How to Spot a Psychopath

These are my Not Very Useful Dice.

The "crooked in every sense" red six-siders are oddly satisfying objects. They're classic, if rather large, sharp-edged casino dice, except for the obvious.

I haven't thrown them enough times to see what kind of result distribution the crooked d6s give. In the aggregate they're probably actually quite fair, since they're all somewhat close to cubic and they have the proper numbering scheme, with opposite sides adding to seven.

(I think they're actually likely to throw a bit low, since the smaller sides on four of them are all ones, plus one two and one six. Frankly, I just want to try sneaking them onto a craps table some day. If you want some of your own, here's an eBay search. A set of six shouldn't set you back more than $US15 delivered.)

The other three dice are perfectly fair. Just... not very useful.

The blue one's a d24, a tetrakis hexahedron (which is one of two possible shapes for a d24 - the other is, of course, the deltoidal icositetrahedron). In gaming, you actually can use a d24 to quickly determine on which hour of the day on some random event takes place. But you can also do that in various other ways on the rare occasions when you have to - like, for instance, a d4 to determine the quarter-day and a d6 to pick the hour of that quarter.

So the d24's appeal remains... specialised. Dungeons and Dragons used to use d24s for a few things, but it doesn't any more. (D12s seem to have been similarly deprecated.)

The larger polyhedron is a rhombic triacontahedron, a d30. It's the big brother of the surprisingly antiquitous, famously malicious, icosahedral d20 that's become the very symbol of gaming nerdery.

I think the d30 has a certain... machismo.

"Oh, you roll twenties, do you? Well, I beat that a third of the time."

It's hard to top that, if you don't have big brass ones.

The d30 can also be substituted for by other dice, though I don't think there's any terribly elegant way to do it - perhaps a rolling-pin d3 (itself substitutable by a halved d6; the cheapest "d3s" are just d6s with only three numbers on them, but "real" d3s aren't terribly more expensive) for the tens, plus a d10 for the units. This isn't something you're likely to need to do very often, though, since d30s are almost as unpopular as d24s. People use them now and then to represent some sort of boost (lucky artifact, you're the son of a god, you bought the DM a pizza) for what would normally be a d20 roll. That's about it.

(There's another design of d24, which is a cube with each face broken up into four flattened triangular facets. I'm not crazy about that type, but since you can get one along with a d30 for a quite reasonable price.)

The red sphere is a more commonly seen item. It is, of course, Lou Zocchi's hundred-sided "Zocchihedron".

Lou is probably royally sick of the sight of his d100, since he spent ages trying to make the darn thing work right, and it still doesn't, really.

(It's a bit hard to find these days, too; most "d100s" currently for sale seem to be just a couple of ordinary d10s. Sixty-siders, which are even less useful, seem to be going the same way. But here's a one-shot start to an odd-dice collection!)

The main problem with a 100-sider is that it's basically a golf ball, and so any sort of fair roll will take ludicrously long to settle compared with the normal "d100", which is just a pair of d10s, one for tens and one for units.

To address the rolling-across-the-room problem, Lou made his d100 hollow and partially filled it with teardrop-shaped metal weights, which slow its roll considerably, and also make it usable as a very small maraca. The d100 is still really only a curiosity, though, and may or may not be biased in favour of the more-widely-spaced numbers nearer its equator.

Companies like Chessex, Koplow Games and Lou Zocchi's Gamescience make a number of other impractical novelty dice. The d5, d7, d14 and d16, for instance, and even the majestic d34. Unfortunately, though, most of the weird-numbered dice that I don't already own are of the pyramids-stuck-together trapezohedron type, which as the side-count rises makes them look more and more like a spinning top rather than a die. The d34 has a particularly severe case of this disease.

I'm still tempted to acquire them, though, so I can have a whole Crown Royal bag full of dice that nobody can use.

If you're at all interested in the aesthetic appeal of dice, by the way, allow me to highly recommend sleight-of-hand grandmaster Ricky Jay's book "Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck", a slim volume which alternates gambling - and cheating - history with a lot of gorgeous pictures of decaying six-siders.