Dice question. Percentile?

[Rat Salad]

I'm still learning the OD&D system here, so I hope I don't come across too stupid, but I was wondering: given the lack of a mention to the d10, what was the original dice setup for percentile? Do most of you use a standard d100 using d10s or am I missing another way to figure percentile given the list of dice that are provided in the brown books?

[coffee]

I use two d10s, one colored and one plain.

And if my players are doing so as well (i.e.; they don't have those fancy new-style 10's dice and 1's dice), I insist that they say at the outset which is the 10s die and stick to it. (I've seen people change from roll to roll, and it seems like after the first few, they decide after the dice have hit the table. And that's cheating, where I come from.)

[Thorulfr]

Roll a d20 twice: the original low-impact polystyrene die was numbered 0-9 twice, to make it a d20 you had to color one side with a magic marker or something. So you roll twice and ignored the color - the first 0-9 roll was your 'tens', the second was the 'units.' Dedicated 'percentile' sets, with one die marked 10-90 didn't exist back then
(...in my day, sonnyboy, we had no new-fangled percentiles...we had to carve out OWN dice out of mastodon bones, and we were THANKFUL! Then we had to walk 1d10 miles, through the snow, to get to our games...uphill! Both ways!....*&^%$kids these days, have no idea how good they have it <grumblegrumble>...)

[Rat Salad]

Thanks both of ya! Yea, I've done it both ways in my other games: as thorulfr says, had to use the old 0-9 d20s, but it's been so long I couldn't remember how to do it! I may actually ditch the d10 and go back to the old "walk 1d10 miles through the snow" method just to keep things authentic and make it tough on myself...har! Might as well, we went back to lined notebook paper character sheets and everybody dug that, so what the heck.

[coffee]

I even got the old-school, low-impact dice (from Noble Knight Games), to add to the fun.

Problem is, everybody wanted to use them! They wear out faster that way!

[Rat Salad]

Hey, coffee: thanks for the heads up on that...i was just on here searching for some!

[busman]

Two d20s (numbered 0-9 twice), one of one color, one of the other. Declare which is tens. Or if you're super ghetto, re-roll your only d20 twice, high then low.

[dwayanu]

The subject came up a while ago when I was reading some old rulebook or another. It occurred to me that reference to using 20-sided dice for a percentile roll might confuse modern readers.

[Rat Salad]

Well, funny thing is I recall doing that (I think it was with the old game "Daredevils"), but I couldn't remember how to do it. Started to look into a bit deeper, then decided to ask on here. I just ordered some of those old original TSR dice I used to have when I was a kid. Can't believe you can still get those.

[foster1941]

By convention when you had a pair of 0-9 d20s the "darker" colored die represented the 10s, so if you had one of those TSR sets with a hot-pink die and a white die the former would normally be the 10s. If you were unscrupulous you'd use colors that were close to each other (green and blue or orange and tan or some such) and conveniently decide after rolling which was the 10s die

[Rat Salad]

I recall crayon marking ours...and then getting finicky...you'd always see one of us sitting over in the corner (while their character was in suspended animation, er some crap) picking the color out of their d20 with a paperclip, getting ready to scribble on a new color. The old dice, if I recall, weren't engraved very deep either, or were uneven, which meant you spent a ton of time breaking crayons bearing down on the number and then wiping away!

[foster1941]

Jun 12, 2008 11:23:47 GMT -6 Rat Salad said:

I recall crayon marking ours...and then getting finicky...you'd always see one of us sitting over in the corner (while their character was in suspended animation, er some crap) picking the color out of their d20 with a paperclip, getting ready to scribble on a new color. The old dice, if I recall, weren't engraved very deep either, or were uneven, which meant you spent a ton of time breaking crayons bearing down on the number and then wiping away!

Yup, and there's always be that one guy way down at end of the table who'd refused to color in his dice so nobody but him and perhaps the person sitting next to him could tell what he'd rolled. Unsurprisingly, that guy always seemed to hit for lots of damage and make all his saving throws

[coffee]

Jun 12, 2008 10:43:12 GMT -6 dwayanu said:

The subject came up a while ago when I was reading some old rulebook or another. It occurred to me that reference to using 20-sided dice for a percentile roll might confuse modern readers.

I still think it's amazing how long it took to make proper d20s.

I still remember one die I used to own. It was from Gamescience and it was called a 20 plus (or a plus 20). (Either way, it was a very pale green).

It was the first 'high impact' die I ever owned.

Anyway, it was a typical d20 of the time, numbered 0-9 twice. Except that half of the numbers had a little + sign next to them. So a 7 was a 7 but a +7 was 17.

At this point, they still hadn't started numbering them 1-20. I don't think that happened until they came up with the (non-platonic) d10.

But hey, I'm not actually a dice historian. Does anybody happen to know for sure?

[dwayanu]

(Foster started it!)

Maybe you could weigh your d20 odds by coloring an extra facet or two, and it might go unnoticed -- especially if you rotated your "bullpen" of dice routinely.

Gamescience nixed that by making dice with a "+" on half the facets. Thanks, Lou ...

[coffee]

Jun 12, 2008 12:21:28 GMT -6 dwayanu said:

You could weigh your d20 odds by coloring an extra facet or two, and it might go unnoticed -- especially if you rotated your "bullpen" of dice routinely.

You know, I honestly never thought of that!

The cheaters in our group were more of the roll then grab variety: They'd roll the die, shout "Nat 20!" and pick it up to show everybody.

Later I encountered a palm-roller -- she could pull off a Nat 20 at will. Her dice were those crystal dice, uninked, that you could only read from about a foot away. I specifically sat next to her one night, so I could see, and sure enough, she was hitting the 20's all night. But it was largely from the palm-rolling.

[Thorulfr]

One guy in the gaming 'club' at high school had this small, red, wooden d6 that he used, especially for rolling up characters - it would almost always come up 5 or 6. Everyone thought it was loaded, but couldn't prove it. Finally I took a good look at it and realized that it was shaved: the corners were rounded so that the 'face' of each side was round (some dice are like that normally), but the flat area of the 5 and 6 were much smaller, while the 1 and 2 were almost square. Thus, if the die landed on 5 or 6 (which puts 1 or 2 facing up), it would tend to keep rolling, while if the 5 and 6 were facing up, the larger area would tend to make it stop on those numbers. We never found out where he got it - it looked professional, but I've never heard of anything like that being offered for sale.

My brother had some transparent red dice that were probably made in the 60s that were raided from some boardgame my parents had. They were notorious for rolling high - though since they were transparent, it was pretty clear they were not loaded. One of the old issues of The Dragon explained the 'Chi Square' test to see if a die is weighted statistically, and when we did the test, they were skewed way to the top. Not sure why; it might have been that the holes were deep, causing a slight bit of weighting. I recall that one of them had a corner that was chipped (natural, not deliberate) - since it was between the 5 and the 6, it might have accounted for some bias just as if it had been shaved.

One way of cheating would be to number a d6 4-5-6-4-5-6... with the duplicate numbers opposite eeach other. Since you can only see three faces of a d6 at a time, it could go unnoticed, especially if you only used one or two of them in your 3d6 or 4d6-lowest pool (and you are good at palming the dice to switch them for clean ones when needed...)


THEN, of course, there is the tried-and-true "Roll the two percentile dice one at a time, and if the tens die is not what you'd like, aim the units die at it to bump it to a different number" trick... I recall reading an article somewhere abouts where someone did an extesive statistical analysis of that rolling strategy.


...not that I'm endorsing any of these, mind you - but as a referee, it always helps to know what to look for.

[Rat Salad]

Hey coffee: was just reading about that die you described, because I had one of those too. In fact, you can still get that die over at Noble Knight. I just about ordered it! Went with the packets of old TSR crappy dice instead. The old "properly colored" ones, er whatever.

[Rat Salad]

Here's the link on that "+" sided d20...little history on it and others....
www.dicecollector.com/diceinfo_polyhedral_d20.html

[busman]

You can still order gamescience dice direct from Lou. They're still the wonderful high impact dice from the past you remember. When Advancing Hordes was shutting down a couple of months ago, I ordered a big bunch of old school dice. I've been happily coloring my 0-9 twice dice ever since.

[coffee]

There's just something about the feel of those old "sharp edged" dice in your hand, especially when you roll 3 or 4 of them. The rounded-edge or "european" style dice just don't feel right.

I actually got a set of the Gamescience dice in my copy of the Castles & Crusades Collector's Edition (which is a little white box, suspiciously similar to a certain other Collector's Edition...) They even had a crayon to color them with!

That's pretty much what decided me on taking the plunge and getting the real earliest dice (the ones I mentioned above).

[busman]

Yeah, those original dice are definitely NOT high impact. They are the reason Lou started making his high impact dice in the first place. I can't find my nearly round original white d20. I may order a set of the ones from noble knight.

[Finarvyn]

I used to have a neat book called "Scarne on Dice" where this Vegas guy told the secrets of how to load or bias dice. Her must have had at least a dozen ways to make the percentages tilt in his favor, and I'm pretty sure the "shaved edge" was one of them.

I don't worry much about my players having loaded dice because I usually don't bother to watch them when they roll. If they wanted to cheat they could just claim to have rolled higher; they wouldn't need to bother to fix the dice.

[Rat Salad]

Well, if you think about the players that cheat: just like grandma used to say; "You're only cheating yourself, sonny!". Takes away from the fun of actually getting to DIE OFF in the game, which I think everyone should have the experience of at some point.

[coffee]

Jun 12, 2008 15:08:48 GMT -6 Rat Salad said:

Well, if you think about the players that cheat: just like grandma used to say; "You're only cheating yourself, sonny!". Takes away from the fun of actually getting to DIE OFF in the game, which I think everyone should have the experience of at some point.

I totally agree. I don't think we as a group should be killer DMs, but I do think that it has an effect on a player when he's had a beloved character buy the farm.

It really kind of bugs me that there are people out there who "think" they know how to play D&D who have never lost a character. They're missing a big part of the picture.

[coffee]

Although I gotta say, when I'm talking about old dice, I'm not talking about the really old dice...

www.christies.com/Lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=4205385&title=rd20

[busman]

Jun 16, 2008 15:41:39 GMT -6 coffee said:

Although I gotta say, when I'm talking about old dice, I'm not talking about the really old dice...

www.christies.com/Lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=4205385&title=rd20

Ok, owning that would be something.

[badger2305]

Something different to consider when it comes to dice would be to use old-style "average dice" for character generation (either PCs or NPCs). Average dice were 2-3-3-4-4-5, which would mean you would never get below a 6 or above a 15 for stats.

Of course, finding average dice these days....hmm. I'm sure there's a source online somewhere....

[coffee]

Jun 16, 2008 22:19:16 GMT -6 badger2305 said:

Something different to consider when it comes to dice would be to use old-style "average dice" for character generation (either PCs or NPCs). Average dice were 2-3-3-4-4-5, which would mean you would never get below a 6 or above a 15 for stats.

Of course, finding average dice these days....hmm. I'm sure there's a source online somewhere....

I have a pair of average dice hanging around somewhere. I bought them for a wargame (which I then never played).

Anyway, you can simulate them with regular a d6; just read 1 as 3 and 6 as 4.

[ffilz]

I don't think using averaging dice for PCs would be that good. It increases the chance of getting a 12 or less from 160 in 216 to 191 in 216, and it makes getting a 15 a 1 in 216. So basically most everyone would be average, with a really rare person getting +1 hit points per die. And few characters getting an experience bonus, and almost none getting a 10% experience bonus.

Frank

[coffee]

I don't think anyone would actually use average dice for character creation (except maybe NPCs). The only real advantage would be that you couldn't get a 3 or 4. (Not that that hurts you much, unless you're using Greyhawk...)