John-David Anderson, aka JD, and the team think your d20 might be too chaotic. Is that the same as being too random?
The argument is that there’s an equal chance of rolling 1, 10 or 20, and that’s too random. The Gausahedron distributes numbers evenly over 20-faces, up to the value 9 for a less random split. You can enjoy some maths, the pitch and the logic at Kickstarter.
As the Kickstarter story begins, even the DMs Guide notes that d20s can lead to some extreme results. On page 239, the book says;
Sometimes the randomness of a d20 roll leads to ludicrous results”
These math geeks acknowledge that you might want your d20 to roll up to 20 but suggest you handle that through modifiers like character levels. In other words, a level 5 character will roll above 7 more consistently than a level 1 character will; in fact, a level 5 will never roll below 6.
Instead of the chaos of a normal d20, we have developed a die that has a different distribution of numbers than a typical d20. We used a modified bell curve (for you math devotees, a gaussian curve) to determine the numbers on the die. Here is an example of a die that has the bell curve centered on the number 5. The boxes indicate how many faces of the die have each of the numbers.
If you want the Gausahedron in your collection as a rarity or to take off, you have to support the campaign and do that with cash or shares.
If you pledge $10 or more, then you’ll get one of the production dice made for the Kickstarter. We should thank the team here and now for at least doing a production run!
At $12, you get a single resin cast die, and they’re limited in number.
Then, at $35, the reward is still a dice, limited to 50, but made from wood.
The “Night Elf Sorceress” will get you a single die too, but made from Gaboon ebony. Wow.
There are other tiers which include 5 different versions of dice, and those are ideal if you’re a retailer or you want everyone in your gaming group to be rolling the same sort of d20!
How long to wait? JD et al. estimate February 2023 for shipping.
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