weseld1 wrote:I have designed dice in which not all of the angles between faces are convex. This means that some of the "faces" will never touch the table on which they are rolled, but these are simply not numbered.
"Gee, another way to make a D12. But who would need one?"
zhowar wrote:I'm not following most of this, but I have to say it's a fascinating thread! Bad time for faro/harami to stop contributing! (re: the historical perspective)
deimos3428 wrote:I don't really know much about dice or polyhedrons; to be honest, I'm just being facetious.
Equipment that will be needed to use these rules... a device to generate random numbers from 1-20. If you do not have access to a die with 20 sides, it is easy to construct a random generator known as a "TOAD" which consists of nothing more than 20 poker chips placed in a small opaque recepticle. Each chip is consecutively numbered on both sides, from 1 through 20.
To have some mechanism which will give the wargamer a random chance of between 1 and 100, all that is needed is a box of poker chips, numbered 1 through 100.
It began with only the basic monsters in CHAINMAIL and was only some six levels deep. Six levels was chosen since it allowed random placement with six sided dice (no funny dice back then).
Combat was quite simple at first and then got progressively complicated with the addition of hit location etc. As the players first rolled for characteristics, the number of hits a body could take ran from 0-100.
We were in the very beginning using the six siders, but when we started doing the fantasy games, I dug out some 20-sided dice I'd purchased in England in the mid 60's. I went to a game store — well, a historical miniatures store — in London, right off of... I think it was at Picadilly, I'm not sure. And I went upstairs to their gaming area and they had these little boxes of 20-sided dice, and I thought "oh, how cool!" And so I picked up three pair, and I came back home with them and tried to introduce them into our military games, but the guys would have nothing to do with them. We had several mathematicians, and working out percentages for six-sided die were child's play for them, but it gave me a headache. So really, the dice sat there for three or four years. Then we did fantasy, and I said "hey, let's use this stuff for it." So when we started on Blackmoor, we started using 20-sided dice at the same time. Go figure. They're gamers, you know?
The first RPG use of such dice was in the first RPG—the famous Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) game. However, D&D did not invent the dice. D&D co-creator E. Gary Gygax, who was the first gamer to use polyhedral dice, told me he originally found them in a school supply catalog from California, where they were sold as tools to teach math and probability.
Gygax found his dice in 1972 and used the new statistical spreads they made possible to create the rules of D&D from the wargame Chainmail. However, the supply of dice was too low to sell them at first. So from 1974 to 1980, D&D came only with marked cardboard chips that were pulled randomly out of a bag.
Summit (try to find a copy of that one!)
This argues in favor of using a D10 numbered 1-5 twice instead of the drum-shaped D5, or using a D14 numbered 1-7 twice instead of the drum-shaped D7.
ifearyeti wrote:I've seen 8-sided dice used for a poker game as well; 7,8,9,10, jack, queen, king,ace. I have no idea how modern they were though.