Kind of interesting
Looking here I found this Zocchihedron
How do you tell what number was rolled, the one at the very top of the sphere?
Played around with one of these back in my role playing days. There are two problems, both of them pretty obvious.
If you roll what is basically a ball it can take a while to settle, and it might end up a distance from where it started (like out the door, down the stairs and out into the playground).
As Icerigger presumes you had to look for the number right at the top. This wasn’t hard exactly, but needed more than the instant glance most dice require.
So a novelty more than anything else, two 10-sided dice were a way better option.
Yeah, it was a toy, not a serious gaming tool. The only way to get any decent use out of it was to roll it around between your hands for a moment to get the randomization going, and then lightly drop it on the table. Otherwise it’d roll way too long. No was did ever replace 2d10.
Agreed, when you get to that point it’s almost like using a golf ball. I had one back in my Dungeons and Dragons days, but it was more as a novelty than anything else.
Yeah, my DM had one, but I don’t recall using it much.
A friend of mine had several, and she was very enamoured with them. I found them to be a PITA, for the reasons that Petrobey described
In a D&D game that my friend was running, she tossed me one of her d100s, wanting me to use it to make a percentile roll for something. I didn’t see her throw it, and so I didn’t successfully catch it. It hit the floor, and split open. It was hollow, with a bunch of little plastic beads inside it (probably actually raw plastic stock from the other dice that Gamescience made). We reassembled it without the beads, and discovered that, without the beads, it took forever to stop rolling.
I used those…25 years ago or so. Hardly a novelty. And they’re quite inconvenient, actually. Two ten-sided die are much more practical.
That happened to mine, but I managed to scoop up most of the beads. The problem was, I could never get the plastic shell with the indentations to line up with the numbers again. No big loss, though. As everyone else has pointed out, it wasn’t much use as a functional die.
On a whim, I bought one of these for MrWhatsit as a Christmas stocking stuffer, and his response was almost verbatim what Petrobey Mavromihalis just wrote. (Er, I mean, his response a few days later when I asked him if it would actually be useful; on Christmas morning, he was appropriately appreciative.)
If I rummage, I can probably find mine from when they first hit the market. It had to be mail-ordered at first, IIRC.
I agree with the other postings, more novelty than useful.
I’ve got one.
Finally, I can cast Nehul’s Reckless Dweomer with one die.
I’ve got a 30 sider I use sometimes, but the 100 seems pointless for reasons already stated.
However. If your group is having trouble staying focused on the game it would make a pretty good “Random Hand of God” smiting tool. Just roll it across the board and anyone touched by it dies. This is best used only as a threat though. I never did like killing player characters because either someone has to go home for the day or the game stops while a new character is created and worked in.
I’ve a friend who collects dice, and has plenty of these things.
Only time we’ve used it was to use as minis to represent an onslaught of Gelatinous Platonic (And Others) Solids: the Gelatinous Cube, the Gelatinous Tetrahedron, Gelatinous Octohedron, Gelatinous Dodecahedron, Gelatinous Icosahedron…
We had to spend ten minutes looking up what to call the Gelatinous Trapezohedron and the Gelatinous Zocchihedron, though.
I bought a 30-sider back when they first came out (early 80s); about the only use I ever found for it was rolling birthdates (the game I ran had 30-day months). What use did you find for it?
I remember that whoever came out with the d30 (Armory, IIRC) also came out with a little booklet with all sorts of random charts that used a d30, just to provide some usefulness for the darn thing.
I’ve also got a few d16s; they were useful for a homebrew system I was working on in which a character got to roll different-sized dice as they got better at something (Margaret Weis Productions uses a similar system for its Serenity and BSG games); the d16 filled in the gap between d12 and d20.
I like the non-lethal D4s, myself. Crystal Dice, I think. Only major advance in dice since you didn’t have to wax the numbers anymore.
Wild magic was much more enjoyable once we started using the 10,000 surge list available here (called The Net Libram of Random Magical Effects v1.20 ). I mean, 100 effects isn’t really ‘wild’, now is it?
Ah, ‘caster’s stomach turns into bag of holding’. wipes away a tear Good times.
I’ve got d4s that are actually twelve-siders, numbered with Roman numerals to distinguish from a d12. I buy a big bag of them every year at the Chessex booth at Origins, and give them away to people. Folks like 'em because they’re far easier to roll than the little pyramids. 
The other major advance I’d note is that almost all d20s are now numbered 1-20, rather than 0-9 twice (which was the norm when I started playing).
Named for Louis Zocchi, who the Dope introduced us to last year:
More than you ever wanted to know about dice (and dice fraud!).