Need a solid opener for your next smash and grab job? Look no further!
Name: Blue d100
Description: A 100-sided die. This was likely cast from Zinc. Nothing fancy here. The color looks like a medium metallic blue from a distance, but up close you can see that the paint has some glitter/mica powder in it. The numbers are carved in what looks to me like a mixture of Helvetica and Arial fonts. The ones are Arial but the threes and the zeros are Helvetica. It’s a mess in this regard. Pick a lane! As with other d100s I’ve seen, all of the faces with numbers that could be read both right-side-up, and upside-down have underbars to indicate orientation. There are eight faces on a d100 die that require this indication: 6, 9, 66, 68, 86, 89, 98, and 99. The edges are vertices are all fairly dull owning to the number of faces they had to cram onto the surface of this die. The die approaches being spherical and can roll for some time on a flat smooth surface. The die was either originally from Misty Mountain Gaming, or my local game store just had some extra Misty Mountain felt bags for these dice. There were also a silver and a red version of this die in the display case. I feel good about choosing blue though. It was a snap-decision and with almost zero hesitation I went with blue.
Size: ~50mm. I think this is about as small as you’d want a d100 to be. Any smaller and it might be too hard to stop on one side. If it was much bigger, it would just weigh too much in a solid metal version.
Where did it come from: Lost Star Tabletop Gaming
How much did it cost: Fifty dollars American
Material / color: Heavy metal, Zinc? Iron? who knows? Dark metallic blue with a slight glittery finish.
Quality: Very good. The sides are all even, the numbers are inked well. There are a few very small dings but it’s impossible to know if they were from manufacturing defects or from handling the die before I bought it.
Readability: Excellent. Bright white font on a dark blue ball is very high contrast. The numbers are still visible from 8′ away on the rug. The hard part is knowing exactly which face is “up”. Usually this will require somewhat close inspection.
Value: Pretty good. This is the first metal d100 I’ve bought, so I don’t have a good feel for the metal d100 economy. I haven’t seen many different options for metal d100s, it’s mostly colors and hollow vs. solid. $50 is a reasonable price for what amounts to a fancy trailer hitch ball with numbers.
Overall Rating: 9/10
Attempts needed to roll a natural 100: 142 rolls
Ten d100 rolls: 68, 24, 29, 46, 17, 62, 18, 56, 19, 84 (42.3 avg)
Creating a stat block using a d100 doesn’t make any sense so I’m going to find other reasons to make rolls with this die for the purposes of this review.
Channel Divinity attempts: (roll under your level to succeed)
10th Level Cleric: 71 – Fail
12th Level Cleric: 34 – Fail
14th Level Cleric: 94 – Fail
16th Level Cleric: 59 – Fail
18th Level Cleric: 43 – Fail
20th Level Cleric: Success (No roll required at 20th level)
Sorcerer Wild Magic table rolls:
13 – You cast Confusion centered on yourself.
96 – You and all creatures within 30 feet of you gain vulnerability to piercing damage for the next minute.
Random Tables rolls:
Spell components and alchemical ingredients: 37 – First grape of a harvest
Worthless things your players find on an unsuccessful investigation / search roll: 80 – A wooden mallet
Final Thoughts: This is my second d100. My first was a cheap plastic d100 that’s the same size but oddly has a different number layout. They both have the 1 and 100 faces opposite and each pair of opposite sides on each die adds up to 101. I believe that this is a very common layout rule for d100s. The only other orientation I’ve heard of was a spindown where the numbers are sequentially ordered in a spiral going from 100 down to 1, sort of like if you peeled an orange in one long piece of rind.
This die is quite heavy, like “break the table top” heavy or “don’t drop this on your windshield” heavy. This die could easily be used as a weapon if you threw it at an enemy. My arm got tired throwing this boat anchor around when I was rolling the die earlier in the review to see how many tries it took to roll a 100. I couldn’t imagine carrying a pocket full of these around to your weekly game. (people still use physical dice and paper character sheets, right? right???)
The finish on the die is very smooth and a great color of medium/dark blue with a nice shiny finish which looks great in artificial light and really pops in the sunlight. The font is very clean and well inked and extremely easy to see. The only downside I’ve found with this die (and probably any other d100) is that the die wanders when you roll it and takes a while to settle down. It’s very prone to resting against whatever it runs into (like the side of my dice tray) and getting cocked between faces. If I roll it on my wood floors, it’ll easily roll half-way across the room before coming to a rest. Given that the more sides you add to a 3d shape, the closer it gets to becoming a sphere. I read somewhere that for geometrically regular 3d shape where all sides are the same size/shape, the limit for the number of sides is 120. I actually have two d120s. One is plastic, numbered 1-120 and not very nice. The other is cast Aluminum, numbers 1-20 six times and is amazing. I never use either of them as they take even longer to settle down than my d100s do and get cocked against the sides of a dice tray like it’s their job.
Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll have a lot of opportunity to roll this d100 at my actual in-person game given how little need to make d100 rolls. Come on DM, open up those random table books and let us bring the chaos! I’ll still bring this die with me though just in case the need arises. Who wants to roll a d10 and a d% together when you can have a statement die like this.
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