For the record, rolling any number of zeroes on a D20 would be pretty impressive. You’d still get stepped on by the Tarrasque, but people would remember the event. For like a minute. Because of the Tarrasque.
While server-side physical dice is a late stage capitalism wet dream still relegated to science fiction, I have seen a bunch of different products attempting to sell me a digital D20. One of them would light up when rolled and flash red on a low roll and play a jingle when landing on a twenty. Another would connect to an app that would… display the result of the roll on your phone. Not quite as exciting, but technically impressive.
My question is always how do you make sure the die is fair with all those electronic bits in it? Teeny lithium batteries, wireless charging coils, and a PCB with ICs powering LEDs all have wildly varying densities. Have you seen the crazy bananas things they do to keep a bowling ball balanced? And I’m to believe that these guys on Kickstarter with the fancy graphic designers have figured it out at a miniature scale where the error margins are so low it would make NASA engineers double-check the math?
Semi-related tangent, I once chipped the edge a D4 I liked a lot so I set out to see if it was still fair or not. Did a hundred trials and had trouble telling, so I looked it up and statistically it takes tens of thousands of rolls to prove a D4 is fair. And it takes exponentially more to do the same for a die with five times as many faces at roughly the same radius. I don’t have the dozens of hours to setup the image recognition rig and robot arm to compensate for the fact that I don’t have the hundreds to roll dice over and over again.
Well at least until it’s the Tarrasque’s turn. Then your minute’s up.
Ja.