The diceman is gone. RIP. Your dice rolls will never have equal-probability-result distributions again. https://www.enworld.org/threads/dice-pioneer-louis-zocchi-passes-away.718828/>Dice manufacturer Louis Zocchi passed away on April 15th at the age of 91.>If you've ever rolled dice with more than six sides, Zocchi is most likely connected to you having that experience. He and his company Gamescience were the first in the United States to manufacture polyhedral dice. He is also the inventor of the 100-sided "Zocchihedron.">Zocchi was well known on the convention circuit for his sales pitch, in which he described the dice manufacturing process--and highlighted the flaws in the dice made by his competitors.>In addition to dice, Zocchi worked on many games and magazines, including a number of wargames including Star Fleet Battles and The Battle of Britain. He was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming's Hall of Fame in 1987 and was presented with the E. Gary Gygax Lifetime Achievement Award at Gary Con in 2022.
perfect shiny polyhedrons
>>97940188I met him once at GenCon while buying some dice. He was very nice and started cracking stupid dad jokes without missing a beat. I think the only one I remember was something like>What's the first thing Elves learn at school?>The ElfabetRest in Peace, you legend.
His sales pitch was basically "I'm too cheap to tumble dice, but that's actually a good thing."If he actually sanded down the sprue nibs, then maybe I could accept his "my dice are better" sales pitch as being more than snake oil, but as it stands the only thing I can really give him credit for is making those ridiculous golf balls. They didn't work, but at least the man tried.
>>97940188I love his dice. RIP cookie old man
>>97940668Tumbling dice is the cheaper option and makes the dice more uneven and more inaccurate. His precision method produced better dice, that's why they were more expensive.
>>97940188Oh my onions we need a sticky!
>>97940894I have never ever believed in precision dice. Sharp edges just do not tumble. They are as much an effect on the dice rolling technique as weighting them.
>>97940188Rest in Peace man.
>>97940188He's rolling dice with the legends now.
Rolled 52 (1d100)>>97940188FI just looked up some of his videos a good week ago.
I remember finding his rants on YouTube in the mid 2000s and bought two sets off his site. Never met him but appreciated the grift. Still got those dice.
>>97940894No, tumbling the dice was not the cheaper option, it was a step in the process he skipped because it saved him money to do so. And, the reason other company's tumbled dice is because it was a quick and easy way to not just soften edges (which improve rolling and also make them less damage prone and less prone to wearing out unevenly), but to get rid of sprue nibs. Gamescience required the customer to sand off those nibs themselves, and then charged premium prices for those dice. The reason those prices were so high was actually just economies of scale; other companies had much bigger operations and just better logistics all around, letting them sell dice more cheaply. Zocchi had to make up a reason for why people should buy his dice, but he was not producing high quality dice like the expensive ones used in casinos with incredibly tight tolerances and several stages of quality control, he was producing pretty cheap dice that were being sold unfinished. So, enter Zocchi the salesman, who would even try to guilt players if they were using dice that he claimed were insufficiently random, despite his unfinished and poorly machined die producing results indistinguishable from any other die even over the course of thousands of rolls. He really had to create a lot of superstitions in order to move his product, superstitions that carried on to his customers imagining they were superior players than those who lacked Gamescience dice.Don't want to malign the recently dead, so I'll just say he genuinely loved dice, and did what he thought he had to in order to keep selling them. While there's better ways he could have gone about it, at least his snake oil salesmanship was somewhat entertaining, even if the ideas he put in people's heads were far less so.
>>97940917Sort of a stupid way to look at it. When we have the conversation about "precision" or "random" we have to presume a) no malicious cognition on the part of the dice roller, and b) no knowledge of or techniques for influencing the dice.The tumbling does not matter at all. The mere action of picking up the dice, moving them as a handful, juggling them in the palm, and then throwing them is enough to impart randomness on behalf of a dice roller who is not malicious thinking of impacting any of those steps, and is not performing any techniques to influence the dice results.So the "precision" and "randomness" only comes into play insofar as an improperly weighted asymmetrical die may tend towards landing on one result over others. And, actually, if you are using improperly weighted dice the less tumbling the better.
>>97941212Then why was everything he said about unevenly tumbled dice correct?
>>97941247It wasn't.
>>97940188F-in-6.
>>97940917Absolutely not true unless you are throwing your die as weak as possible.
>>97941315Then why do casinos run with sharp edges?
>>97941247...it wasn't?His middle-school science fair level of testing and dioramas didn't showcase anything meaningful. Aside from how the numbers are distributed making high and low rolls still equally likely even with the most extreme concept of an egg-shaped die, most die fall within tolerances that make any imbalances entirely imperceptible in the perhaps dozens of rolls a die might see in a single night, or hundreds over the course of a campaign.I have heard lots of people with silly dice superstitions, including even having played with people who refused to allow players to roll "spindown" dice, and even one guy who would do saltwater tests to check for bubbles if a player was rolling too well. And, frankly, it's that kind of autism that is kind of disgusting, because it acts like people who don't give a shit about a a certain set of equally high/low number appearing slightly more often over the course of thousands of rolls than another set of high/low numbers are somehow morally irresponsible.
>>97941427 (continued)The "you need to be autistic or you're cheating" argument is incredibly lame, and dice from the majority of manufacturers are not just sufficiently random for their purpose, even most reject dice that fail to meet certain tolerances are still more than random enough for something like an RPG. We're not talking about casino dice that see a hundred rolls or more every hour and have potentially thousands of dollars on the line, and even those dice tend to be far from the perfect cubes that the mythology the casinos try to conjure up and try to pretend they are. We're talking about dice that get rolled a couple dozens times a night, with dice where a butterfly fart can shift a 20 into a 2 or a 1 into a 19, and which could take thousands of rolls to even suspect any meaningful imbalance.If someone found a die that over the course of a hundred rolls would net them a +1 advantage over the total of a hundred rolls with a hypothetically truly random die, then he can go ahead and have that advantage. And even that is more extreme of an advantage than most dice would ever grant.
>>97940917>Sharp edges just do not tumble.lol. Fuck off. Even a three year old knows from experience that they do.>They are as much an effect on the dice rolling technique as weighting them.Due to the way they are made, weighting is about the only bad thing about sharp edged dice and that is avoidable only by machining and filling the numbers or pips with specially weighted paint.Due to die shrinkage and irregularities in the melt density and voids, which are what happens to all dice as all moulded dice suffer these, you won't get perfect faces. It's compounded by the digits.Then the tumblers come along and unpredictably and uncontrollably change the geometry of the dice. The face size changes, its shape changes, the angle it makes relative to the centre of geometry changes, its flatness changes, its centre of mass deviates uncontrollably from the centre of geometry. Toss a sharp edged die a thousand times and there's a very good chance you'll be able to determine which axis is longest or which is shortest simply by observing how many times the opposite pair of numbers come up. Such determination is next to impossible for a tumbled die due to face irregularities limited to not only size thus mass. The stub attachment left on Zocchi's dice is easily detectable by bias. Flatten that down well, hopefully whoever cut it off the runner didn't cut it too close to the die, and then it can be possible to determine bias on the 3-4 axis as those numbers remove the most material or on the 1-6 axis which remove the least.
>>97941244>t. places his dice on the table without rolling
>>97941391Then why do actual casinos demand roll and bounce? Casino dice are the worst dice for tabletop gaming, not because of any manufacturing faults, but because every time I see someone using casino dice (doubly so if he demands to use them or loudly proclaims their mechanical perfection), I can safely bet money he'll just """roll""" dice in hand and place them on the table.
1/2 By Rick Meints, President of Chaosium Lou Zocchi deserves all the superlatives used to describe him. When The Chaosium began in 1975 Lou reached out to our company founder Greg Stafford to offer invaluable advice to a struggling business that needed all the advice it could get. Lou knew distributors, game stores, and the marketplace. Greg listened, learned, and found a mentor in a man who had a deep passion for an industry that at the time barely saw itself as anything more than a hobby business.Lou and Greg both held a passion for the gaming community, so much so that Gamescience and The Chaosium were two of the five founding families of the Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA) when it started in 1978. They both wanted to share their hard-earned knowledge with newer companies; a foundational belief The Chaosium holds to this day. We are all us. We all succeed together.I personally had little knowledge of Lou’s place in the gaming hall of legends until 2015. Greg and I were wandering the Gen Con Exhibitor Hall and ended up at Lou’s Gamescience booth where Greg introduced me to the “grandfather of gaming”.
>>979420702/2I personally had little knowledge of Lou’s place in the gaming hall of legends until 2015. Greg and I were wandering the Gen Con Exhibitor Hall and ended up at Lou’s Gamescience booth where Greg introduced me to the “grandfather of gaming”. While I had visited Lou’s “every expense spared” booth at Gen Con several years prior, something felt distinctly different. I never had the honor of talking to Lou at length, yet he heard me, and helped me. He knew of the challenges we faced getting Chaosium back on its feet, and how we should address them. Greg and Lou spoke effortlessly, continuing a conversation that had started decades ago. At best, I stood by hoping to be on the shoulders of giants.A few years later at Origins Lou and I were both loading out our booths in the Marshaling Yard. Lou walked over to me, as his van was right next to mine, and said, “Rick, I need your help and advice.” Even though tired, I leaned in. The wise sage wanted something from me, an honor I felt I likely did not deserve. His words still echo with me to this day: “How do I find and open the gas cap to fill up this rental van?” I stopped and noticed my van and his were the same model, the same year, and we both stood on equal ground. Two tired guys trying to load up after a good show, get some food, and get home. I showed him where the gas cap was, he thanked me, and he turned back to his work. I thought he only knew my name because I still wore my show badge. I said “I remember when Greg introduced me to you at Gen Con.”Lou looked over his shoulder, paused but a blink, and said “We all miss him.” Now I say the same words about Lou: We all miss him.Lou Zocchi possessed many talents. He promoted an industry before it was even remotely an industry. He believed in the power of our community, its excellence, and always had fun.We shall not see his like again.The Chaosium remembers you fondly Lou, and wishes you Vale and Farewell.
>>97941427>>97941433>superstitionsIt's not about cheating or about a statistical .00001% chance to roll more often. It's dice that consistently and noticeably roll specific numbers. Ran into this issue with a player who bought some bulk dice off amazon for 20 bucks and every time he used a d8 from one of the sets, it landed on a 1. Over a dozen times in a single session.I've experienced similar problems with chessex dice, one d20 that consistently rolled 18s, another that landed on 3 so many times in one night that it ruined a whole session, and so on. Dice becoming lopsided or oblong from tumbling aren't a matter of being unfair. It's that they're fucking boring and they ruin games. You want true randomness because that's why you use dice. Lack of randomness fucks up the whole hobby.
>>97942704>I've experienced similar problems with chessex dice, one d20 that consistently rolled 18s, another that landed on 3 so many times in one night that it ruined a whole session, and so on.You are literally a superstitious retard that can't accept randomness. Blaming the dice for unexpected results, you can't make this shit up.
>>97942786Are you purposefully being retarded, or did you just unwisely choose this stance and then decide you couldn't walk it back?
>>97942792Yes, I'm retarted, thanks for noticing. Actually since you are so smart maybe you can help me pick some lottery numbers? I usually go with 1-1-1-1-1-1-1, 2-2-2-2-2-2-2, etc. but I never win anything. What's your strat?
>>97942704I once rolled a d12 five times in a row and got the highest result each time. That's a 1 in 250,000 chance if you look at just those five rolls. Thing is, I wouldn't have remembered these rolls if they turned up something else.I also achieved two M GETs and one hept on 4chan boards, but a) these were two slow boards, b) not like I could prove it and c) who knows how many posts I've made since I've been here.
>>97942844The d20 that mostly rolled 18s was used for months in a star wars d20 game. Our GM was a dick who kept screwing us over for minor mistakes, so I kept using my cheater die and kept rolling 18s almost on command. That's not just a minor statistical anomaly. That's the manufacturing process creating faulty products. Otherwise, the moments where you naturally roll 3 nat fucking 20s in a row are supposed to be memorable because that's should be rare. It shouldn't be a thing you can reliably predict.
>>97942704Unlikely events occur. The issue (well, one of many issues) with randomness is that humans are naturally pattern-seeking creatures and try to create superstitions over why certain patterns may emerge. We also struggle with perceiving probability and have strong biases on what it "should" be, rather than what it is.Roll a hypothetically perfectly random d20 a thousand times, and you're not going to have an equal distribution of 50 rolls for each number. Well, you might, but that's incredibly unlikely. Even a mythically truly perfect and truly random number generator would (likely) produce results that, if the generator were to be judged solely on the numbers it produced rather than the method, could be used in an argument to demonstrate it isn't actually perfect because the results would be skewed in some fashion.Weighted/skewed dice do exist, and technically all dice qualify as such. But, even handmade dice with clear imbalances will typically take dozens (if not hundreds) of rolls to discover where their biases are just via their results, and on a particular day those results could actually indicate the dice is actually fair or even skewed in the opposite direction. >You want true randomness because that's why you use dice. You want sufficient randomness. No one seeking "true" randomness would use dice, because dice are not "truly" random. But, even most factory reject dice are more than sufficiently random for an RPG, barring some incredibly rare and extreme examples.The problem with people suspecting dice are imbalanced and obsessing about securing the most precisely manufactured dice (which GameScience are definitely not, by the way) is that it distracts from the game and cheapens the experience, and ultimately many of the "patterns" that emerge from results can be explained as simply randomness being annoyingly (and inherently) fickle.
>>97940188Why are you posting this here?/tg/ is for settings and worldbuilding.
>>97942949Do fuck off.
>>97943075Where is he wrong?
>>97940188damn, rest in peace my goat
>>97940917There's a reason casino dice are shaped the way they are.
>>97944475Ease of machining for those specific required tolerances. Keep in mind that Casinos spend a good amount of effort lying to its victims and doing their best to create both the illusion of fairness along with the illusion of luxury/high quality.
>>97944518>the illusion of fairnessYou can just look at the structure of the winnings to understand that the house always wins, and even in games with more skill like poker, you pay a fee for the table.
