Are you a sadistic dungeon master who thinks critical hits happen too often? A lazy gamer who wishes you could roll just one die for all your rolls? The Dice Lab has you covered. They came up with the world’s first injection-molded 120-sided die. And they don’t know what it’s good for.
As I said, you can substitute a d120 for smaller dice; The Dice Lab even made tables to help you transpose the results. But that’s not really a unique use for it is it? Perhaps the die’s best purpose is to illustrate the beauty of mathematics. According to The New Yorker, mathematician Robert Bosch spent almost 2 months running computations to come up with a numerically fair arrangement for the die, which Henry Segerman discusses in his video below. The die’s shape, a disdyakis triacontahedron, contains the maximum number of faces for a practical die, i.e. one that’s symmetrical and can be rolled to produce a random result.
You can order The Dice Lab’s d120 from MathArtFun for $12 (USD) each.
[via The New Yorker]