"10D or 1-10 Twice 20D" Topic

What if any would be the difference other than the obvious shape? When I arrived at a game with my newly purchased 1-10 (Twice) 20D, I was told I had bought the wrong kind, I needed 1-10 10D.
Please excuse if I missed if this was previously addresed.

It wouldn't matter to me. Looks like it does to your gaming group though.

No, works the same. I once purchased a double inked d20 (0-9) by mistake thinking it was a d20.

The die still has a 1:10 chance of rolling any single digit from 0 to 9 as any normally inked d10 does. The game host doesn't know his dice.

Your GM is innumerate.

Some people have problems reading the smaller facets on a d20, which might explain it. They might also be (justifiably) concerned about it getting confused with a d20 if the rules use multiple dice types. Or they might just have a vested interest in making you buy more dice – friends of the local store owner, were they?

IIRC, when the "modern" ten-facet d10 was first introduced there was some outcry about how it was supposed to be statistically impossible for all ten sides to have equal odds of coming up, but I believe it was disproven and that obviously isn't the issue here.

Incidentally, if you want to make their heads explode, insist on making all your d10 rolls with two six siders instead. If Die #1 comes up even, then read die #2 as it falls unless it rolls a six, in which case reroll die #2 until a result of 1-5 occurs. If Die #1 comes up odd, add 5 to the result of die #2 unless a six is rolled, in which case reroll as above. There are lots of ways to use almost any die combo to produce statistically identical results – I've had the odd game session where we suddenly needed a polyhedral that no one had brought with them (Rogue Trader was inordinately fond of randomly shifting away from d6's for specific rolls, for ex) and it was either improvise or make randomizer chits.

Battle Works please come clean my brains off of the laptop…

The only issue I see is if the game uses both d10 and d20, there might be confusion on what you're rolling. This happened to me in an airplane game at a con a few years ago, the GM put the dice on the table and we were part way through the game before he said, oh _those_ d20's are really d10's, don't use them for the torpedo runs (which needed real d20's). We were wondering why our torpedoes kept missing but it never occurred to us to examine the dice.

d20s Tend to roll longer and have cocked lays more often than d10 dice.

I use the twelve-sided d4 constantly, and used to use the double tens as d20s before the 1-20 type came along.

A few years ago I ran into some younger (younger than me, anyway!) who needed to make a 1-20 roll, but only had a d10 and a d6 (no 1-20 marked d20). They were at a loss for what to do …

I explained that you just rolled both dice. If the d6 came up 1-3 add nothing to the d10 result, on a 4-6 add 10. They were dumbfounded.

Sigh.

Farstar, just curious. I was under the impression from talking with Lou Zocchi back when I worked for him in the early 1980s that all polyhedrons were introduced to the market at the same time. d10, d20, d12, d8 and d4.
I remember seeing my first d20s in 1977. We actually used d20 for our games than d10. Why I do not know but that was what the Fort Hood group used for percentage dice.
Just curious to hear your timeline.

If the 20-sider numbered 1-20 was around that early, it didn't make its way to our area for quite some time. The doubled 0-9 and crayon method was the accepted method.

As for the shapes, the d10 came late. The other classics (d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20) are all ideal solids, know to geometry for centuries. The d10 had to be invented; a ten-sided shape is buildable using paper, compass, and ruler, but the sides match across halves so it won't roll to produce an upward face. Lou may well have invented the d10 (by shifting the faces a half step) fairly quickly, as I think my first d10s were from him, but it was most definitely NOT part of the set when TSR went looking for dice in the mid 70s. The "tens ten" die was even later, though not by many years.

My early D&D crowd had several active shoppers and convention goers, so we missed little in the way of new developments. New dice came into the group as they appeared, and I recall adding d10s, 1-20s, and tens-ten dice to the collection over time.

Ah the old caryon with the dice. Boy were those rough dice. That was what made Zocchi's hard formula dice so popular. They keep their shapr edges. However when the unbalanced rounded edge craze came into being Zocchi dice sales plummeted.
Thnaks farstar for the memories.

You may be thinking of the educational supply dice that TSR used very early on. Those were really rough, often lop-sided, squashed, or otherwise irregular, and they wore down. Mine are still in decent shape because I replaced them with Lou's wares pretty quickly. TSR replaced them in the Basic box with somewhat more resilient dice that I had not seen before or since, but Zocchi dice were the staple until the rise of Chessex's harder plastic rounded dice.

The Crystal Caste dice, with their barrel shapes that completely departed from the ideal solids, came along much later. I'll tolerate their d8, d10, and d12, but the d4, d6, and d20 are not good.

Since the advent of the tens-ten in the early 80s, only one further development has really gotten regular time in my dice bag. The mapping of a d4 onto the dodecahedron (the d12) so that you get a rollable d4 was just what the d4 needed. They are made with Roman numerals so they are clearly distinguishable from a regular d12. I don't even deploy old d4s to the table anymore.

The Chessebout the original rough TSR dice.x formula may have changed but during the dice hardness tests of 1985, they were not as hard as Zocchi.

In addition I have gotten several Chessex dice that had cracks in them in my mass wholesale shipments. I never got defects like that from Zocchi. There were defects tough, often a spruse 'splinter extending from a corner. This happened mainly w d20.
Yes I was talking a

But… but.. but.. ITS GOT TWICE AS MANY 10'S ON.

That's cheating.

Those who remember Zocchi's d20. They were 0-9 twice. One set had a plus beside the number.

"Those who remember Zocchi's d20. They were 0-9 twice. One set had a plus beside the number."

Indeed. I still have a couple in pretty good shape.

As well, some of his twenty sided d10 came with one lot of 0-9 inked in one color, and the other in another. Still have some of those too.

I have here at the moment a black die, with silver and gold numbers.

They're keepsakes now though. Haven't rolled them for decades.

Duck

Thanks for the input, advice and information. I always enjoy reading/hearing how aspects of gaming came to be. In that respect, was Larry Brom the first to use playing cards with the birth of TSATF?

they were not as hard as Zocchi.

He IS a tough old bird, yes.

Or did you mean the dice?

From what I've been able to glean about manufacturing processes, Chessex dice use a harder plastic, but many of their speckled varieties are attained by only partially melting the pellets (or melting them but not stirring the mix), which can lead to partial bonds and brittleness in the finished product.

By comparison Zocchi appears to use a slightly softer plastic with a little more inherent elasticity, but he uses a fully liquid casting technique. This allows for those nice sharp edges, but makes some of the fancy color options much harder or impossible.

I own both. Ironically, the sharper edged Zocchi dice work better on Chessex Battlemats, while the softer-edged Chessex style dice perform better on hard surfaces like base tabletops or paper dungeon tiles.

Neither variety likes the odd combination of hard-but-springy, which is why those rigid dry-erase grid maps from several years ago failed, IMO. Rolls just die as the surface was too slick to get an edge catch and just springy enough to rob the dice of bounce. Dice aren't supposed to slide…

Sorry if I'm re-stating anything said already but from what I researched while trying to make my own RPG rules is that for some reason the D10 could not or was not produced back in the day (Original D&D) the way they rolled a D10 was a 1-10 times 2 D20 in turn to make a D20 one had to Roll the 1-10 D20 twice and total it.
When D10 started production the D20 1-10/1-10 died off and became a 1-20 die and that ended up being a mistake. The probability curve changed on the D20 roll compared to the 1-10 + 1-10 roll and better yet the new D20 system still states the old school "probability"…

Back to your problem, you have the same probability curve on that "Old School" type D20 as you do rolling a regular D10, your group probably thinks you have a better chance at rolling a slammer because it has double of each number. It would be easier to buy a D10 than to sway the minds of your group. There are many of us Anti 1-20 D20 gamers that get nowhere with all the charts, graphs, proof and history.

EDIT:

And if its a D20 they want you to roll you will roll better on that Old School die than a new style D20, like I stated above, your Probability curve is better.

Not sure who "they" were, but rolling 2d10 in place of 1d20 is not going to be better unless you *want* that bell curve. Getting a 20 on 2d10 only happens 1 time in 100, while it happens five times as often on a standard d20.

On the flip side, doubling a d10 to get 1-20 is also stupid, as it is still a d10. This gets a result of "20" one time in ten, or twice as often as a normal d20.

Rolling a twenty-sider that is numbered 0-9 twice (as the early dice were) without coloring one set of numbers is just rolling a d10.

The 20-sided die is older than the ten-sided die. Anyone who tells you different is ignorant or dishonest. Troll Hammer's "Old School" is game changing, and is blatant cheating if the whole table isn't doing it. If the whole table IS doing it, then you've changed D&D to a d10 game or a bell curve. The d10 doesn't change the game all that much, but switching to a bell curve alters the game immensely.

Farstar sorry I didn't specify or articulate what I was trying to say.

If you break out a copy of 0ed D&D "where the 10 neutral D20 started" It will state that the average roll for a D20 (1-10+1-10) would fall some where in the middle. This did make a Crit (20) or a Fumble (2) a special outcome. This statement was also true in later editions (Thats the average roll is somewhere in the middle)

ALSO as I stated in my older post, THERE was no such thing as 1-20 D20 when 0ed D&D came out, it was only a 10 neutral die WITH 20 sides due to the lack of Actual D10's. That being said The game was ORIGINALLY D10 based from what you stated…

When saying DOUBLING do you mean doubling 1 roll of D10? Or do you mean rolling 2D10 and Adding the total? And also it was never stated that the D10 was older than the D20.
What I stated was that THE D20 NUMBERED (1-10)(1-10) IS older than the standard 1-20 D20

I will agree that Multiplying 1d10 by two is stupid.

Rolling 2D10 would be the same as rolling 1(OLDSCHOOL)D20 (I will sate again the Old D20 was numbered 1-10 1-10)

EXPLANATIONS:

It didn't help that 20-sided dice at that time weren't numbered 1 to 20. Instead, they were numbered 0-9 twice. A 0 counted as 10, and a "control die" was needed to run the full range from 1 to 20…

The link with an explanation is bellow
link

ALSO Many players didn't use the Control Die as stated above! Many simply rolled the d20 twice and added the total together! that got rid of the excess rolls.

It all comes down to personal preference…

I was specifically differentiating between a "d20" and a "twenty-sided die".

While a purpose-made twenty-sided d20 came a little later, the original educational solids TSR used as dice very early on predate everything else, and their twenty-sider was numbered 1-20. I own one. You'd have to ask Lou why the first purpose-made twenty-siders were 0-9 twice, but knowing his tendency toward "proper" dice, I suspect it was a balance thing; It would have been much simpler to get a balanced die with only one digit on each face.

Some notation standards: "2d10" is two dice whose results are added together. 1d10x2 is a single die whose result is multiplied by 2.

Early percentile results were done via (1d10x10 + 1d10), though I did run into a few idorts who would roll 10d10. Whether the d10 was ten-sided or twenty-sided was a matter of time and place.

I knew a few people who would use a twenty-sided d10 and a control die for d20 rolls, but the vast majority switched to coloring the two sets of numbers differently and calling high during a roll; followed by mass purchases of actual d20s when those became available.

Rolling 2d10 makes D&D a totally different game, from to-hit checks to saving throws. If TSR wrote that this was acceptable very early on, they backed away from it *very* quickly (probably after a basic introduction to dice probability).

Even a single die has an "average". That average has no weighting preference, but it is an average.

As soon as you roll multiple dice and add the results, weighting of results occurs. 2d10 will roll an 11 result 10% of the time and a 20 result only 1% of the time, whereas a single d20 *should* roll each of its results 5% of the time.

ALSO Many players didn't use the Control Die as stated above! Many simply rolled the d20 twice and added the total together! that got rid of the excess rolls.

It all comes down to personal preference…

If only some people at the table were doing that, they were playing a different game. Preference has nothing to do with it.

Everybody should be required to have dice with no indentations (like casino dice) and be clear, so that the dice are not weighted to one side. Also, the dice should have faces that change randomly until the die stops rolling, so they cannot be "palmed".

What hooey.

The spin and bounce characteristics of the "other" polyhedrals (ie. everything but the d6) are sufficiently odd that only the dead drop method of cheat rolling is at all reliable, and that only on certain surfaces.