Are there any role-playing games which use dice larger than a d100?

Question

AFAIK, Dungeons & Dragons' largest die is a d100 (even though in practice people very often roll two d10s). Are there any role-playing games whose rules mention dice larger than a d100? It seems to be possible to make a d120 but the article claims it has no use.

Inspired by today's XKCD:

Mathematically speaking, that cannot be a die that is both 'fair' and 'regular', but 'almost fair' and 'almost regular' are OK in my book. And as the d100 = d10 × d10 practice shows, there are other ways to 'roll' such large dice.

Answer 1

d1000

In a brief search I found the following:

Here's a forum post including images of a Games Workshop publication using the d1000.

The d1000 MUTATION TABLE! is simulatniously everything that was right with 80s GW and everything that was wrong.

It's massive, takes up 11 pages, has 36 (!!) sub-tables and such wonderful ideas as 'silly walk' and 'mechanoid' (roll for which body part). It's awesome.

According to this article, Games Workshop also used a d1000 for the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e random career table.

The Iron Sky RPG appears to be attempting to make the d1000 a primary die mechanic. Presented here without further comment.

Answer 2

d120 exists, but doesn’t seem to be in use

There are 120-sided dice (since there is a 120-sided face-uniform polyhedron, the disdyakis triacontahedron). I cannot find any game that uses a d120, however. Considering how many articles I found on just how difficult to produce this die was, that’s probably for the best.

d1000 exists, and seems to get used

Unlike the challenge of producing a d120, a d(power of 10) means just rolling more d10s for more digits. So a d1000 or even d10,000 or d1,000,000 or whatever is trivially simple, since you just need more d10s and not fancier dice.

And there’s even a “d1000 spinner,” which does not entail rolling separate dice to generate the number. Doubtful that higher powers of 10 get anything like that, though, nor could I find any.

So do these get used?

Wiktionary has an entry for a d1000, which claims

d1000

(dice games) A die roll used for example in some role-playing games and wargames to generate a random number between 1 and 1000. The most common method is to roll 3 differently colored d10s, where each color has been designated to represent one of the three digits.

It does not cite any source for “some role-playing games and wargames” that use a d1000, however.

What I’ve been able to find with my own searching is that Kenzer & Co.’s Hackmaster seems to use 1000-entry random tables, and thus require d1000 rolls. See this review, which mentions them, and explicitly refers to it as a “d1000 roll.” I have not purchased or played Hackmaster myself to confirm, or to determine if Hackmaster explicitly refers to a “d1000” within its rules (or if it just presents a random table with 1000 entries and says “randomly pick one”).

Answer 3

Probably not

It is very difficult to prove a negative. With that said, there are strong reasons to believe that the answer is no.

First, as a longtime gamer, I can say that I have ready a lot of rule books for a lot of games both independent and professionally published, and I have never seen any die roll with more than 100 sides mentioned.

I certainly do not claim to have done anything close to reading all of them of course, but I think I can claim a large enough survey that the fact I have not seen it mentioned at least suggests that if it happens it is a rare niche.

More conceptually, something like that is simply unlikely as a practical matter. Most games assume that you will be physically rolling dice and it is difficult to get ahold of dice with more than 100 sides and even 100 sided dice are rare in practice. (I have one and I still almost always use 2 d10s to simulate because the d100 is hard to read).

As mentioned in the question, d100s are often simulated by 2d10s. That is relatively simple to do and very natural for most people because we are accustomed to a base 10 number system. While there are certainly ways to simulate a fair die with a larger size than that, they all get more awkward and feel less natural. (Going to a d1000 would be easy, but you rarely need a range that large, and going for anything between 100 and 1000 would seem awkward to someone accustomed to base 10).

I should caveat though that I am excluding cases where a number of dice are rolled and simply summed together. That gives you a broader range, and is actually used in a lot of games. Several games us that as part of damage calculations and an early Star Wars RPG used it as the basis for their skill checks. But that often excludes the lower numbers so isn't simulating use of a larger die in a meaningful way and I have never seen that system described in the rules as being in place of some larger die set.