Live and Let Die: d10

Being the fourth profile on the polyhedral life our favorite dice. This week: The d10.d10 isn't like the other dice. While it can serve the function of hit die and damage as well as any other, it can also complete itself by being rolled with a twin. As soon as RuneQuest came out with percentile-based skills, d10 achieved its true destiny.

Real name: Pentagonal trapezohedron AKA deltohedron AKA decahedron
Nickname: Percentile dice. To prevent players from cheating by "switching" the color of their tens and singles, manufacturers offer true percentile pairs:
Uses: Rolling Fighter hit points. Longsword damage. Skills in RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, etc. DCHeroes/MEGS' main engine. World of Darkness. Cyborg Commando's d10x. 7th Sea/Lot5R's Roll and Keep. White Wolf. I.C.E.'s many many many tables (and a shout-out to MERP fans!).
Beloved because: Legend of the 5 Rings' exploding 10. The baddest doubles in DCH. Easy to spin. Required for when you want to roll on a huge number of possible outcomes or very specific odds.
Hated because: The ominous "0" that represents the number 10. I.C.E.'s many many many tables. Dice sets that don't have two d10s of different colors.
Biggest rival: Zocchihedron, the so-called 100-sided dice.

Comments

Matthew E said…
And, of course, it's distinguished from the other dice because it's not a Platonic solid. With the other five (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron), every vertex is the same and every edge is the same. With the decahedron, the two "points" are not the same as the vertices around the "equator", and the edges coming off the "points" aren't the same as the "equator" edges. Still a fair die, though, which my third-year geometry professor tells me the Zocchihedron is not (and I believe her. Try rolling it: it lands near the poles a lot more than it lands near the equator). Actually, the d10 gives us a recipe for making a fair die for any even number of faces; if you want, say, a d32, you just make a d10 with 16 faces coming off each "point" instead of 5.

I wish I hadn't lost the 10-siders that came with the original DC Heroes game. They were cool. More rounded than usual. They looked kind of like peanut M&Ms.
Siskoid said…
Yellow and red, right? If so, I still have them.

Warning to others: Geometry nerd in the hizzyyyyyyyyyy!
Doc_Loki said…
Dude! How could you not mention the various White Wolf systems, and their wonky handfuls-of-d10s systems? That's a major reason why there the d10 is the second most commonly encountered die!