Thursday, June 24, 2010

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I gotta say -- I'm pretty much through with ten sided dice.

I don't have any problem with dice that produce a 1-10 result, I just don't like the pointy little non-platonic bastards that keep stabbing me in the hand.

That's why I bought a set of these:


Twenty siders, numbered from 0-9 twice. Found 'em on ebay. These are the style of dice you used to get back in the day, but made of modern materials (i.e.; they won't start wearing away immediately).

They just feel better. They probably don't roll any more randomly, but I don't care. I'm happy with them and that's what matters to me.

One potential drawback for the uninitiated would be using them as percent dice. But once again, I remember from back in the day: The colored die is the tens digit and the white die is the ones digit. It's a simple as that. (The Top Secret rule book said so, in so many words.)

(I knew one guy who would call which die was the tens die while they were in the air. Sometimes even after they landed. And what he called might be the tens or it might be the ones. No consistency whatsoever, and perilously close to cheating in my book. Drove me up the wall.)


And, in other news, Fight On! number 9 is out. But you knew that already, right? Thought so.

6 comments:

Robert said...

Heh. I have a draft blog post on this very subject. I have a couple like those, but I ordered a bunch of Gamescience d20+ dice (20-siders numbered 0 to 9 and 0+ to 9+) just yesterday to match my newer sets that came with the 1 to 20 d20s.

One guy I played with had a hard & fast rule for the order of d%: Spectral order. The higher frequency color was always the tens die. (I think white & lighter grays beat black & darker grays too, but that hardly ever came up.)

Aaron E. Steele said...

My problem is distinguishing quickly between the d8 and d10.

Do they make a d16, or do still have to roll a d6 and d8 to get that range?

Will Douglas said...

Robert: Yeah, I wish I had known they still made 20+. I had one back in the 80s and loved it. But Zocchi's site confuses the heck out of me, I can't find anything on it.

Paladin: Don't know if they still make a d16; can't say as I've ever seen one. But you could always just roll a d20 and reroll anything over 16.

Robert said...

I have a couple of d16s. They are “true d10” style, so I tend to prefer the d8 & d6 workaround anyway.

Gamescience is selling sets with d3, d5, d14, d16, and d24 in addition to the standards. Hard to justify the extra cost—more than double the price of a standard set. So, I probably won’t buy any more of them.

I suspect they aren’t still making the d20+. I think they’re just “new old stock”.

Yeah, the Gamescience site isn’t great. Gamestation—their primary online retailer—is better. Gamestation also sells through Amazon, though. Sometimes it can be easier to find what your looking for there.

kesher said...

...and you actually got to use them on Sunday. :)

Will Douglas said...

Yeah, Sunday night. I didn't have any use for them in your game, since we only used d20 and d6.

(That was my old, vintage d20 that I was using.)