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/

sgbeal 2 hours 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.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zocchihedron

I didn't see a picture of Zocchi's d100, Wikipedia has one

pcblues 2 hours ago

Interesting they had to redistribute the numbers to take account of its natural bias.

philipallstar 23 minutes ago

Sort of crazy they didn't test it for bias before they released it!

benj111 2 hours ago

I'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 58 minutes 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.

pcblues 2 hours ago

I just throw 17d6 and subtract 2.

Problem solved.

(I am joking!)