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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Peelee
I never understood why someone would waste their money on a d100.
Oh, I can explain that to you.
Years ago, I was in a game store, and saw a die I'd never seen before. It was a d34. I told the clerk, "That's ridiculous. Nobody has any use for a 34-sided die. They just made that to find out if anybody was stupid enough to buy a die that has no purpose whatsoever.
"Gimme two."
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jay R
Oh, I can explain that to you.
Years ago, I was in a game store, and saw a die I'd never seen before. It was a d34. I told the clerk, "That's ridiculous. Nobody has any use for a 34-sided die. They just made that to find out if anybody was stupid enough to buy a die that has no purpose whatsoever.
"Gimme two."
And I think that's my favorite joke on the forum, now. I'm off to GIS a d34!
ETA: Disappointment, thy name is d34.
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Peelee
And I think that's my favorite joke on the forum, now. I'm off to GIS a d34!
ETA: Disappointment, thy name is d34.
It's worse than you think. Back when they were made, it turned out that there was an actual use for them. How annoying.
At the time, the Arizona (I think) lottery used the numbers 1-34 in their lottery. Its purpose was to generate lottery numbers.
I still have my d34, though.
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
I guess you could make a usable d100 of relatively small size by making the exterior slightly transparent, filling it with water and adding a bubble a little smaller than a facet, that will show the right number.
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
heh.. to go back on topic..
I'm visiting my grandad in Amsterdam. The man is 97 and he was already a grumpy sort, which got worse since we burried grandma some 18 months ago. in our defence, she was dead.
Language is something of an important topic in the family on his side, and I'm starting to think it started with him.
He was getting aggravated about Dutch starting to more and more include words migrated from other languages, German in the instance he was getting mad about.
He asked me to look up if there was such a thing as an association for the Dutch language.
Of course I found one because, language nerds...!
As I was giving him the contact details, we noticed they have a paid phone service where you can ask questions about language, and a regular phone number where you cannot do just that but can get in touch with the association.
Grandpa asked for the latter.
When I asked him what he wanted to do with it, he said "I want to advise them"... with something of a belligerent glare in his eyes.
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/...d-facepalm.jpg
They won't know what hit them...:smalleek:
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Peelee
The best joke in Scrubs was the two coins that add up to 30 cents riddle. The lunch guy says to go to a libary, gets corrected to library. Then, when the answer is revealed, looks at the janitor and says, "your face is all red like a strawbrerry!" Gets me every time.
Also, friend had a d100. Die in water in exterior shell. Never broke, stopped alright, about the size of a golf ball. Just couldn't tell which number was actually on too. Percentile dice are just so much easier, I never understood why someone would waste their money on a d100.
A cheap rng's even easier than that
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bohandas
A cheap rng's even easier than that
I'd call percentile dice a cheap rng:smalltongue:
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
BTW, how come nothing ever uses a d30 d40 d60 d80 or d120; they can easily be done with the same system as the d%. In fact d30 and d60 are easier than d% as they only require one non-six-sided die plus a d6, instead of two non-six-sided dice
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jay R
It's worse than you think. Back when they were made, it turned out that there was an actual use for them. How annoying.
At the time, the Arizona (I think) lottery used the numbers 1-34 in their lottery. Its purpose was to generate lottery numbers.
I still have my d34, though.
There is another use for them. 3d34-2 produces a near perfect 1-100 bell curve.
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bohandas
BTW, how come nothing ever uses a d30 d40 d60 d80 or d120; they can easily be done with the same system as the d%.
Well, what would you use them for, and in what RPG system? Percentile dice are a nice, usable range which people are already familiar with, and expressing a chance of something happening as a percentage is also quite common, so d% makes sense in a way that d120 does not.
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Gnoman
This is the kind of comment I wish I could somehow save into my permanent memory. So many times I wish I had had a way of cheaply generating a normal distribution.
GW
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
factotum
Well, what would you use them for, and in what RPG system? Percentile dice are a nice, usable range which people are already familiar with, and expressing a chance of something happening as a percentage is also quite common, so d% makes sense in a way that d120 does not.
Tables of unimportant random events, random traits for on the fly NPCs, that kind of thing. What are the odds 0f the developers having exactly 100 good ideas for these. It would be nice to be able to stop at eighty or go up to one hundred and twenty.
The closest thing I've seen to this is Toon by SJ games which used 36 option tables.
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bohandas
Tables of unimportant random events, random traits for on the fly NPCs, that kind of thing. What are the odds 0f the developers having exactly 100 good ideas for these. It would be nice to be able to stop at eighty or go up to one hundred and twenty
Nothing's stopping them, though. A d10 and a d(tens-place) is all you're looking for there. Have a table of eighty entries, d10 and d8 will do it. 120, d10 and d12. Id wager the only reason tgeres a 00-90 labeled d10 is because percent chance is more commonly used than any other.
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
factotum
Well, what would you use them for, and in what RPG system? Percentile dice are a nice, usable range which people are already familiar with, and expressing a chance of something happening as a percentage is also quite common, so d% makes sense in a way that d120 does not.
I could see a d120 coming up if you designed a system around fractional success rates, but that's about it.
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Peelee
Nothing's stopping them, though. A d10 and a d(tens-place) is all you're looking for there. Have a table of eighty entries, d10 and d8 will do it. 120, d10 and d12. Id wager the only reason tgeres a 00-90 labeled d10 is because percent chance is more commonly used than any other.
Which is precisely what I was talking about. The same kludge used to make the d% can also be used to make a d30 d40 d60 d80 d120 or d200. If we don;t require one of the dice to be a d10 we can also make things like a d16 d36 and d400.
(and also the "roll 1d6 divide by 2 and round up" used for the d3 can also be used to make a d5 if you swap out the d6 for a d10)
EDIT:
(Now that I think of it, most of the dice (d2 d3 d4 d6) could be replaced by a d12 divided by different amounts)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bohandas
Which is precisely what I was talking about. The same kludge used to make the d% can also be used to make a d30 d40 d60 d80 d120 or d200. If we don;t require one of the dice to be a d10 we can also make things like a d16 d36 and d400.
(and also the "roll 1d6 divide by 2 and round up" used for the d3 can also be used to make a d5 if you swap out the d6 for a d10)
EDIT:
(Now that I think of it, most of the dice (d2 d3 d4 d6) could be replaced by a d12 divided by different amounts)
Since a standard gaming dice box has percentile dice, I fail to see how two non-six-sided dice are any more difficult than one non-six-sided and one six-sided. Or any other number you want.
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bohandas
Which is precisely what I was talking about. The same kludge used to make the d% can also be used to make a d30 d40 d60 d80 d120 or d200. If we don;t require one of the dice to be a d10 we can also make things like a d16 d36 and d400.
The d36 is already effectively in use - if you ever see a d66 referred to it's basically percentile dice on a d6. While there are obvious gaps in that (7-10, 17-20, 27-30, 37-40, 47-50, and 57-60) it works just fine for tables.
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
archon_huskie
I actually have encountered a d100. it had so many sides it was essentially a ball. and to get the numbers large enough to be legible on each side, it was also the size of a tennis ball.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Grey_Wolf_c
I had one. It wasn't that much bigger than the other dice, and it was easy enough to read. This picture shows the scale (my one was not that fancy)
Spoiler: Picture of d100
Show
GW
Now I want one :smallfrown:
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bohandas
(and also the "roll 1d6 divide by 2 and round up" used for the d3 can also be used to make a d5 if you swap out the d6 for a d10)
EDIT:
(Now that I think of it, most of the dice (d2 d3 d4 d6) could be replaced by a d12 divided by different amounts)
Or you could replace the entire set of dice with a d10 and a d12, because 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20, and even the rarely used 30 all go evenly into 120
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Grey_Wolf_c
This is the kind of comment I wish I could somehow save into my permanent memory. So many times I wish I had had a way of cheaply generating a normal distribution.
GW
It's not Normal. It looks sorta like it, but it's not. It's actually three quadratics stuck together.
To get a more-or-less Normal distribution (68% within μ ± σ, 95% within μ ± 2σ), you need to add 30 or so random variables together, not just three.
Jay R., Ph.D.
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jay R
It's not Normal. It looks sorta like it, but it's not. It's actually three quadratics stuck together.
To get a more-or-less Normal distribution (68% within μ ± σ, 95% within μ ± 2σ), you need to add 30 or so random variables together, not just three.
Jay R., Ph.D.
It's a heck more normal than a random 1-100 random call, and it does not require "30 or so random variables", which is quite expensive. Equally, gravity can be approximated to 10 and pi to 5. I.e. the kind of scenario where I wished I could get a normal distribution cheaply did not require a true normal distribution, or I would have paid for one.
Grey Wolf
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Grey_Wolf_c
It's a heck more normal than a random 1-100 random call, and it does not require "30 or so random variables", which is quite expensive. Equally, gravity can be approximated to 10 and pi to 5. I.e. the kind of scenario where I wished I could get a normal distribution cheaply did not require a true normal distribution, or I would have paid for one.
Grey Wolf
Tangent, wikipedia's example for the Central Limit Theorum is of dice (d6). You can see that 3 dice is indeed much higher on the ends of the bell curve (that might actually be a nice feature, if you assumed the normal distribution when assigning numbers then you get 'interesting' cases far more than you'd expect, but still rarely enough to feel special and not provable until you plot them on a graph.
With 5d6 the curve visually looks pretty good. I think you'd have to do pretty sophisticated analysis to determine if a moderate sized set of events came from the die or the normal. .
Though conversely any calculations based on assuming the normal distribution will be out by a noticable amount. I'm not sure what bigger die (or indeed mixed) would do off hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:D...it_theorem.svg
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bohandas
d36
Necromunda (and I believe Mordheim) uses d36s, although they're referred to as d66s. Back on topic, this always annoyed me far more than it should.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bohandas
d5
Also, Only War and similar games use d5s.
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jormengand
Necromunda (and I believe Mordheim) uses d36s, although they're referred to as d66s. Back on topic, this always annoyed me far more than it should.
Toon also uses d36 and i think they use th4 same grammarically incorrect notation
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jormengand
Also, Only War and similar games use d5s.
The point is they that's presumably because you can't actually make a 5 sided die (unless it's one of those weird spindles), but that hasn't stopped them from using d3s
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Re: dice and grammar
:amused:
So many other threads, spend pages on grammar, and this thread that was about grammar, is now about dice.
I'm in awe!
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Re: dice and grammar
Quote:
Originally Posted by
2D8HP
:amused:
So many other threads, spend pages on grammar, and this thread that was about grammar, is now about dice.
I'm in awe!
Well, if you want it to get back to grammar, you have three commas where you only need one.:smalltongue:
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Re: dice and grammar
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Peelee
Well, if you want it to get back to grammar, you have three commas where you only need one.:smalltongue:
I believe you (I'm relatively uneducated compared to most of the Forum).
Please tell me which one's, so that I may do better.
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Re: dice and grammar
Quote:
Originally Posted by
2D8HP
:amused:
So many other threads, spend pages on grammar, and this thread that was about grammar, is now about dice.
I'm in awe!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
2D8HP
I believe you (I'm relatively uneducated compared to most of the Forum).
Please tell me which one's, so that I may do better.
The punctuation in blue should be omitted. Apostrophes are never, ever used for plurals. Commas are complicated, but you can generally approximate them by splitting groups of thought that are related but complete in and of themselves.
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Re: dice and grammar
Quote:
Originally Posted by
2D8HP
I believe you (I'm relatively uneducated compared to most of the Forum).
Please tell me which one's, so that I may do better.
Ah, no worries. Gnoman's beaten me to it (hey, first time I've used his name where it worked well!), so I'll just toss out a useful rule of thumb: read it as if you were speaking. If you would pause, there's probably a comma needed. If you wouldn't pause, there's probably no comma needed. And normally, I'll not care or call you out on it; the circumstances just amused me right then.
ETA: I think the comma in "please tell me which ones, so that I may do better" is fine. No guarantees that I'm right, but I'd write it the same way.
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Re: dice and grammar
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Gnoman
The punctuation in blue should be omitted. Apostrophes are never, ever used for plurals. Commas are complicated, but you can generally approximate them by splitting groups of thought that are related but complete in and of themselves.
They are sometimes used when the word being pluralized isn't usually a noun. Like so, skip down to 2b.