Comment by benj111
11 hours ago
I've never played any games that require this, but the Wikipedia page makes reference to percentage rolls, but wouldn't you need 101 sides to get 0% and 100% for that?
11 hours ago
I've never played any games that require this, but the Wikipedia page makes reference to percentage rolls, but wouldn't you need 101 sides to get 0% and 100% for that?
> but wouldn't you need 101 sides to get 0% and 100% for that?
There is no 0% in d100/d-percentile rolls. Every "how to interpret these dice" paragraph in games which use them will tell you to interpret 0-0 on 2d10 as 100, not 0. Or, hypothetically (but i don't recall having ever seen this), they'll have a stated range of 0 to 99 (inclusive). Either way, the numeric range spans precisely 100 digits.
There are games that use a d100 with 0-99 range, and games that read a d10 as 0-9 for that matter. First that comes to mind is Ambush! from 1983 that did both those things (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1608/ambush).
Love that game, but it is a bit distracting that probabilities feel one-off. Rolling 5 or lower to hit is 60%, not 50%. And when rolling 2d10 the result is 0-18, not 2-20.
yeah but that means there is no 0% on the scale
The point of percentile dice isn't to generate a string between "0%" and "100%", it is to test if action with chance of x% success gets done or not. For every o value of x, there are x out of 100 values which are strictly less than x, or if you count 0 as 100 then there are x out of 100 values which are less than or equal to x. Either way you get x% percent chance for event to happen. If the dice had 101 sides, the probabilities would be x/101 which aren't nice round percents.
It even works correctly for 0% and 100% chance events. Assuming 0 is counted as 0 - For 0% there are 0 numbers less than 0 on dice so chance of throwing number less that is 0/100=0%. For 100% all 100 numbers are less than 100 so no matter what the result of throw is you will succeed.
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No, because in d100 based systems you success is rolling at or below a chance.
So the fact there is no 0% (0 is interpreted as 100) is necessary because if your modifiers are giving it 0% chance, you need dice to start at 1 for that to work