Napoleonic & ECW wargaming, with a load of old Hooptedoodle on this & that


Sunday 2 August 2015

More from the Dice Fetish Labs

Following my post on D4's, Ross made a jocular reference to D7's.

I had another look at the Dice Shop's website - good grief - I must stop this.


There are at least 3 different shapes of D7 which you can buy. There is also a D11...


...and I even found a D2...


...which leads me to wonder how we ever came to invent the coin.

This is wonderful - it gives me hope for the future of human ingenuity, but I really must limit the time I spend looking at this stuff.

One thing I realised, which was pretty obvious really, comes from the fact that it is possible to make a nice, reasonably shallow pyramid based on any regular polygon you wish - thus the double D4 from the previous post is two 4-sided pyramids, base-to-base. The thing I hadn't thought of is that, if you round the corners a bit and make the base circular, you can have dissimilar pyramids base-to-base. Thus a 6-sider on top of a 5 sider will give you a D11, and so on.

That's clever, and potentially useful, but a bit lame compared with regular 100-siders and all that, and if the two pyramids are more than slightly different I think I would be suspicious of the fairness of the die.

That's enough. Have to go and lie down for a bit.

4 comments:

  1. The 'Dungeon Crawl Classics' RPG uses all of these new dice types. So, following convention, we should start to see their use in wargame design by about 2025?

    The one bonus of having d14, d16 etc, is that we can now step incrementally and consistently toward the d20 from a d4, allowing for an increased quality/efficiency range/spectrum based on troop types. I'm sure this won't add any extra complexity to wargame rules though ;)

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  2. It is only right to mention that my new relationship with the dice shop is now just a few days old; thus far the dice I ordered have not yet reached me (which is OK), but I have had 3 lots of junk email from them (which is less so). Hmmm.

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  3. I still don't really trust d20s, even the original 0-9 x2 ones let alone more exotic ones.

    We did have an early form of d2 though, it was made of a copper alloy in disc shape with a mapleleaf stamped on 1 side and the image of the queen on the other. It never worked for me either, lost every toss.

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