The Shape of the Heavens

Sing, Muse, of the noble dodecahedron, twelve-faced and true, 
So oft neglected in the clattering chorus of polyhedral dice! 
Raise now a hymn to the least loved of gaming’s solids.

Pity the poor d12! Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. The d20, that lumbering golf ball of chance, sees far more use, while even the d4, a caltrop in disguise, is remembered (if only by the soles of our feet). But the d12? Forgotten. Neglected. Dare I say underappreciated?

Yet, what a die it is! Twelve equal pentagonal faces, each meeting at broad angles. Indeed, the dodecahedron is the shape Plato associated with the heavens themselves, the cosmos rendered in acrylic or resin. According to some ancient sources, the gods used d12s when rolling for Fate. Who needs the Pythia when you’ve got precision-milled polyhedra?

Physically, the d12 may be the most satisfying die to hold. Substantial without being bulky. Perfectly symmetrical. It rolls with purpose. It doesn’t skitter like a d4 or overdo it like percentiles. The d12 knows what it’s about. It rolls once and rolls well. There’s something reassuring in that.

But what is it usually asked to do? Calculate long sword damage against large opponents. Serve as the hit die for the barbarian. It's the gaming equivalent of being called in to move a couch. Even the d10, that irregularly-shaped interloper, has muscled its way to the top of the pile, if only for percentile rolls. The d12? Banished to the edge of the table, like some exiled aristocrat.

I've done my part to rectify this injustice in Thousand Suns, where the d12 takes its rightful place at the center of the action. Why? Because it deserved better. Because it felt right. Because when I picture futuristic exploits in a sprawling interstellar empire, I don’t want to roll a pyramid or a cube. I want a Platonic solid whose geometry is touched by the divine. I want the Golden Ratio embedded in plastic.

So, here’s to the d12: noble, overlooked, and elegant. May we find more uses for it at our tables – and more excuses to hear its satisfying clatter. After all, if it's good enough for the heavens, it ought to be good enough for us.

Dice Advice

A couple of questions for my readers:

1. I'm looking into acquiring a new set of sharp-edged, precision dice of the kind I associate with Lou Zocchi. Unfortunately, acquiring a full set of Gamescience dice seems really difficult at the moment. With that in mind, can you recommend alternatives and, if so, vendors from whom I can buy them?
2. Most precision dice come un-inked these days. Can you recommend good ways to ink them, preferably ways that a middle-aged man with poor eyesight can undertake? 

Thanks!

High Adventure and Low Comedy

Free League publishes not one, not two, but three different fantasy roleplaying games at the moment – Forbidden Lands, Symbaroum, and now Dragonbane. Each one is quite distinct from one another, not just in terms of rules but also in tone. For example, Dragonbane, the latest iteration of the venerable Swedish RPG, Drakar och Demoner, sets itself apart from the other Free League fantasy RPGs by its willingness to embrace lighter, even sillier moments, as designer Tomas Häremstam points out in his preface:

Though a toolbox for allowing you to tell fantasy stories of all kinds, Dragonbane is a game with room for laughs at the table and even a pinch of silliness at times – while at the same time offering brutal challenges for the adventurers. We call this playstyle mirth and mayhem roleplaying – great for long campaigns but also perfect for a one-shot if you just want to have some quick fun at your table for the night. 

Dragonbane is quite an interesting RPG for a number of reasons and I hope to get around to discussing it at some point, but there are several other games and gaming products ahead of it in my review queue. However, the "mirth and mayhem" tagline really caught my attention, in part because it reminds of a phrase my friends and I have used for years – high adventure and low comedy.

I can't quite recall precisely when we coined this phrase, but we did so as a way to capture what the experience of playing most RPGs was actually like at the table – not what its designers wanted to be like, which is quite a different thing. This is an important distinction. With a handful of exceptions, like Paranoia or Toon, whose stated intention is to be humorous, most roleplaying games are written and meant to be played seriously. "Serious" doesn't mean utter devoid of humor, of course, but the humor is accidental, a natural consequence of the unpredictability of playing any game, especially one where player choice and dice rolls contend with one another.

What my friends and I call "high adventure and low comedy" is thus very often (though not exclusively) the result of exactly this: dice with a mind of their own. One of my most popular posts touches on this very topic, though from a slightly different angle. However, the point remains the same, namely, that it's well nigh impossible to avoid moments of unexpected levity when so many of a character's actions are determined by the roll of dice. There's simply no way to ensure that even a high-level and competent character will always succeed at the right moment. Instead of making his save against dragon breath, he might fail and be burnt to a crisp. The reverse is also possible and the all-powerful Dark Lord might, metaphorically speaking, slip on a banana peel as he attempts to menace the heroes who've dared to confront him in his lair.

Over the years, I've experienced many examples of this. In my House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign, the character Aíthfo hiZnáyu has fallen prey to bad dice rolls on several notable occasions. And while I used those unintended mishaps as an opportunity to introduce new elements to the campaign, there's no denying that they were also funny – so much so that the players continue to chuckle about them years later. House of Worms has never been a deliberately funny campaign. Tékumel, with its detailed history, ancient mysteries, and constructed languages is perhaps the very definition of serious business when it comes to RPGs and yet there's no way to prevent unexpected silliness from creeping in from time to time – nor would we want to do so!

Dice rolls that go awry aren't the only source of humor. Players are every bit as unpredictable as dice. Sometimes, a player might just be in a whimsical mood and decide that his character does something goofy. Other times, he might be bored and want to shake things up by choosing to act in a way that's, in his opinion, more entertaining. Or maybe someone misspeaks, calling a character by the wrong name or accidentally – or, worse, intentionally – making a pun that causes everyone to erupt into laughter. There are simply so many ways that a roleplaying game session can descend into unintentional humor that there's no point in worrying about it. Instead, it's best to embrace it these moments of levity and enjoy them for what they are.

I think that's why, when I came across the passage I quoted above, I was so taken by it. Over the years, I've read a lot of roleplaying games. Very few of them acknowledge that low comedy is very often the inescapable companion of high adventure. You can't really have one without the other, not without clamping down so hard on anything that deviates in even the slightest way from the Truth Path that, in the process, you've also sucked all the fun out of roleplaying. These are games, after all and they're meant to be fun. They're also exercises in human creativity and interaction, both of which often take us to unexpected places. 

Isn't that why we play these games in the first place?

Gamescience?

Can anyone recommend a reliable source of Gamescience precision polyhedral dice? They seem very difficult to find these days. Gamescience seems to maintain a website, but, based on its appearance, I'm not convinced it's still active. More to the point, the selection available there is quite limited. 

Alternately, are there any other manufacturers who make dice of similar appearance and quality? I'm not wedded to Gamescience as such. However, I don't like dice with rounded edges and most dice these days seem to be in that style. I'd happily acquire precision dice from another source if I knew of one.

Any suggestions?

Electronic Super Dice Kit

Speaking of issue #62 of Dragon (June 1982), here's another advertisement from that same issue that stuck in my memory.

Now, electronic dice rollers were very trendy at the time, as evidenced by the existence of Dragonbone. They're yet another example of a transitional technology that is quickly superseded but that, for a time, manages to find a place in the market. For about a decade, starting in the mid-1970s, there were electronic versions of all sorts of things, spurred on by the decrease in the prices of integrated circuits, microprocessors, and transistors. Given that, I'm not at all surprised by the appearance of dice rollers like this.

What strikes me as unique about this advertisement is that, unlike Dragonbone, this was a kit to build your own "ultimate gaming aid" rather than a finished consumer product. I recall seeing "build your own radio" kits for sale in the Sears catalog and, of course, at Radio Shack, so it's not as if something of this sort was completely unheard of. However, at $19.98 (close to $65 in today's debased currency), this is very expensive for a do-it-yourself dice roller. Dragonbone was "only" $5 more, which makes me wonder if they had many sales. My guess is probably not, but there's no way to prove or disprove it now.

Regardless, the ad is yet another data point for the past is a foreign country file.

A Single Roll of the Dice

One of Gary Gygax's most famous – and often lampooned – assertions in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide is that "YOU CANNOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT" [capitals Gygax's]. I'd like to suggest that even more important to a meaningful campaign is the inclusion of randomness. The traditional way this is achieved is through the use of dice, but I'm quite willing to accept other forms of randomness, such as cards, chits, or even coin flips. What's important is not the method so much as the fact that not every aspect of gameplay is within the control of its participants, including that of the referee himself. Some degree of what transpires in a roleplaying game must be left to the whims of chance.

No one who's read this blog for very long should be surprised by this. I am, after all, a huge proponent of the oracular power of dice, as well as the belief that "gamey-ness" is no less important to what makes an RPG an RPG than its "roleplaying." This is a big part of why I'm opposed to any definition of roleplaying games that likens them to an activity of "collaborative storytelling," unless that definition also includes collaboration with random elements. Without some degree of randomness – including the concomitant possibility of failure – my level of interest diminishes (and I say this as someone whose ongoing Empire of the Petal Throne campaign often goes weeks without a single die roll).

I was reminded of my feelings about this during a recent session of the Barrett's Raiders Twilight: 2000 campaign I began in December of last year. The characters are currently in the process of exfiltrating the Free City of Kraków, which they have come to realize is a nest of vipers liable to get them all killed. However, one of the characters, a CIA field agent who'd been posing as a Polish civilian prior to the outbreak of the war, recently received information that suggests an important contact is being held captive in an abandoned farmhouse northwest of the city. Since his captors were likely Soviet agents, the character felt an obligation to rescue his contact or, failing that, to ensure he didn't divulge operational secrets to the enemy. 

To that end, he and one of the other player characters set off, under cover night, to the location of the farmhouse. The farmhouse was surrounded on one side by a copse of trees that his player felt would provide excellent cover, especially in the dark. What the player didn't know was that the same copse of trees was being used by a Soviet lookout. Thus, when the character and his companion (another PC) entered the copse, I called for a Recon skill roll, this being the skill used in Twilight: 2000 for determining, among other things, if a character can successfully travel through an area without being seen.

The dice were in the characters' favor that day – so much so, in fact, that they not only succeeded in not revealing themselves to the hidden lookout, but they also succeeded in spotting him. Armed with this knowledge, they decided that discretion was the better part of valor and retreated back in the direction they came. Of course, events could have just as easily gone badly for them, in which case they'd likely have alerted not simply the lookout but the other Soviets patrolling the grounds of the farm. In that event, there's a very good chance that the player characters would have been badly wounded, if not captured or killed, since they were outnumbered and outgunned. 

I found this tiny moment in the session quite thrilling, as did the players involved. Though they didn't realize it at the moment I called for a skill roll, a lot hung on the results of that throw of the dice. Indeed, the entire course of the next session, which involved a planned raid on the farmhouse, might have gone completely differently had the characters failed that Recon roll. This is precisely why I so value randomness in RPGs: you can never be sure what will happen next. The entire course of my House of Worms campaign was altered by a single failed saving throw, for example. Indeed, many of my fondest memories of playing roleplaying games include unexpected moments occasioned by the results of a single roll of the dice. 

I can't speak for anyone else, but that's how it should be.

Random Roll: DMG, p. 110

Page 110 of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide contains a section entitled "Conducting the Game" with three sub-headings, each of which is probably worthy of a separate post. I may treat the other two at some point, but, for the moment, I'm going to deal only with the first one, because it treats a topic very near and dear to my heart, namely "Rolling the Dice and Control of the Game."

Gygax begins this section by stating, "In many situations it is correct and fun to have players dice such things as melee hits or saving throws." That's simple enough and hard to disagree with, particularly his point about fun. He then adds the following:

However, it is your right to control the dice at any time and roll dice for the players. You might wish to do this to keep them from knowing a specific fact. You might also wish to give them an edge in finding a particular clue, e.g. a secret door that leads to a complex of monsters that will be especially entertaining, You do have the right to overrule the dice at any time if there is a particular course of events that you would like to have occur. In making such a decision you should never seriously harm the party or a non-player character with your actions. "ALWAYS GIVE A MONSTER AN EVEN BREAK!"

There's a lot of unpack here, so let's start with his first sentence. Taken in isolation, it would seem that Gygax is endorsing an authoritarian approach to refereeing, playing into the caricature of him and old school referees more generally. However, there's actually a lot more nuance here. On the one hand, he admits that, by controlling when and by whom dice are rolled, the referee can ensure events occur as he prefers (or the reverse). On the other hand, Gygax is emphatic that no such decision should harm either the player characters or non-player characters, which is both a remarkable thing to say generally and more specifically for someone regularly lampooned as dictatorial. The final sentence of that paragraph, presented entirely in capitals, clarifies his ultimate point: the referee should be fair.

Gygax makes clear the dice rolls the referee should always roll: "listening, hiding in shadows, detecting traps, moving silently, secret doors, monster saving throws, and attacks made upon the party without their possible knowledge." I don't think there's anything controversial here. Potentially more contentious is his assertion that

There will be times in which the rules do not cover a specific action that a player will attempt. In such situations, instead of being forced to make a decision, take the option to allow the dice to control the situation. This can be done by assigning a reasonable probability to an event and then letting the player dice to see if he or she can make that percentage. You can weigh the dice in any way so as to give the advantage to either the player or the non-player character, whichever seems more correct and logical to you while being fair to both sides.

This is very close to my own trust in the oracular power of dice and echoes the play style of many early referees, like Dave Arneson and M.A.R. Barker. Take note, too, that Gygax once again emphasizes "being fair to both sides." This is key to understanding his perspective on these and related questions, I think.

Gygax concludes this section of the DMG by talking about times when "through no fault of his own," a character – though, interestingly, Gygax frequently uses the word "player," when he clearly means character – will die. He notes that sometimes "a freakish roll of the dice" results in an unfortunate end to a PC. He notes, though, that "in the long run you should let such things pass as the players will kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time." I personally find this hard to disagree with and it's been the way I've handled rolls in my Empire of the Petal Throne campaign since the start (and where both PCs and major NPCs have died as a consequence). At the same time, Gygax counsels leniency:

You can rule that the player [sic], instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonably severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done. It is very demoralizaing to the players to lose a care-for-player character when they have played well. When they have done something stupid or have not taken precautions, then let the dice fall where they may!

I'm not sure I'm on board with this bit of advice, at least as a general approach. As with everything, there are degrees of leniency and, while I'm certain there have been instances where I've ben kind-hearted as a referee, my general rule nowadays is to let the dice fall where they may in every circumstance. I guess that makes me more of uncompromising than the man himself. 

That having been said, Gygax pulls back slightly. He explains that

one die roll that you should NEVER tamper with is the SYSTEM SHOCK ROLL to be raised from the dead. If a character fails that roll, which or she should make him or herself, he or she is FOREVER DEAD. There MUST be some final death or immortality will take over and again the game will become boring because the player characters will have 9+ lives each!

Nuance, balance, and, above all, fairness. These are the keys to understanding Gary Gygax's approach to most aspects of refereeing and why, far from having been the tyrant he's sometimes made out to be, he's actually a superb model for referees to emulate.

Randomness Fetishism

I've long argued that an essential feature of old school play is randomness. Embracing the oracular power of dice is something in which I believe quite strongly and have employed to good effect many times in my ongoing campaigns. My feeling remains that we ought not lose sight of the fact that, when we're playing Dungeons & Dragons or Traveller or whatever, we are playing a game and a key feature of any game is uncertainty. No player – and here I include the referee as a player – can wholly determine the outcome of play. There are lots of ways to achieve this, but the most common ones involve randomizers of some sort, dice being popular but cards or chits are also possible.

I've been pleased to see, in recent years, a greater appreciation of randomness and the gameplay elements that can only emerge through its introduction, such as surprise. We play games for many reasons, of course, but I'd wager that one of their chief joys is contending with the unexpected. If we could predict precisely what was going to happen in a game before we sat down to play it, what would be the point? Indeed, much of our entertainment depends on, or at least includes, moments of surprise. It's for this reason that most games (though obviously not all) include random elements. It's also why I bristle somewhat when I hear people refer to roleplaying games as exercises in "collaborative storytelling," unless one is including randomness as an equal collaborator. 

I bring all this up because I've also noticed that random tables and the creation of them have become almost a badge of "old school-ness," to such an extent, in fact, that they seem to be everywhere. Just the other day, for example, I was reading an avowedly old school product and the first thing I noticed was just how many random tables it included – too many, in my opinion. No doubt some of you are wondering how I could say that, given all of the foregoing and it's a fair question, though not one whose answer I can easily articulate. My gut feeling is that, while one should welcome randomness in a game, one shouldn't turn it into an idol. That's why Gary Gygax's scene from Futurama is so amusing: it pokes fun at the notion that one might look to dice rolls to determine one's own mental state.

Now, I love random tables and use them often. Well crafted ones are exceptionally useful tools for any referee. One of my favorite blogs consists of nothing but random tables, many of them intended to be read with tongue firmly planted in cheek. But random tables – and randomness in general – cannot and should not be replacements for imagination and thought. They can be spurs to both, in addition to helping one break out of creative ruts but I sometimes wonder if we who enjoy old school games don't fetishize randomness to the point that we are in danger of becoming caricatures like Gygax's cartoon alter ego. Like other aspects of old school play, such as the emphasis on player skill or the ever-present danger of death, randomness should is only part of the equation – an important one, to be sure, and one I am glad is receiving a fairer hearing these days, but I sometimes worry if it's now over-emphasized, almost to the point of self-parody. 

Free RPG Day Haul

I never had much use for Free RPG Day in the past. I didn't have anything against it, but the start of the promotion coincided almost exactly with the beginning of my disinterest in what "mainstream" publishers were producing, so I never had any reason to give it any heed. This year was different, though, because I knew Goodman Games was producing a 16-page booklet containing two adventures for Dungeon Crawl Classic Roleplaying Game and I wanted to snag it.

So, I set off to a couple of local game stores and succeeded in my quest. I also grabbed a copy of Columbia Games's map of Hârn (which, to be fair, I already owned, but I can never get enough maps), as well as some funky dice from Q-Workshop. I didn't find  anything else that was of interest to me, but I'm very happy to have gotten the map and the DCC RPG module.

Feelings Occasioned by Dice

I got the last of the Zocchi dice I ordered so that I'd be set to play in my first game of Dungeon Crawl Classics tomorrow night (you can be sure I'll post about the experience later). I couldn't find a complete set that included everything I needed, so I had to get a few of them separately. Likewise, I'd been told that the "standard" D7 doesn't roll very well, so I got a D14 numbered 1-7 twice instead. And, to be honest, I didn't like the looks of the D7s I saw anyway, though the modified D14 I got is no prize, being large than I expected.

I know, for a lot of people, the use of all these additional dice types is a big turn-off. When I first heard about it, I thought it was a bit gimmicky too. Plus, the cost of assembling these dice was not insignificant, especially when compared to how cheaply one can acquire a full set of "ordinary" polyhedrals these days.

Having said that, I want to be honest: it was a lot of fun assembling this new collection of dice. In fact, hunting down all these weird dice reminded me a lot of what it was like in early 1980 finding my first set of polyhedrals. As you may recall, I started with the Holmes set. My copy included chits, not dice. I knew what the dice were supposed to look like, since I'd seen pictures of them and my friend's older brother had some, but I wanted my own. Finding them in suburban Baltimore at that time was no easy task, at least not for a kid who was as yet unaware of the existence of hobby stores that stocked RPGs.

The process of finding that first set of dice is something I'll never forget. It's not only one of my early RPG-related memories, but it reminds me of an aspect of the hobby that's very important to me -- initiation. Finding those dice was like a quest for the Holy Grail. Bringing them back to my friends and showing them off was proof that I'd ascended Mt. Olympus and returned. It was a rite of passage that showed I was now a full member of the fraternity of gamers. I suspect that this was a big part of the initial attraction of the hobby to me -- I felt like I was joining something "mysterious" and "elite."

I'm sure that sounds silly to a lot of people reading this, especially those who either didn't have a mentor who brought them into the hobby or who entered it by way of miniatures wargaming long before annoying kids like me appeared on the scene. For me, though, it's a fond memory and one that Goodman Games has not only conjured up but helped me to relive, if only a little. To my mind, that's what more contemporary RPG publishers ought to be trying to do.

Terminological Oddities

One of the many fascinating things about reading early RPGs is discovering peculiarities in their vocabularies. For example, lots of people have commented on the use of the word "throw" for "roll" in games like Empire of the Petal Throne and the Holmes-edited Blue Book. In between all my Dwimmermount writing, I came across another one.

I've been reading my copy of The Complete Warlock, published in 1978 by Balboa games explicitly as "a major D&D variant." The Complete Warlock is a codification of house rules that originated at the California Institute of Technology in 1975, making it one of the earliest variants of OD&D and thus a window on the dawn of the hobby.

While I'll have more to say about Warlock soon, one of the things that struck me about it was its use of percentile dice, which it calls "00-99" dice. What a strange formulation! Equally strange (to me anyway) is that the rules consider a result of "00" as the lowest possible result, below "01." In combat, for example (which uses a percentile system), a roll -- or should I say "throw?" -- of "00" is always a hit, while a roll of "90-99" is always a miss.

It's a small thing, admittedly, but completely contrary to my own experiences. In the Blue Book, there's a section on how to use dice and it explicitly identifies as a roll of "00" as being "100." That's why pretty much every game I ever played back in the day did it, but then I didn't start playing till late '79, by which point even D20s numbered 0-9 twice were already fading into the mists of history.

For the Love of Dice

One of my favorite blogs is Zenopus Archives, because, as its subtitle indicates, it's dedicated to "exploring the underworld of Holmes Basic." Since September of last year, its author has produced a lot of excellent posts about the version of D&D I started with back in the Fall of 1979, including examinations of the Blue Book's many rules oddities. Recently, he made a post that attempts to reconcile Holmes's notorious rule that all weapons deal 1d6 damage but that "light" weapons, like daggers, strike twice per round, while "heavy" weapons strike only once every other round.

It's a terrific post, well presented and argued, and one that in my opinion does a good job of making sense of this rule without outright abandoning it -- so terrific, in fact, that I thought "Wow, I'd love to use this interpretation in my own games." The problem is that, when I first started the Dwimmermount campaign, I began by playing LBB-only OD&D "by the book," to the extent that that's possible. That meant using 1d6 for all weapons. While this did have some nice side effects -- daggers were capable of killing even 1st-level fighting men with relative reliability -- it had a big drawback. No, I'm not talking about the pointlessness of using a two-handed sword; I'm talking about the lack of variety in the dice we got to roll.

Silly as it sounds, this mattered to us at the table. Just rolling d20 and d6 didn't feel right. Some of that sense of "wrongness" was no doubt conditioned by decades of using all the polyhedrals. My players and I strongly associated playing D&D with using five or six different types of dice in play. So, OD&D's focus on just two of the dice seemed somehow anemic and it wasn't long before we adopted Greyhawk's variable hit dice and damage rules. Once we did that, things felt "right" again and, even though we had thrown out many other bits of accumulated D&D lore in an effort to go back to the roots of the game, having only a limited selection of dice was a bridge too far, even in pursuit of that goal.

I like rolling dice and, when playing D&D, I like rolling lots of different kinds of dice. I have to admit that, while there's definitely something very primal to games like Traveller, which only use d6, I nevertheless miss the variety of shapes. Maybe that's why I still prefer Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu over other horror RPGs or why I see the use of all the weird Zocchi dice by Goodman Games's Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game as a point in its favor. I realize the irony in my saying this, since my own Thousand Suns uses only one type of dice, though, in my defense, it's d12 that it uses! (Mind you, I sometimes get the notion to design another SF RPG that uses all the classic polyhedrals, but then I recognize how silly that'd be).

Retrospective: Dragon Dice

The first polyhedral gaming dice I ever owned were a set of multi-colored, low impact ones I bought in a Kay-Bee Toys. I bought them because my printing of the Holmes Basic Set came with chits and a voucher for dice from TSR, apparently because such dice were still in short supply at the time. Though my friends and I tried using the chits -- we separated them into little bathroom Dixie cups -- we quickly found them unwieldy and, frankly, not very fun. Rolling dice is an enjoyable experience, whereas picking little pieces of laminated cardboard out of a cup is not.

So, I sought out a set of dice and found them wherever I could. As it turns out, the dice I bought were identical to the ones some people got in their Holmes sets. I later acquired a duplicate set in my copy of Gamma World. When I got those dice, I thought they were the coolest things in the world, not knowing any better. I used them for a couple of years, since I hadn't yet succumbed to dice fetishism and saw no need to buy more, even though the D20 was rapidly losing its edges and becoming spherical through continued use.

After that initial set of dice, the next set I acquired came in the Moldvay-edited Basic Set. They were blue, like the ones pictured above (those in my Expert Set were yellow), and they also exerted a strange fascination for me. For one, they came with a little black crayon to color in the numbers. This struck me as peculiar, since my original dice came pre-inked. Also of interest was that the D20 was actually numbered 1-20 as opposed to 0-9 twice, a fact that TSR proudly proclaims in its advertisement. I honestly don't know if the ad is correct in its claim, but, if so, it wasn't until 1981 that the hobby saw a "true" D20. I can't speak to the truth of it one way or the other, only that I personally never saw one numbered 1-20 until 1981.

Over time, I acquired several more sets of "Dragon Dice," as TSR called them. For some reason, I really liked them, even though they weren't of the greatest quality. Over time, they too started to show signs of wear, losing their edges through regular use. But they were smaller than my original dice and were of uniform colors, two qualities my younger self found very appealing. Indeed, Dragon Dice were my gateway to the wider world of matched dice sets. When I started playing, I never saw anyone with matched dice sets, only hodgepodge collections of them. Once I acquired my Dragon Dice, though, I found it harder and harder to use "mismatched" dice and slowly started acquiring a sizable collection of dice sets.

Eventually, I stopped using my Dragon Dice, moving on to dice produced by Gamescience or The Armory, both of which were much, much better made and available in a wider variety of colors and materials. But I still have a certain fondness for these TSR dice, as they introduced me to one of the weirder aspects of our hobby (at least to outsiders): its fascination with dice.

The Ads of Dragon: Fair Shake

That gamers have a lot of superstitions regarding dice is an understatement. Over the course of the three decades I've been involved in this hobby, I've seen a lot of weird dice-related rituals, from only using a "lucky" die to rolling dice in a particular way to "ensure" a propitious result. So, I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise to see this ad in issue #76 (August 1983) for a "dice device" called the Fair Shake:

Given the expense and the complication, I have a hard time imagining that any gamer except the truly gadget-obsessed would buy something like this. I remember being quite baffled by this ad, wondering why anyone would pay $12.95 plus $2.00 for shipping and handling for something that doesn't do anything that you can't do more easily with your own hands -- but then gamers often buy all sorts of crazy stuff that doesn't make any sense to me.

Open Friday: Weird Dice

If you didn't already own them, would you ever play a game that required you to buy weird dice like these?

I ask, because, back in 1979, that's what I did in order to play Dungeons & Dragons. My "complete" Basic Set didn't include them -- talk about false advertising! -- so I had to find a store that actually stocked these oddities.

Chameleons Dice

Reader John Middleton recently reminded me of the above: The Armory's line of polyhedral dice called "Chameleons." These dice got their name because, as their packaging proudly proclaims, they "change color with temperature!" You can see more of these dice over at the excellent DiceCollector website.

I never owned any of these dice myself, but, growing up in Maryland, I often went to The Armory's shop out in Pikesville, where I do remember having seen these dice, along with many others. Back then, I wasn't the dice connoisseur that I became later, so I rarely was willing to spend much money on random number generators. Even if I had been, I'm still not certain I'd have bought these, but who knows?

The Ads of Dragon: 20 Plus

As every gamer knows (or ought to know), the D10 is a late addition to the menagerie of dice. Until its appearance, we made do with D20 numbered 0-9 twice. I'm pretty sure I didn't lay eyes on a D10 until I got a copy of the Moldvay-edited Basic Rules, though it's possible I saw one before then. At any rate, by the time this ad appeared in issue #63 of Dragon (July 1982), D10s were well established in the hobby.

So it's fascinating that Gamescience was not only still selling "percentile D20s" in 1982 but was in fact touting its ability to serve as a D10, D20, and D100 (and D2, which is even weirder). Mind you, I owned several games, like FASA's Star Trek, that included Gamescience 20 Plus dice in their boxes, but those were pretty much the only occasions where I saw them being used instead of D10s. Though I nowadays prefer percentile D20s, I didn't back in the day and I'll be the first to admit that my current love of them almost entirely an affectation.

Handmade Dice

One of the things that unites us as gamers, I think, is a love -- some might say obsession -- with dice, especially strange and unusual dice. That's why I thought you'd all enjoy Dicecreator's Blog, written by a gentleman who makes his living producing custom dice. There's a remarkable variety to the dice he's created, many of which are quite beautiful. If you've got a moment to spare, drop by and take a look. Who knows? Maybe you'll be in the market for commissioning a set for yourself one day.

The Ads of Dragon: Dragonbone

Coming to us from issue #58 (February 1982) is this wonder of the modern age: Dragonbone!

In case it's not obvious from the ad, Dragonbone was an electronic dice roller. It was also very expensive, so, intrigued though I was by the idea of a "computer" -- that's what my friends and I would have called it back in the Dark Ages -- that generated random numbers for you without the need for dice, there was no way I was ever going to shell out $24.95 for it. I mean, FGU games typically cost $20.00 a pop and were widely regarded as way too expensive in my neck of the woods, so Dragonbone's price of admission was beyond the pale.

To this day I've never actually seen a working Dragonbone. I'm sure someone must have bought one -- or else all those ads DB Enterprises ran in Dragon for years and years really were among the most Quixotic endeavors in the history of this hobby.

Mystery Dice

A reader asks help in identifying these dice. Does anyone know where they come from? The one on the left looks like one of the Dikesha dice from the AD&D 2e Ravenloft boxed set, Forbidden Lore, but the other two I cannot place. Any help in doing so would be appreciated.