I'm asking more as an outside observer, and not with anyone who has any grievance with how games are played, nor am I judging or criticizing anything.

I've just always wondered, why use all the different types of dice? Why a 4 sided die for one thing, three 6 sided dice for another, and a twenty sided dice for something else? Couldn't you use, just for example, two 10 sided dice to represent a percentage between 1 and 100 (one die is tens and the other is ones, and they're differentiated by colour), and then use that for all instances?

If you needed to decide something was a one in four possibility, you just declare it a 25% chance, and roll the two tens. No matter what kind of possibility you wanted that are currently represented by various combinations of dice, it seems to me you could represent it within a range of one to one hundred. 

Sure, a bag of all different shaped dice looks kind of cool, but is there a reason for them that goes beyond aesthetics? With just two 10 sided dice (or three if you wanted really fine gradients of percentage) wouldn't that make things simpler and more consistent without losing any of the variety of chances taken?

I thought maybe it had to do with probabilistic outcomes. For instance, if you roll two 6 sided dice, I believe that you're more likely to come up with some combination that adds up to 7 than you are with a combination that adds up to 2 or 12. So there's a bell curve of possible outcomes. Nonetheless, maybe I'm just not well versed enough in probabilities enough to see a difference, but I still think you could get the same equivalent likelihoods of an outcome by using a straight percentage, adjusting up or down depending on what you needed.

Again, I'm not trying to be contrarian, I'm just curious. Is there an objective reason for all the different dice?


Question: WYSIWYG HTML / CSS builder
Answer: I don't know of any online tools, but I really like the way this standalone program called Stylizer enables users who don't know CSS very well to modify web site layouts. But honestly, there's no way I'd pay $89 for it. I recommended it to some friends to use it for the trial period, but learn how to use Firebug as well.

That being said, I tend to agree with the comments above. A designer is more likely to learn CSS/HTML and do it themselves or pay a service to convert their pdf into a page.