Be right back…
Well, manufacturing inconsistencies are not the dominant role in the unfairness of the most common d100, the one made by Game Science. Every single one of them has a significant bias against the numbers at and near the poles (including 1 and 100), because the die is prolate. So if the d120 is limited only by manufacturing inconsistencies, then it’s already fairer than the d100. And the makers of the d120 (so far as I know, there’s only one place that makes them for sale) go to considerably more effort to mitigate those problems than most dice manufacturers.
I don’t think that necessarily follows. Some of the angles in a d120 are extremely shallow, and even a tiny center-of-mass offset could make some numbers almost inaccessible. Dice makers (even high quality ones) can barely make decent d20s, so I don’t have much hope for a d120. Sure, if the typical d120 maker is higher quality than the typical d100 maker, then that is likely to dominate, but that just emphasizes my point.
Sorta tempted to build a dice-rolling machine… I’ve needed a simple computer vision project to play around with for a while now.
All of them are equally shallow. That’s one of the criteria for a Catalan solid. But the angles for a d100 are going to be nearly as shallow, on average.
I haven’t rolled my d120 thousands of times, but from what I have, it seems to not have any obvious imbalances, at least.
I was thinking about this myself, but it seems like it might be an engineering challenge for a die that is very nearly a sphere; I think more space has to be allowed for it to come to a natural stop.
Or maybe not… maybe it’s acceptable to have a machine that restricts the rolling, just not in any way that adds its own unfair influence.
All this talk of the mechanics of accurate dice is fascinating and all, but it’s turning into a bit of a hijack.
This is my main objection to them being gaming pieces or divining tools.
The notion of them being part of a game of some kind doesn’t seem too far-fetched; for example a game where other pieces had to be stacked or balanced on an object.
I am not seriously proposing the dodecahedra were the Roman version of buckaroo, but the idea that they were the centrepiece of some gaming or gambling or fortune telling activity is not completely ridiculous.
It is, IMO bizarre to think of them as something that would be thrown. They are almost perfectly unsuited to that.
One thing that does sort of weigh against the idea of them being part of a game, is: what happened to that game?
The Romans had dice games, board games and tabletop games that still exist in some similar form today, or were documented, and yet the dodecahedron game, if there was one, was spread across half of Northern Europe, then vanished without a trace.
I think it’s pretty obviously used to track your progress in a primitive version of Hunt the Wumpus…
It was invented by a distant ancestor of Keyser Söze.
Is the lack of archaeological context for these items perhaps something that is itself telling?
For example: The Guys In Charge (who you don’t see every day) tell you that they are appointing this other guy as some sort of supervisor who will be able to snoop into anything he wants, to ensure you’re not evading taxes or planning an insurrection or just generally getting up to stuff. So you’ll know who is in charge, they’ve given him this shiny bauble to flaunt, as a mark of office.
Life under the gaze of the snoopervisor turns out to be a damn nuisance and eventually, as per 30% of TV crime dramas, someone shoves him; he stumbles, falls and cracks his head on the hearth stone. He’s not breathing.
OK, the body isn’t hard to dispose of; the hogs will take care of it, for example. The shiny metal thing needs to go away; you can’t just sell it for scrap because it’s very recognisable and you can’t be sure who will snitch if they see it. The best place for it is somewhere nobody will go digging tomorrow - the latrine, or the refuse pit.
I’ll go right ahead and highlight the key problem with this: what, and that happened exactly like that, hundreds of times, across a huge geographic area?
The core question though, remains; has the context of these objects been stripped on purpose, at the time they were in use, or just after they stopped being used?
The lack of context for the ones without it is largely because of how they were found, not how they were deposited - either by rank amateurs, or so long ago that archaeology wasn’t very advanced.
I’m not sure if that is true in every case though, for example the wikipedia article says-
Though I don’t know how many, and if that number would be deemed significant.
Some of them have archeological context, but it’s a fairly small fraction of the total.
As far as being kept with coins, small value coins were made of bronze, the same metal the dodecahedra are made of. At that time, the value of coins was pretty much entirely based on the value of the metal they were made of, so a dodecahedron would have the same value as an equivalent weight of bronze coins. People wouldn’t necessarily spend a dodecahedron, but in extremis, they could break one up and spend the pieces. Or at least try, since not everyone will take a random chunk of metal as the same as a coin.
Yeah, it would stand for something if they were the only non-coin objects ever found in coin hoards from the period, but I imagine that’s not going to be the case.
I’m sure that a metal decorative object would be worth more than it’s metal content back then just like it is now. The presence of a dodeca in a coin hoard is quite reasonable either for the value of the metal or the greater value of an ornament. And for that matter being found in almost any location.
I think the one found in a grave might be more significant. You don’t usually bury something with someone just because it’s valuable-- It’s because the item had some sort of personal, sentimental significance to the deceased.
I think that leans more toward ornamental instead utilitarian. Maybe a surveyor, glove knitter, or gambler would want to be buried with an instrument of their trade but I think they’d have a more sentimental attachment to something more inspirational like a personal gift or expensive purchase.
While this is nominally true of the silver and gold coins (although see the various debasements that occurred during Roman times) this wasn’t true of bronze coins, which had a token value related to the precious metal coins, and were not tied to their metal value.
Not saying there wouldn’t be bronze coins in a coin hoard, mind you. Just that the dodecahedron wouldn’t be worth the same as the coins just for its metal.
I realize this if just an example but I feel fairly strongly that the fact that they all have differing sized holes, points to them having a utilitarian purpose.