|
As someone who has never heard of them before now, what is the "Chessex reputation" ?
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 09:07
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 16:22 |
|
|
Loxbourne posted:As someone who has never heard of them before now, what is the "Chessex reputation" ? if I'm not mistaken, the criticism of Chessex is that it's the McDonalds of dice - you get a bunch of dice, and you get it cheap, but the workmanship isn't great if you're familiar with the physics and manufacturing processes of dice
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 09:18
|
|
|
Loxbourne posted:As someone who has never heard of them before now, what is the "Chessex reputation" ? Chessex is essentially the default manufacturer of tabletop dice. Zocchi argued that the way they're manufactured (the tumble polish part) introduced bias into each die. In the regular sets they sell this isn't really a thing you actually have to worry about. The Pound-o-dice they sell are the ones rejected for regular sale for one reason or another (more often it's because the colors didn't mix correctly and you get some amazingly ugly/awesome color) that can, maybe, sometimes, have more roll bias than a normal set. For the purpose of elfgames, unless you're tracking each roll of each die over the lifetime of the die you'll never actually notice a difference, but nerds being nerds it's still a "major deal!!!!" in the same way that the odds of a US quarter coming up heads or tails isn't technically exactly 50/50.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 09:20
|
|
|
My formative gaming years were the early 80's, and this is lodged in my skull re: Gamescience.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 12:46
|
|
|
love me some full page ads in unreadably tiny font
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 13:01
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:love me some full page ads in unreadably tiny font The guy has some very serious opinions about dice. (I switched to Gamescience a few years ago. I love me some sharp-edged dice in retro colors.)
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 13:09
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:love me some full page ads in unreadably tiny font Dr Bronner's is better toilet reading.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 13:10
|
|
|
If you do get the chance, it's worth going to a Lou Zocchi's stories talk if he does one at a convention, guy has some amusing stories.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 13:22
|
|
|
I grabbed a bunch of remnant d6's to use tracking +1/+1 counters in my commander deck. Most of them were good, one of them had about 2mm of excess paint covering the entirety of the 1 side. I filed/scraped it off, but I don't trust that die to roll sanely.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 14:27
|
|
|
Holy crap, I always thought Zocchi's speech was just a comedy sales pitch. I had no idea he based an entire ad campaign on it! I'll always have a soft spot for Zocchi and Gamescience for producing that wonderful old range of plastic Star Trek ships.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 15:20
|
|
|
Loxbourne posted:Holy crap, I always thought Zocchi's speech was just a comedy sales pitch. I had no idea he based an entire ad campaign on it! This ad - or one like it, with a larger version of that picture - was in every issue of Dragon and every distributor catalog back in the early days. If you're a gamer of a certain age, it was impossible to avoid it.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 15:34
|
|
|
Lou Zocchi is a weird man. Voice for writing, face for radio. Yet he has ridiculous confidence and it works. Theres a video of him on youtube talking about dice and I watched the entire thing, completely compelled to do so. That dude could sell vacuums very successfully in the states. Edit: https://youtu.be/MRzg_M8pQms
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 15:45
|
|
|
I heard the Merck plant down the road is shutting down. I wonder if they'd rent me a laminar airflow cleanroom for gaming.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 15:52
|
|
|
dwarf74 posted:The guy has some very serious opinions about dice. For the benefit of those who haven't listened to him in person, it's worth it. Here is part 2;. I find the the guy absolutely delightful. I wish I could care about anything as much as this man cares about his dice. Also someone built an actual dice rolling robot to test dice for randomness. Gamescience did well. Some other probably equally unhinged people actually rolled individual dies 10,000 times each, and the marketing copy isn't that far off. Does it matter given that I roll my dice maybe five times a week? No. I just think it's cool as hell.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 15:53
|
|
|
8one6 posted:in the same way that the odds of a US quarter coming up heads or tails isn't technically exactly 50/50. Turns out you can't bias a coin if you're flipping it correctly (i.e. letting it spin and catching it in the air). Obviously, serious gamers will only play games that use 1d2 dice pools, or that use 1d4 and 1d8 by interpreting sequences of coin flips as binary.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 15:55
|
|
|
Monokeros deAstris posted:Turns out you can't bias a coin if you're flipping it correctly (i.e. letting it spin and catching it in the air). Obviously, serious gamers will only play games that use 1d2 dice pools, or that use 1d4 and 1d8 by interpreting sequences of coin flips as binary. Or ditch dice entirely and just use random number generators. It's not the same though.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 16:14
|
|
|
The real secret is that "true" randomness does not actually have all that much value added compared to, like, a bunch of normal dice which may have some bias over the span of their entire lives but which cannot actually be taken advantage of in any practical way.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 16:17
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:The real secret is that "true" randomness does not actually have all that much value added compared to, like, a bunch of normal dice which may have some bias over the span of their entire lives but which cannot actually be taken advantage of in any practical way. Especially if the same dice are used by everyone at the table, including a GM (if there is one).
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 16:21
|
|
|
I think it varies; as a GM on a 13th Age game, I want a good single d20 that rolls well and fairly, so I use a Gamescience d20. When I was running Exalted, I just bought out every Chessex white-and-black d10 they had at a convention (literally going out to every booth) because I just needed quantity over quality. I generally use my Gamescience set but when I need a lot of a specific dice (like my Fantasy Craft character that rolled multiple d4s) I fall back on any old dice. As a GM I'm more likely to take dice quality seriously if I'm only using one or a few dice. Granted, when I ran Exalted I literally printed out rows of d10 results and crossed them off to save my players from waiting on me throwing big pools of dice. When I ran Breakfast Cult I just used a Fate Deck to speed things up while my players used Fate Dice. It's about finding the appropriate tool as much as quality itself.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 16:40
|
|
|
TheDiceMustRoll posted:Lou Zocchi is a weird man. Voice for writing, face for radio. Yet he has ridiculous confidence and it works. Theres a video of him on youtube talking about dice and I watched the entire thing, completely compelled to do so. That dude could sell vacuums very successfully in the states. I love this. I have zero interest in ensuring Absolute True Randomness for my elfgames but this guy is awesome. I love people that care very deeply about things I don't care about at all, they're great.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 18:16
|
|
|
All this talk of Lou Zocchi and no one has mentioned the Zocchihedron?
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 18:21
|
|
|
DivineCoffeeBinge posted:I love this. The proprietor has more than 21,000 posts on there. I will never care about anything in my life as much as that guy cares about matresses, and I am humbled by this knowledge.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 18:24
|
|
|
Cessna posted:All this talk of Lou Zocchi and no one has mentioned the Zocchihedron? I own two because I always have to loan out one. Doesn't work on all the Stolze games that are built around two d10 dice tricks but it more than makes up for the ability to count your roll immediately.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 19:02
|
|
|
Gerund posted:I own two because I always have to loan out one. Doesn't work on all the Stolze games that are built around two d10 dice tricks but it more than makes up for the ability to count your roll immediately. Which dice tricks don't work? Adding the digits together works, reversing the digit order works...
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 19:09
|
|
|
Gerund posted:I own two because I always have to loan out one. Doesn't work on all the Stolze games that are built around two d10 dice tricks but it more than makes up for the ability to count your roll immediately.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 19:10
|
|
|
Cessna posted:All this talk of Lou Zocchi and no one has mentioned the Zocchihedron? Maybe because it's not *~*truly random*~* enough?
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 19:14
|
|
|
Yeah, I'd say stuff like the Zocchi d5 or d24 are a much more interesting designs (and neat numbers to work with) than the golf ball.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 19:17
|
|
|
LatwPIAT posted:Which dice tricks don't work? Adding the digits together works, reversing the digit order works... Physicality flopping the dice so that the red is on the other side of the blue forever and always is so significantly more satisfying that I exaggerated in saying that the other method of flopping the digits in your head while leaving the golf ball in place doesn't exist, mostly. Warthur posted:I dunno, in my experience most people find it really fiddly to figure out which number is actually on top of the Zocchihedron, plus the drat thing keeps rolling and rolling forever because it's basically a golf ball. I think for most people when you take into account rolling time and figuring time two D10s are a way faster way to do percentiles, especially if you have a "tens" die or a clear "blue is tens, red is units" system or whatever. Perhaps my card-table is smaller, my eyesight better, the frustration of chasing down the second die and adjusting it to be next to the first is enough of a value-add, for me?
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 19:29
|
|
|
When I was a tiny babby D&D player I bought one of early-90s runs of the Zocchihedron, the red one with the white numerals, after being enthralled by the sight of it under glass at my comic store. D&D parents, if your tiny humans also play RPGs I highly recommend a Zocchi d100 as a novelty gift, because for an eight or nine year old rolling a die that barely fits in your palm is a delight. Mine eventually broke open along the seam after a too-aggressive roll sent it flying off the table and into a wall. Mom glued it back together, bless her well-intentioned heart, but she misaligned the casing and the inner sphere, and it never rolled properly after that.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 19:36
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah, I'd say stuff like the Zocchi d5 or d24 are a much more interesting designs (and neat numbers to work with) than the golf ball.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 20:07
|
|
|
dwarf74 posted:(I switched to Gamescience a few years ago. I love me some sharp-edged dice in retro colors.) I've got a set of them. Shop clerk mocked me for thinking it actually mattered for rolls; I just like the aesthetic. Definitely had to fill in the numbers with a sharpie though, there's no way I'm squinting to see divots in light-blue plastic.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 20:18
|
|
|
Bruceski posted:I've got a set of them. Shop clerk mocked me for thinking it actually mattered for rolls; I just like the aesthetic. Definitely had to fill in the numbers with a sharpie though, there's no way I'm squinting to see divots in light-blue plastic.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 20:23
|
|
|
As for bad dice, the first edition of Quantum had some issues with their die manufacturer. Something hadn't been rinsed off so they were all greasy/sticky, and had serious deformation issues. I could put some of the d6es on a face and just watch em rock back and forth, the face was bowed so far outward. I can't recall if I kept them around here somewhere as souvenirs, the company replaced them all and some other missing parts just fine.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 20:23
|
|
|
dwarf74 posted:Yeah the d5, d7, etc. are things that really should not exist or work properly, and yet... Yeah, though the d7 was a design by somebody else that he bought the rights to a very long time ago, and the (triangular) d5 is pretty clearly modeled on it. Apparently when he first released the d7 he would allow people to bet some small amount (like $2 or $5) that they could get certain numbers reliably more often (the face numbers, presumably) and apparently it was easy money for Zocchi.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 20:30
|
|
|
The d5 is such a simple elegant design, it's amazing it wasn't around earlier. It's just the triangle version of a cylinder stretched such that the probabilities are equal. (Too tall a cylinder, you get too many 1s, 2s, and 3s, too short and you get too many 4s and 5s. By the intermediate value theorem, the fair version exists.)
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 20:46
|
|
|
dwarf74 posted:Yeah, that's part of the oldschool charm. I have blue, yellow, orange, and white ones I use all the time. I also have some of their gems, but I like the opaque ones way better - much easier to read.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2019 21:01
|
|
|
Catfishenfuego posted:To be accurate, because this game gets brought up a lot. Zak only co-wrote that and did the lovely, ugly art. It was also co-written by a trans woman, the trans woman in question writes lovely edgelord stuff and is an abuse enabler, but she claims she named the character and didn't know the other trans creator in question. Who is the co-writer on it? I'm curious if she's tied into the network of shitheads I keep loose tabs on
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2019 03:47
|
|
|
BENGHAZI 2 posted:Who is the co-writer on it? I'm curious if she's tied into the network of shitheads I keep loose tabs on
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2019 05:41
|
|
|
PST posted:Yeah and it was really bad and a classic example of someone using wikipedia and a couple of other sources to write a 'comprehensive' mythological guide to one of the most complex theological belief structures in the world. Due to jumping back in the thread from recent quotes, I ran into this again, and wanted to ask: What was the title of this one? I want to see if it got FATAL & Friends'd. Because I think Hindu theology and epic literature/religious poetry is really cool, and OSR chuds are really bad, and apparently I like to experience pain.
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2019 05:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 16:22 |
|
|
Joe Slowboat posted:Due to jumping back in the thread from recent quotes, I ran into this again, and wanted to ask: What was the title of this one? I want to see if it got FATAL & Friends'd. Arrows of Indra
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2019 05:49
|
|