On Thursday, March 01, 2007, at 03:59PM, "Pat" <xenophule@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> So, I was playing D&D last night and the discussion came up on how cool it >> would be to own a set of dice whose face numbers were in binary. > > Never heard of anything for D20,... > > Anyway, that aside, I personally feel that binary notation is best saved > for dice that have a number of faces equal to a power of two I figure if you're making lots of binary decisions (which the only reason I can think of why you'd want faces marked in binary), the Right Thing for that is to throw a bunch of distinct coins in the air. As for how a d20 *should* be marked... I figure what a die roll really gives you is a single multiway decision, the extreme case being that of a d6 roll (or equivalently a d8) choosing an arbitrary permutation of 4 items or a d20 (or equivalently a d12) roll choosing an arbitrary even permutation of 5 items... ... provided you're throwing the die into a crease so that it's forced to come up in a particular orientation (i.e., not just be lying on a particular side) where you can read things off and provided the die is marked in some way that lets you read off the permutation quickly. But once you have that, say, a way of getting a even 5-permutation (d60), then all of the various subsets (d2,d3,d4,d5,d6,d10,d12,d15,d20,d30) come pretty much naturally. Check out: http://wrog.livejournal.com/47373.html (scroll halfway down to get to the picture). The hard job, of course, is convincing some manufacturer of dice to actually do this... -- Roger