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584 points robinhouston | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.216s | source
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ChuckMcM ◴[] No.44381861[source]
Worst D-4 ever! But more seriously, I wonder how closely you could get to an non-uniform mass polyhedra which had 'knife edge' type balance. Which is to say;

1) Construct a polyhedra with uneven weight distribution which is stable on exactly two faces.

2) Make one of those faces much more stable than the other, so if it is on the limited stability face and disturbed, it will switch to the high stability face.

A structure like that would be useful as a tamper detector.

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ortusdux ◴[] No.44382291[source]
You jest, but I knew a DND player with a dice addicting that loved showing off his D-1 Mobius strip dice - https://www.awesomedice.com/products/awd101?variant=45578687...

For some reason he did not like my suggestion that he get a #1 billard ball.

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gerdesj ◴[] No.44382580[source]
Love it - any sphere will do.

A ping pong ball would be great - the DM/GM could throw it at a player for effect without braining them!

(billiard)

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hammock ◴[] No.44382631[source]
Or any mobius strip
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gerdesj ◴[] No.44382819[source]
I think a spherical D1 is far more interesting than a Möbius strip in this case.

Dn: after the Platonic solids, Dn generally has triangular facets and as n increases, the shape of the die tends towards a sphere made up of smaller and smaller triangular faces. A D20 is an icosahedron. I'm sure I remember a D30 and a D100.

However, in the limit, as the faces tend to zero in area, you end up with a D1. Now do you get a D infinity just before a D1, when the limit is nearly but not quite reached or just a multi faceted thing with a lot of countable faces?

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1. zoky ◴[] No.44383722[source]
> However, in the limit, as the faces tend to zero in area, you end up with a D1.

Not really. You end up with a D-infinity, i.e. a sphere. A theoretical sphere thrown randomly onto a plane is going to end up with one single point, or face, touching the plane, and the point or face directly opposite that pointing up. Since in the real world we are incapable of distinguishing between infinitesimally small points, we might just declare them all to be part of the same single face, but from a mathematical perspective a collection of infinitely many points that are all equidistant from a central point in 3-dimensional space is a sphere.