Louis Zocchi, inventor of the d100, has died

G_o_D•4 minutes ago

The study of imperfection in dice that makes them settle on certain favoured numbers by Louis, helps clear superstitious story of Mahabharata whereby the character named Shakuni, had dice made of his dead father's ashes who/which always respects/fall on numbers he desired,threby winning/cheating in game of Chaupad, that ultimately lead to biggest war in human history

sd9•5 minutes ago

It had never occurred to me that somebody needed to invent polyhedral dice. There must be so many inventions in the world that I’m completely unaware that there was a point in time before which something didn’t exist and after that it did.

tgrover•26 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•about 2 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•about 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•about 2 hours ago

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

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

pcblues•about 1 hour ago

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

philipallstar•34 minutes ago

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

pcblues•about 1 hour ago

I just throw 17d6 and subtract 2.

Problem solved.

(I am joking!)

benj111•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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.

Louis Zocchi, inventor of the d100, has died

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