It's interesting that in the Futurama clip Gygax rolls a d20 and a d6. It reminded me that back in the day the d20 weren't numbered 1 to 20. There were numbered 0 - 9 twice. The dice could be used for percentile rolls as d10 are used today. When used as a 1 - 20 number generator, the 0 would be treated as 10 and some method used to determine whether the result was 1 - 10 or 11 - 20. Some people colored one set of 0 - 9 with crayon or marker to denote that these numbers represented 11 - 20, but others, like myself, would roll a d6 along with the d20 and on a 4 -6, add 10 to the number on the d20 to get 11 - 20.
Early use of a D20 marked 0-9 twice was due to the lack of a 10-sided regular polyhedron. Since early dice sets were based on the regular polyhedron, the (irregular) trapezohedron D10s we're used to today weren't widely available.
I used to have a pair of such d20, numbered 0-9, I loved them doing d100 rolls but unfortunately I have lost one of them during the years and not ever found any shop selling the model with just 0-9 again :/
I just posted exactly the same observation in a FB gaming group, along with a photo of my original (1980) orange d6 and white d20, as shown in the Futurama clip. Great minds think alike, eh?
A pair of dodecahedron numbered 0-9 twice were called "randomisers". They were used as d20s by having the second roll even/odd or high/low to determine adding 0 or 10 to the other die's result, or as percentile dice as we use the irregular d10s today. There were other randomiser solutions too. Basically, d4s were irrelevant since it's basically just a d20 divided by five. D6s could be randomised simply by rerolling any result that didn't fall in the range 1-6. Same with d8s.
My group just used model paint to distinguish the two 0-9 ranges. We had plenty of paint on hand for painting the miniature figures also used in the game. Sometimes we'd paint the 20 a third color so critical hits would stand out. I am doubtful crayon would stick well enough to give a good result. I don't remember colored markers being common in the 1970s.
@@BobWorldBuilder EPT probably deserves to be forgotten anyway, for reasons that probably go without saying to people who know anything about its creator.
@steppeone It should be mentioned that whenever you buy a tekumel product from drivethrurpg part of the proceeds are donated to charity. Personally I think Tekumel is very cool (and original) and certainly deserves to be remembered even though it's creator was an awful human being.
My first D&D box set from the 80s came with 5 dice and 2 crayons, there was no 10 sided die and the d20 had 0-9 twice. You the purchaser were to color the sides of each die with the crayons then wipe the face off with a napkin to leave the wax in the numbers, then when rolling the d20 you would have to declare "the red is high" or such before rolling to determine if you had rolled a 5 or a 15.
I remember the $3 crayons they sold at the hobby shop... and I also remember using my nephew's crayolas and spending my money on Ral Partha miniatures instead.
I have the dice I bought in 1978 from a "Head Shop". We had to use nail polish on 10 sides of the d20 to denote Hi and Low as the numbers went from 0-9.
The original polyhedral dice that TSR used were from the scientific supply company Creative Publications. There were two issues with these dice. The first being that the "D20" was actually a "D10" i.e. it was number 1 to 0 twice. Early players either colored in the number two different colors with the 2nd color representing 11-20 or.. rolling a d6 with the d20 and 4-6 meant reading the result as the 10s, the 2nd being that they were made of a soft plastic and after a lot of use the edges would 'wear away'. I had a friend whose d20 rolled like a marble. 🤣Jokingly, gamers referred to them as 'Low Impact dice". Later on when Lou Zocchi produced his Game Science dice, he advertised them as "High Impact Dice." In addition, the popularity of the Holmes Boxed set resulted in a dice shortage, and for a time TSR included 'Chits' to put into a cup to get the expected results in the game and a coupon to send away for polyhedral dice.
Aye, I remember all of this clearly. Then the religious right started claiming we were all going to hell and demonized an entire creative industry. Yay.
You filled in a couple of gaps for me, but I knew that the "maths rocks" were literally that once. There was something called the Royal Game of Ur which was a race game which used d4s. Which makes the d4 around 5,000 years old.
@@OmneAurumNonWell, it's the shape of the die moreso than the markings. Many dice exist without numbers, again going back to ancient times or the other early modern instances here. And also why spinners or coin flips or drawing cards for high / low or the like are not seen in the same light; despite in essence doing the same function.
I was a well established historical wargamer when I first encountered D&D in 1974. At the time, 20 sided dice numbered 0-9 twice, sold in one black (tens) and one red (units) pairs, were known as Percentage Dice, and widely used in UK rules, particularly for skirmish games and micro-armour games. I remember them in TableTop Games Western Gunfight rules, plus Leicester MIcro-Armour's 1/300th WW2 rules, and several others.
A crucial detail is that Gygax liked the funny dice because they represented a way to make people buy more stuff. If I recall correctly, they actually intentionally made the first d&d dice with cheaper plastic so that the corners would wear off and people would have to buy more dice. Gygax was, above all, a businessman- and a rather monopolistic one at that.
I'm sure that's true in some way haha, people certainly spend a lot of money on dice today! My understanding is that the original cheap plastic dice were chosen simply because they were cheap, not that they knew they'd wear out quickly. I think we'd still see incredibly cheap quick-wearing dice today if that were the case.
@@BobWorldBuilder My understanding was that the idea basically failed because people preferred to use crappy worn out dice rather than buy new ones. Of course, nowadays, your dice are a status symbol. Nobody wants to be the only person at the table without iridescent titanium oxide dice or whatever.
Undoubtedly! They also helped people market the game to friends, both actively and passively, since outside of mathematics (and possibly classical philosophy) nobody really has sets of platonic solids lying around, even today. Except role-playing gamers.
When I was growing and playing a lot of RPGs in the 80s dice sets were tricky to come by. All my dice came from the the different boxed systems I'd buy. Needless to say I had a lot of d10s because everything was a percentile system.
I designed a game that used the bell curve on 3D6 as part of the game mechanics. The goal wasn't to roll high, it was to roll average. When you're aiming in front of you, you're trying to hit the center. If you roll a 3, that's a wide miss to the left, and 18 was a wide miss to the right. But a 9, 10, or 11 was a dead hit. 8 and 12 were grazing hits that did half damage. It was fun.
Nice video, with lots of cool history! Also of note is that the Magic 8 Ball debuted with a d20 inside in 1950. The d12 is the King of Dice, though, as it can represent 1/4 and 1/3 in whole numbers. Also it rolls quite nicely, so we should be using 12-sided d6 (with 1-6 twice) and d4 (with 1-4 thrice) for a better illusion of randomness.
The five shapes (pyramid d4, d6, d10, d12, and d20) are the only regular polyhedrons definable as "platonic solids" (requiring, among other features, all faces to be congruent and themselves a regular polygon) that can exist. There are "fair dice" of different numbers of faces, but none of them will follow the same rules of form. Note the 'teetotum,' barrel dice, mixed polygonal dice, chamfered multifaceted, etc as potentially statistically fair but of a notably different form. The reason those five shapes were in the educational supply catalog is because they share this unique and interesting property, thus being coveted by math nerds.
@@stefanatic82 No way, how did I do that?! Being an honorable man, I shall not edit but leave evidence of my fallibility. Thank you and mark inspiration.
in the book "Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D" it is said that originally the rules said to use a bag with 20 numbered chips inside a pick one out, then when gary discovered the existence of the icosaedron he changed the rules to that dice.
Thank you for another great video Bob! I really appreciate how active you are in this community. You are always posting comments on other creator's channels and seem genuinely interested in building a sense of community within the TTRPG space!
@@TimeLapsePrints There's also Ed Greenwood, which while not a writer for the rules or anything, was the creator of the Forgotten Realms which became the 'main' D&D setting over time, so he can be sort of considered a co-creator in a way.
Ed Greenwood can NOT be considered a co-creator of d&d he wasnt around for d&ds origin and came later with the forgotten realms bs, only reason it became the defacto campaign setting is because both Dave and Gary ended up leaving T$R (or were forced out) and took the rights to their campaign settings so T$R needed a default "high magic" fantasy setting, so cue up the direct ripoff of Tolkiens world eliminster = gandalf anyone? Sheesh...
@@DavidClunie Like it or not, Ed Greenwood's writings have become the basis of D&D's most popular works for arguably decades at this point. When a lot of newer people think about D&D, they think about Greenwood's work.
I still have some of those soft plastic dice from the 70's that you needed to highlight yourself with grease pencil (black and red grease pencils were still readily available as they were used for writing on overhead transparencies in office and classroom presentations). You can identify them easily because the plastic was somewhat terrible and all the edges rounded off in very short order.
Wow - great research and terrific video. I've dug down several rabbit holes looking for the origins of these whacky polyhedrals as well. Hearing it comes straight from Dave Wesely is awesome! Updating my slides for the "History of D&D" presentation at DunDraCon starting in just over 1-week.
it's a good thing the original guys at TSR didn't use 2d6 to play dnd. well, according to Prof. DM, some did. i like rolling 2d6 vice 3d6 or 1d6. i'm not opposed to d20. i just set a target number of 7 and then add or subtract for adv or disadvantage or +1, -1, as the situation calls. d20 the TN is 11 works fine for adv and disadvantage. still add the +1s or -1s as needed and there it is.
I learned rpg with a 2D6 homebrew as a kid in early 2000s because other dice cost a fortune and were almost impossible to find. 2D6 systems are lingua franca here in Brazil, specially in the countryside. We even had zines dedicated to it!
Are you going to follow this up with an explanation of why 3rd edition adopted the D20 gaming system? Back in the Grognard days, the d20 was for combat and saving throws only, and skill checks were done with percentile dice.
Pretty sure that with 3rd edition they were looking to get most game play mechanics to use the same basic system for success and failure. Before that you had different actions using different dice with different good rolls. Combat was d20 high, while skills (non-weapon proficiency) were d20 low. Most d100 was roll low, unless it was magic resistance then it was d100 roll high (caster rolled, not the target). Then there were the myriad of things that never improved as you leveled (like finding a secret door) that were a d6. It was kind of a mess back then.
To improve the game? There's no reason to have completely different basic mechanics for different parts of the same game. There is a reason no other RPG does that.
Because they wanted to create a unified dice mechanic across most actions. Also worth mentioning that percentile-based skill checks in the game tended to be in intervals of 5%. A d20 has a 5% chance to land on any of the sides, so it made sense just to turn all skill checks into d20 rolls.
I went back to 2d6 a few years ago, because I wanted the bell curve. But I have found a really nice side effect; critical hits and misses. They each happen only 1/36th of the time, and they are visually compelling--double sixes or snake eyes. Double sixes gives you a bonus d6 and it explodes if you roll another six. A row of three d6s showing 6 has garnered the term, "the dragon" for its appearance. (Plug: my game is called CLASH and there's a quick-start on DriveThru RPG.)
The reality is critical hits can ruin the game, and 1/36 chance for a crit isnt small enough. Just use the d20 and if they roll a d20 to hit, and they can roll a 20 on a second roll, ie 1/400 of a chance give them a crit. makes them rare and special, and you dont have your PC's always dying when they are always being hit with a crit, because if they can roll a crit, the monsters also have to be able to roll a crit, and do you really want to have your players taking double damage? or max damage or however you give extra damage?
@@nobody342 Hi, Crusader. I think you are right about the frequency of critical hits--in the D&D system. Let me explain. In my system players roll 2d6 (plus some modifiers) against each monster's Difficulty. The difference is the damage done to the losing party (this means that one roll takes the place of 4 in D&D). A double six just means you get to roll another d6 worth of damage--it isn't instant kills.
Depends on how you define "bell curve." You actually need infinite dice to get a proper bell curve, but three is enough that it looks right. One just gives you the flat line approximation while two does indeed give a triangular approximation.
I’ve done way too much research on dice 😂 If I remember correctly the general consensus was that most ancient dice would have been used primarily as random number generators, specifically for the oldest game: gambling. The oldest dice ever are a pair of d6 that date back to 3000 B.C. 😳
I imagine that if someone invented rpgs back them, it would use a 1D6 or a 2D6 mechanic. By scaling results, you can have different narrative effects ( or degrees of success) at 2-4-7-10-12 rolls. So even back then it would not be primitive.
@@AdlerMow definitely not primitive. People back then were just as intelligent as we are now. I assume it would have much more realistic survival mechanics than what we have today!
At the Naval War College in Newport RI, there is a war game room that was the size of a basketball court with a gridded floor. It was built in the 1890’s. On the wall there is a mural of platonic shapes (ie dnd dice). It was in this room the Rainbow Plans were developed.
Nice that you mentioned the use of multiple dice to get different distributions than just flat. You can just use flat distributions and tons of tables, but there is something nice about rare/extreme outcomes actually being more tactilely reflected in the dice. I personally like the setup where the number of dice you get is based on skill, and difficulty is the target number and/or number of success required. But in the age of computers, tons of tables can be fun too.
Oh oh, I know this one! It was the alternate to hit roll in 0D&D, and it stuck around in Basic and Advanced and then WotC used it as the universal mechanic for 3e and beyond
Re. 2:10 Two dice (with the same number of sides) give you a triangular distribution. Three dice give you something more bell-shaped (closer to a normal probability distribution), four even more so, etc.
That picture of "1983 red box set" dice look just about like the ones I have still, although I've lost several of the dice. I also have my Expert Set dice, and the "d100s" I bought that are really just light blue & orange d10s. Complete with crayon to color in the faces. TSR also went through some different plastic around then. My Moldvay Basic and Expert sets are a slightly different color than my younger brothers' Red Box & the d100 sets just a couple years later. This picture has the d4 that looks more like a "Moldvay dice", a duller and more matte faded blue, than a Red Box one, which has a brighter, glossier baby blue color. Yes, I'm nerdy (and old) enough to notice which dice came from which sets.
This was dang interesting! I knew a little of this, but certainly not the whole history. There's a podcast called "Secretly Incredibly Fascinating" and this feels like it could belong there.
Fascinating history video! And you told it well, too. I find the history of the game fascinating in general, if you had any other ideas along this vein, I'd love to see them!
Ha! Those were the dice we used when I was in junior high. Those exact dice, ordered out of a math catalog. But this would have been 15 years later (maybe 1980 or so), and I don’t remember them being very expensive. But I had a lot of pocket change since I was a paperboy, so maybe I was spoiled. What I remember most is that the twenty sided would wear so fast that it was basically a golf ball after about a month of use and it would keep rolling until it hit something. I still have the first, quality, d20 I ever bought, tan with black numbers.
My first D&D book came with a piece of cardboard with squares numbered 1 through 20 to cut up and draw from a hat or bag. It was the blue cover with the silver dragon, but just the book - not a boxed set. Dice were hard to find!
Thank you for giving a tip to 2D6 systems! They were lingua franca for decades out in developing countries, only by mid 2000s other dice started to be more common! Ironically, in USA it was the opposite!
2:20 - YEEEAH I KNOW!!! That's exactly when I baked my own system with my friends we used 2D6, so we cold have this regression to the mean where we could count on extraordinary rolls being actually extraordinary! So rolling 2 of the same number had special meaning and there are other ways you can control the probability curve to make things more and less extreme. The problem really is describing those as rules for a player in a game; THAT is the real hard part in my opinion.
In the late ‘70s or early ‘80s we had a game called Word Nerd that used an icosahedral die with letters on it, called the “Nerd Cube”, which would generate random letters the players would use to make words in a 4 x 4 grid. Some letters were worth more points than others, something like Scrabble.
(Commenting before watching) I always kind of assumed the d20 was used because it is the platonic solid with the most sides. I figure the platonic solids have a beauty about them that inherently draws in nerds, so the creators of games set about using them to build the games as Plato used them to build the world. And then since it was decided to use them the one with the most sides was used to represent the largest variance of outcome. And somewhere along the way the horrid d10 was added because every creation story needs some devil or great evil.
As far as magic goes, as someone big into rationalism and who believes almost all, if not all observable phenomena can be explained by science- eventually, I prefer hard magic systems with rules, where magic is just another field of study and only mysterious to those who aren't learned in it. Much like Vector Calculus seems mysterious to someone who hasn't learned post high school math.
I just recently started looking into more wargames and was very surprised that the vast majority of them only use d6. Like what I am supposed to do with all my other dice while I war game!
6:00 yes!! Dreidels are the way to go. It adds a time element so you can spin against other players to see not only who's got the numbers but also spinning for longer. So why roll when you can spin it?
I once found a percentage die that was just a sphere that was dimpled on the inside with a ballast ball, so one of the hundred numbers on the outside would stay facing up.
You mentioned the notion of the bell curve of adding dice (especially d6). This is the standard for many games, with one really strange exception. There is a paperback Dr. Who role playing game called "Time Lords." Developed after gaming had reached the target/skill stage, the system took the difference from the target/skill and made you roll 2d6. Instead of adding the die you subtracted the higher one from the lower and you had to "beat the difference" (of the target/skill) to succeed. This results in one of the strangest curves ever, but it's exceptionally easy to explain to a non-gamer.
I really dislike the d20 because of just how random it is, really prefer 3d6 (or 2d6, 3d6 is just an easy direct rule change for d&d), but this was really fun.
Advanced Squad Leader, from the tactical war gaming genre, uses 2d6 in innovative ways. One of the dice is colored which has meaning, doubles has meaning, and it leans into the bell curve for sniper checks, and malfunctions. Also, the Naval War College had war games that used d20 before wwii.
I always figured they felt a need for that flat probability distribution--extreme results are more probable than you expect if you're used to rolling 2d6--but it's interesting to hear that the reason was ultimately "there's magic and weird fantasy stuff, so we need weird dice".
The thing I think is interesting is that in the ancient world you don't seem to see all the Platonic solids equally frequently. Ancient d20s and d6s nearly identical to modern ones abound, and there were d4s in the Royal Game of Ur, and other shapes like long prisms were used, but you don't see the Platonic d8 or d12 very often. (There are those mysterious Roman dodecahedra, but whatever they are, they don't seem to be dice. If they were dice, you'd think they'd be decorated more like the other Roman dice we find all over.)
I think I remember the D20 being vastly less important in the long run of ADnD 2e. I first ran into it being the primary die in West End's 2nd edition Paranoia (I got at a rummage sale), where it was apparently switched from a D10 system they had for first edition.
I own four 20 sided dice numbered 0-9 twice (called "percentile" dice) which I mail ordered from a UK wargamer who had a supply he used to sell, which came from the USA. This was before D&D existed. They were used in wargames. In this case, naval wargames, in pairs to generate percentage chances. The UK supplier was an author of a set of naval wargame rules I found in my local library, which used these dice and at the back of the book he advertised that you could mail order them from him. That would be in about 1972, when I was aged 15. D&D of course originated from a wargame where players ran rival warlords in a campaign against one another where the lords could explore underground sites to try to gain mystic artifacts to help their armies win battles.
funny thing, there's a certain Japanese tabletop RPG, Sword World, that is, basically, almost "D&D with serial numbers filed off, and more anime"... in which basically all rolls are done with 2d6. ALL OF THEM. D&D was, indeed, published in Japan in those 80s and 90s, and had some playerbase, but one thing was putting a damper on it... apparently the only source of "funky dice" were, well... TSR's Dragon Dice, which weren't exported there in large enough quantites.
I remember the first time I saw the “d20” was in 1976. Called Percentage Dice. Even though there were 20 sides the numbers on the dice were 0 to 9 twice, and they were used to generate numbers from 1 - 100 by Napoleonic Miniatures gamers. I bought a set, and when I discovered D&D I filled in half the numbers with a blue pen and half with a red pen to turn them into d20s.
Interesting! The "12-sided Tetotum" in that game was actually something else! But the reinterpretation as a platonic dodecahedron makes perfect sense and is cooler! So polyhedral dice come from a fortuitous misinterpretation. That's funny! 😆
The famous Magic 8-Ball toy basically has a big d20 in it with all of the little phrases on each face. It floats in the dark fluid inside and gives you your fortune. :-)
I referred to that original set of polyhedral dice as blast-o-matic. The plastic was very cheap, and they would ware down with repeated use. The D4 was a caltrop because if you stepped on it, it would be much more painful than stepping on LEGO - it was pointed instead of more current safety 4-siders with no points - or the rolling variety.
thanks nice story, i always thought about this from a simple math perspective,dice of trowing d20 as scales of 5% makes easy and add more "radomess" to the critical trows in the game.
3:54 I remember the first game I played used the % die or 2 D10 that was the game Pleadium( I may have misspeled that) but I do know that d20s were used but they weren't the main focus
They included low quality, small, and yellow dice. So we all naturally ran out and began getting new dice as soon as we could afford it. One of my favorite tricks for fast money was to ride my bike out the McDonalds, BK, and the 7-11's (we had a few nearby) after they closed. Then cleaning up all the change by teh drive through windows, and at 7-11, before there were leave a penny cups, folks might drop their pennies and change. One night for dice, maybe two or three for a module.
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Clearly, the ancient Egyptians used the dice in their variant of duel monsters.
If only
How do you think ancient peoples came up with shit like "Griffons" in the first place?!
I thought they used battle cards with monster
They dueled their monsters in the dungeon because they couldn't find their dice and they were out of capsules
I believe they were called shadow games
It's interesting that in the Futurama clip Gygax rolls a d20 and a d6. It reminded me that back in the day the d20 weren't numbered 1 to 20. There were numbered 0 - 9 twice. The dice could be used for percentile rolls as d10 are used today. When used as a 1 - 20 number generator, the 0 would be treated as 10 and some method used to determine whether the result was 1 - 10 or 11 - 20. Some people colored one set of 0 - 9 with crayon or marker to denote that these numbers represented 11 - 20, but others, like myself, would roll a d6 along with the d20 and on a 4 -6, add 10 to the number on the d20 to get 11 - 20.
Early use of a D20 marked 0-9 twice was due to the lack of a 10-sided regular polyhedron. Since early dice sets were based on the regular polyhedron, the (irregular) trapezohedron D10s we're used to today weren't widely available.
I used to have a pair of such d20, numbered 0-9, I loved them doing d100 rolls but unfortunately I have lost one of them during the years and not ever found any shop selling the model with just 0-9 again :/
I just posted exactly the same observation in a FB gaming group, along with a photo of my original (1980) orange d6 and white d20, as shown in the Futurama clip.
Great minds think alike, eh?
A pair of dodecahedron numbered 0-9 twice were called "randomisers". They were used as d20s by having the second roll even/odd or high/low to determine adding 0 or 10 to the other die's result, or as percentile dice as we use the irregular d10s today.
There were other randomiser solutions too. Basically, d4s were irrelevant since it's basically just a d20 divided by five. D6s could be randomised simply by rerolling any result that didn't fall in the range 1-6. Same with d8s.
My group just used model paint to distinguish the two 0-9 ranges. We had plenty of paint on hand for painting the miniature figures also used in the game. Sometimes we'd paint the 20 a third color so critical hits would stand out. I am doubtful crayon would stick well enough to give a good result. I don't remember colored markers being common in the 1970s.
Fun fact: critical hits with a d20 was lifted by AD&D from Empire of the Petal Throne.
Great short video, Bob.
Interesting! I've always heard it was a house rule from D&D players. I guess in any case, it was a house rule first
@@BobWorldBuilder it probably was, in the same way EPT took its rules from Original D&D. It really was such an interesting time in gaming.
@@BobWorldBuilder EPT probably deserves to be forgotten anyway, for reasons that probably go without saying to people who know anything about its creator.
@@steppeone What's the deal with the creator? Pretty much all I know about EPT is that it's the quirky conlang rpg.
@steppeone It should be mentioned that whenever you buy a tekumel product from drivethrurpg part of the proceeds are donated to charity. Personally I think Tekumel is very cool (and original) and certainly deserves to be remembered even though it's creator was an awful human being.
My first D&D box set from the 80s came with 5 dice and 2 crayons, there was no 10 sided die and the d20 had 0-9 twice. You the purchaser were to color the sides of each die with the crayons then wipe the face off with a napkin to leave the wax in the numbers, then when rolling the d20 you would have to declare "the red is high" or such before rolling to determine if you had rolled a 5 or a 15.
I remember the $3 crayons they sold at the hobby shop... and I also remember using my nephew's crayolas and spending my money on Ral Partha miniatures instead.
I used to use model paint and wipe it off the dice face when wet, to leave it in the numbers.
I have the dice I bought in 1978 from a "Head Shop". We had to use nail polish on 10 sides of the d20 to denote Hi and Low as the numbers went from 0-9.
The original polyhedral dice that TSR used were from the scientific supply company Creative Publications. There were two issues with these dice. The first being that the "D20" was actually a "D10" i.e. it was number 1 to 0 twice. Early players either colored in the number two different colors with the 2nd color representing 11-20 or.. rolling a d6 with the d20 and 4-6 meant reading the result as the 10s, the 2nd being that they were made of a soft plastic and after a lot of use the edges would 'wear away'. I had a friend whose d20 rolled like a marble. 🤣Jokingly, gamers referred to them as 'Low Impact dice". Later on when Lou Zocchi produced his Game Science dice, he advertised them as "High Impact Dice."
In addition, the popularity of the Holmes Boxed set resulted in a dice shortage, and for a time TSR included 'Chits' to put into a cup to get the expected results in the game and a coupon to send away for polyhedral dice.
I was there, Gandalf, 3000 years ago...
I had to send the form in for the dice when I got my Holmes set. Wish I'd kept the chits though!
I want a couple solid white 0-9 D20s so bad!
The “dice shortage” was caused by the oil embargo in the ‘70s.
Aye, I remember all of this clearly. Then the religious right started claiming we were all going to hell and demonized an entire creative industry.
Yay.
You filled in a couple of gaps for me, but I knew that the "maths rocks" were literally that once.
There was something called the Royal Game of Ur which was a race game which used d4s. Which makes the d4 around 5,000 years old.
Yeah most of the other platonic solid dice are much older than the d20!
They also doubled as caltrops in times of war *nods sagely*
They're not exactly d4s. There are two marked sides and two blank sides. So the outcome is more like flipping a coin. You either get a one or a zero
@@OmneAurumNonWell, it's the shape of the die moreso than the markings. Many dice exist without numbers, again going back to ancient times or the other early modern instances here. And also why spinners or coin flips or drawing cards for high / low or the like are not seen in the same light; despite in essence doing the same function.
Dude, the pyramids are nothing but giant D4s.
I bet their original exterior had numbers painted or built with coloured rocks.
I was a well established historical wargamer when I first encountered D&D in 1974. At the time, 20 sided dice numbered 0-9 twice, sold in one black (tens) and one red (units) pairs, were known as Percentage Dice, and widely used in UK rules, particularly for skirmish games and micro-armour games. I remember them in TableTop Games Western Gunfight rules, plus Leicester MIcro-Armour's 1/300th WW2 rules, and several others.
A crucial detail is that Gygax liked the funny dice because they represented a way to make people buy more stuff. If I recall correctly, they actually intentionally made the first d&d dice with cheaper plastic so that the corners would wear off and people would have to buy more dice. Gygax was, above all, a businessman- and a rather monopolistic one at that.
I'm sure that's true in some way haha, people certainly spend a lot of money on dice today! My understanding is that the original cheap plastic dice were chosen simply because they were cheap, not that they knew they'd wear out quickly. I think we'd still see incredibly cheap quick-wearing dice today if that were the case.
And Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro are keeping his spirit alive to this day, how nice of them! :D
@@BobWorldBuilder My understanding was that the idea basically failed because people preferred to use crappy worn out dice rather than buy new ones. Of course, nowadays, your dice are a status symbol. Nobody wants to be the only person at the table without iridescent titanium oxide dice or whatever.
Undoubtedly! They also helped people market the game to friends, both actively and passively, since outside of mathematics (and possibly classical philosophy) nobody really has sets of platonic solids lying around, even today. Except role-playing gamers.
When I was growing and playing a lot of RPGs in the 80s dice sets were tricky to come by. All my dice came from the the different boxed systems I'd buy. Needless to say I had a lot of d10s because everything was a percentile system.
I designed a game that used the bell curve on 3D6 as part of the game mechanics. The goal wasn't to roll high, it was to roll average. When you're aiming in front of you, you're trying to hit the center. If you roll a 3, that's a wide miss to the left, and 18 was a wide miss to the right. But a 9, 10, or 11 was a dead hit. 8 and 12 were grazing hits that did half damage. It was fun.
Nice video, with lots of cool history! Also of note is that the Magic 8 Ball debuted with a d20 inside in 1950.
The d12 is the King of Dice, though, as it can represent 1/4 and 1/3 in whole numbers. Also it rolls quite nicely, so we should be using 12-sided d6 (with 1-6 twice) and d4 (with 1-4 thrice) for a better illusion of randomness.
The five shapes (pyramid d4, d6, d10, d12, and d20) are the only regular polyhedrons definable as "platonic solids" (requiring, among other features, all faces to be congruent and themselves a regular polygon) that can exist. There are "fair dice" of different numbers of faces, but none of them will follow the same rules of form. Note the 'teetotum,' barrel dice, mixed polygonal dice, chamfered multifaceted, etc as potentially statistically fair but of a notably different form.
The reason those five shapes were in the educational supply catalog is because they share this unique and interesting property, thus being coveted by math nerds.
Not d10 but d8!
@@stefanatic82 No way, how did I do that?! Being an honorable man, I shall not edit but leave evidence of my fallibility. Thank you and mark inspiration.
@@TrojanManSCP thanks for your reply and the inspiration, I shall use it wisely ;)
D10 is not a platonic solid. D8 is.
in the book "Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D" it is said that originally the rules said to use a bag with 20 numbered chips inside a pick one out, then when gary discovered the existence of the icosaedron he changed the rules to that dice.
This is a hell of a history video
Thank you for another great video Bob! I really appreciate how active you are in this community. You are always posting comments on other creator's channels and seem genuinely interested in building a sense of community within the TTRPG space!
That was awesome! That cool ancient Greek dice at the end is so cool! Feels kinda time-travellery.
It’s good to hear you giving Dave some of the credit he deserves for creating D&D
Among others I had never heard of. Gary has become to D&D what Stan was to Marvel, but worse.
@@TimeLapsePrints There's also Ed Greenwood, which while not a writer for the rules or anything, was the creator of the Forgotten Realms which became the 'main' D&D setting over time, so he can be sort of considered a co-creator in a way.
Ed Greenwood can NOT be considered a co-creator of d&d he wasnt around for d&ds origin and came later with the forgotten realms bs, only reason it became the defacto campaign setting is because both Dave and Gary ended up leaving T$R (or were forced out) and took the rights to their campaign settings so T$R needed a default "high magic" fantasy setting, so cue up the direct ripoff of Tolkiens world eliminster = gandalf anyone? Sheesh...
@@DavidClunie Like it or not, Ed Greenwood's writings have become the basis of D&D's most popular works for arguably decades at this point. When a lot of newer people think about D&D, they think about Greenwood's work.
@@DavidClunie T$R? What year is it, 2004?
I love these kinds of videos. The variety of your work is why I think this is the best TTRPG channel out there.
I still have some of those soft plastic dice from the 70's that you needed to highlight yourself with grease pencil (black and red grease pencils were still readily available as they were used for writing on overhead transparencies in office and classroom presentations). You can identify them easily because the plastic was somewhat terrible and all the edges rounded off in very short order.
TIL there's a Yahtzee for the full set of dice, weird
D&DYahtzee. It just... rolls... off the tongue. :P
@@stewi009 Yet they went with the less-catchy and more sensible name Zazz. What were they thinking?
Fun to see the history of gaming with the d20 (and other polyhedral dice)!
Wow - great research and terrific video.
I've dug down several rabbit holes looking for the origins of these whacky polyhedrals as well.
Hearing it comes straight from Dave Wesely is awesome!
Updating my slides for the "History of D&D" presentation at DunDraCon starting in just over 1-week.
For “divination rituals”, it’s relevant that Magic 8-Balls work by having a d20 floating in saline within, with a different fortune on each side.
That's awesome! Thank you for this!
It was fun to look into :)
That is so fascinating. Im always interested in the history behind my hobbies
ive been playing since 1978, i always wondered why and were the extra poly dice were used and added.. THANKS BOB!!!
it's a good thing the original guys at TSR didn't use 2d6 to play dnd. well, according to Prof. DM, some did. i like rolling 2d6 vice 3d6 or 1d6. i'm not opposed to d20. i just set a target number of 7 and then add or subtract for adv or disadvantage or +1, -1, as the situation calls. d20 the TN is 11 works fine for adv and disadvantage. still add the +1s or -1s as needed and there it is.
I learned rpg with a 2D6 homebrew as a kid in early 2000s because other dice cost a fortune and were almost impossible to find. 2D6 systems are lingua franca here in Brazil, specially in the countryside. We even had zines dedicated to it!
Are you going to follow this up with an explanation of why 3rd edition adopted the D20 gaming system? Back in the Grognard days, the d20 was for combat and saving throws only, and skill checks were done with percentile dice.
Very few skills checks were d100.
Skill checks in 1e and 2e used a d20, having to roll low. Percentile was for Thief Skills and Bend Bars/Lift Gates
Pretty sure that with 3rd edition they were looking to get most game play mechanics to use the same basic system for success and failure. Before that you had different actions using different dice with different good rolls. Combat was d20 high, while skills (non-weapon proficiency) were d20 low. Most d100 was roll low, unless it was magic resistance then it was d100 roll high (caster rolled, not the target). Then there were the myriad of things that never improved as you leveled (like finding a secret door) that were a d6. It was kind of a mess back then.
To improve the game? There's no reason to have completely different basic mechanics for different parts of the same game. There is a reason no other RPG does that.
Because they wanted to create a unified dice mechanic across most actions. Also worth mentioning that percentile-based skill checks in the game tended to be in intervals of 5%. A d20 has a 5% chance to land on any of the sides, so it made sense just to turn all skill checks into d20 rolls.
This is a cool video! thank you for bringing us this knowledge!
What I great video! I feel like we've all learned something today.
I went back to 2d6 a few years ago, because I wanted the bell curve. But I have found a really nice side effect; critical hits and misses. They each happen only 1/36th of the time, and they are visually compelling--double sixes or snake eyes. Double sixes gives you a bonus d6 and it explodes if you roll another six. A row of three d6s showing 6 has garnered the term, "the dragon" for its appearance. (Plug: my game is called CLASH and there's a quick-start on DriveThru RPG.)
The reality is critical hits can ruin the game, and 1/36 chance for a crit isnt small enough. Just use the d20 and if they roll a d20 to hit, and they can roll a 20 on a second roll, ie 1/400 of a chance give them a crit. makes them rare and special, and you dont have your PC's always dying when they are always being hit with a crit, because if they can roll a crit, the monsters also have to be able to roll a crit, and do you really want to have your players taking double damage? or max damage or however you give extra damage?
@@nobody342 Hi, Crusader. I think you are right about the frequency of critical hits--in the D&D system. Let me explain. In my system players roll 2d6 (plus some modifiers) against each monster's Difficulty. The difference is the damage done to the losing party (this means that one roll takes the place of 4 in D&D). A double six just means you get to roll another d6 worth of damage--it isn't instant kills.
My issue with 2d6 systems is that’s difficult to understand the mathematical implications of a +1 or +2., whereas in d20, it’s an easy +5%/ +10%.
Very interesting Bob, I’m amazed it went so deep into the past. Thanks
Great video, Bob!
Fun fact: you actually need 3 dice to get a bell curve. 2 dice results in a triangular distribution
Depends on how you define "bell curve." You actually need infinite dice to get a proper bell curve, but three is enough that it looks right. One just gives you the flat line approximation while two does indeed give a triangular approximation.
Triangle distribution is a close approximation to a (truncated) normal distribution.
I’ve done way too much research on dice 😂 If I remember correctly the general consensus was that most ancient dice would have been used primarily as random number generators, specifically for the oldest game: gambling. The oldest dice ever are a pair of d6 that date back to 3000 B.C. 😳
I imagine that if someone invented rpgs back them, it would use a 1D6 or a 2D6 mechanic. By scaling results, you can have different narrative effects ( or degrees of success) at 2-4-7-10-12 rolls. So even back then it would not be primitive.
@@AdlerMow definitely not primitive. People back then were just as intelligent as we are now. I assume it would have much more realistic survival mechanics than what we have today!
Thanks for all the fun facts, Bob!!
Have been thinking about the meanings of different dice all week, thanks for doing this vid!!
DANG! I did not know any of this... except for the Egyption d20 part. Thanks for this video!
At the Naval War College in Newport RI, there is a war game room that was the size of a basketball court with a gridded floor. It was built in the 1890’s. On the wall there is a mural of platonic shapes (ie dnd dice). It was in this room the Rainbow Plans were developed.
Nice that you mentioned the use of multiple dice to get different distributions than just flat. You can just use flat distributions and tons of tables, but there is something nice about rare/extreme outcomes actually being more tactilely reflected in the dice.
I personally like the setup where the number of dice you get is based on skill, and difficulty is the target number and/or number of success required. But in the age of computers, tons of tables can be fun too.
I love the d20, but it’s fun to experiment with other systems as well.
Oh oh, I know this one! It was the alternate to hit roll in 0D&D, and it stuck around in Basic and Advanced and then WotC used it as the universal mechanic for 3e and beyond
When did YOU get your first d20?
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2:12 2 dice is a pyramid or triangle. 3+ dice give you an [approximation of] a bell curve.
Re. 2:10 Two dice (with the same number of sides) give you a triangular distribution. Three dice give you something more bell-shaped (closer to a normal probability distribution), four even more so, etc.
D6 is the only iconic die I know of but the rest have an interesting story I guess
great video, thank you Bob!
That picture of "1983 red box set" dice look just about like the ones I have still, although I've lost several of the dice. I also have my Expert Set dice, and the "d100s" I bought that are really just light blue & orange d10s. Complete with crayon to color in the faces.
TSR also went through some different plastic around then. My Moldvay Basic and Expert sets are a slightly different color than my younger brothers' Red Box & the d100 sets just a couple years later. This picture has the d4 that looks more like a "Moldvay dice", a duller and more matte faded blue, than a Red Box one, which has a brighter, glossier baby blue color.
Yes, I'm nerdy (and old) enough to notice which dice came from which sets.
Ember Forge is the best. I got his jumbo D20 for my big table tower. He makes some really cool jewelry as well.
This was dang interesting! I knew a little of this, but certainly not the whole history. There's a podcast called "Secretly Incredibly Fascinating" and this feels like it could belong there.
This all was really great. I had never heard of Wesely, or his role in D&D's use of dice other than d6's. Thanks!
Fascinating history video! And you told it well, too. I find the history of the game fascinating in general, if you had any other ideas along this vein, I'd love to see them!
Ha! Those were the dice we used when I was in junior high. Those exact dice, ordered out of a math catalog. But this would have been 15 years later (maybe 1980 or so), and I don’t remember them being very expensive. But I had a lot of pocket change since I was a paperboy, so maybe I was spoiled. What I remember most is that the twenty sided would wear so fast that it was basically a golf ball after about a month of use and it would keep rolling until it hit something. I still have the first, quality, d20 I ever bought, tan with black numbers.
Well i learned it went back to ancient Egypt. I knew it went back to ancient Rome. Thanks Bob. Keep up the good work.
My first D&D book came with a piece of cardboard with squares numbered 1 through 20 to cut up and draw from a hat or bag. It was the blue cover with the silver dragon, but just the book - not a boxed set. Dice were hard to find!
Thank you for giving a tip to 2D6 systems! They were lingua franca for decades out in developing countries, only by mid 2000s other dice started to be more common! Ironically, in USA it was the opposite!
2:20 - YEEEAH I KNOW!!! That's exactly when I baked my own system with my friends we used 2D6, so we cold have this regression to the mean where we could count on extraordinary rolls being actually extraordinary!
So rolling 2 of the same number had special meaning and there are other ways you can control the probability curve to make things more and less extreme.
The problem really is describing those as rules for a player in a game; THAT is the real hard part in my opinion.
I had lunch with David Wesely at GaryCon a few years back. He's a really delightful font of history of the game. Nice man.
Great video Bob! Thank you!
Two dice form chevron distribution, it takes 3+ to create s Bell curve
I loved the D20 when I was younger. Now that I'm older I prefer D6-based games.
Man, I had that Frazetta poster behind you on the wall of my college dorm room in 1982, when I began playing games with strange dice!
I had that same poster too!
In the late ‘70s or early ‘80s we had a game called Word Nerd that used an icosahedral die with letters on it, called the “Nerd Cube”, which would generate random letters the players would use to make words in a 4 x 4 grid. Some letters were worth more points than others, something like Scrabble.
Seems to me this video rolled a natural 20, for critical success. Another great video thanks to you, Bob. Keep up the great work.
I remember the first time I saw those dice. They came in the box along with a crayon, which you used to fill in the numbers on the dice.
(Commenting before watching) I always kind of assumed the d20 was used because it is the platonic solid with the most sides. I figure the platonic solids have a beauty about them that inherently draws in nerds, so the creators of games set about using them to build the games as Plato used them to build the world. And then since it was decided to use them the one with the most sides was used to represent the largest variance of outcome. And somewhere along the way the horrid d10 was added because every creation story needs some devil or great evil.
Don't forget about the Game of Ur that uses a type of four sided dice for 2400 BC
As far as magic goes, as someone big into rationalism and who believes almost all, if not all observable phenomena can be explained by science- eventually, I prefer hard magic systems with rules, where magic is just another field of study and only mysterious to those who aren't learned in it. Much like Vector Calculus seems mysterious to someone who hasn't learned post high school math.
A magic 8-ball has an icosohedron inside of it. Patented in 1946.
I just recently started looking into more wargames and was very surprised that the vast majority of them only use d6. Like what I am supposed to do with all my other dice while I war game!
6:00 yes!! Dreidels are the way to go.
It adds a time element so you can spin against other players to see not only who's got the numbers but also spinning for longer.
So why roll when you can spin it?
now i need a "Honest Abe" D20
I once found a percentage die that was just a sphere that was dimpled on the inside with a ballast ball, so one of the hundred numbers on the outside would stay facing up.
You mentioned the notion of the bell curve of adding dice (especially d6). This is the standard for many games, with one really strange exception. There is a paperback Dr. Who role playing game called "Time Lords." Developed after gaming had reached the target/skill stage, the system took the difference from the target/skill and made you roll 2d6. Instead of adding the die you subtracted the higher one from the lower and you had to "beat the difference" (of the target/skill) to succeed. This results in one of the strangest curves ever, but it's exceptionally easy to explain to a non-gamer.
Amazing vid. Good job!
The Ancient Egyptians were also playing D&D, except back then it was a sci-fi game.
All my personal design stuff is based on 2D6 these days. I like the bell curve.😊
I really dislike the d20 because of just how random it is, really prefer 3d6 (or 2d6, 3d6 is just an easy direct rule change for d&d), but this was really fun.
Advanced Squad Leader, from the tactical war gaming genre, uses 2d6 in innovative ways. One of the dice is colored which has meaning, doubles has meaning, and it leans into the bell curve for sniper checks, and malfunctions.
Also, the Naval War College had war games that used d20 before wwii.
I always figured they felt a need for that flat probability distribution--extreme results are more probable than you expect if you're used to rolling 2d6--but it's interesting to hear that the reason was ultimately "there's magic and weird fantasy stuff, so we need weird dice".
Wesley is so important to understand RPGs as we know them, it's unbelievable.
Thank You for a fun and interesting video. :-)
The thing I think is interesting is that in the ancient world you don't seem to see all the Platonic solids equally frequently. Ancient d20s and d6s nearly identical to modern ones abound, and there were d4s in the Royal Game of Ur, and other shapes like long prisms were used, but you don't see the Platonic d8 or d12 very often. (There are those mysterious Roman dodecahedra, but whatever they are, they don't seem to be dice. If they were dice, you'd think they'd be decorated more like the other Roman dice we find all over.)
I think I remember the D20 being vastly less important in the long run of ADnD 2e. I first ran into it being the primary die in West End's 2nd edition Paranoia (I got at a rummage sale), where it was apparently switched from a D10 system they had for first edition.
I own four 20 sided dice numbered 0-9 twice (called "percentile" dice) which I mail ordered from a UK wargamer who had a supply he used to sell, which came from the USA. This was before D&D existed. They were used in wargames. In this case, naval wargames, in pairs to generate percentage chances. The UK supplier was an author of a set of naval wargame rules I found in my local library, which used these dice and at the back of the book he advertised that you could mail order them from him. That would be in about 1972, when I was aged 15.
D&D of course originated from a wargame where players ran rival warlords in a campaign against one another where the lords could explore underground sites to try to gain mystic artifacts to help their armies win battles.
funny thing, there's a certain Japanese tabletop RPG, Sword World, that is, basically, almost "D&D with serial numbers filed off, and more anime"... in which basically all rolls are done with 2d6. ALL OF THEM.
D&D was, indeed, published in Japan in those 80s and 90s, and had some playerbase, but one thing was putting a damper on it... apparently the only source of "funky dice" were, well... TSR's Dragon Dice, which weren't exported there in large enough quantites.
Can we please bring back Honest Abe-ing as a term for rolling a crit/fail
I remember the first time I saw the “d20” was in 1976. Called Percentage Dice. Even though there were 20 sides the numbers on the dice were 0 to 9 twice, and they were used to generate numbers from 1 - 100 by Napoleonic Miniatures gamers. I bought a set, and when I discovered D&D I filled in half the numbers with a blue pen and half with a red pen to turn them into d20s.
Interesting! The "12-sided Tetotum" in that game was actually something else! But the reinterpretation as a platonic dodecahedron makes perfect sense and is cooler! So polyhedral dice come from a fortuitous misinterpretation. That's funny! 😆
I am looking up Zazz right now!
Very cool video. The Greek letters probably represented numbers. A=1, B=2, etc.
I like when I'm rolling dice in my Tabletop RPG and the dice says "Honest Abe"
I love the bell curve Fate dices gives me... and I'm not going back.
The famous Magic 8-Ball toy basically has a big d20 in it with all of the little phrases on each face. It floats in the dark fluid inside and gives you your fortune. :-)
I referred to that original set of polyhedral dice as blast-o-matic. The plastic was very cheap, and they would ware down with repeated use. The D4 was a caltrop because if you stepped on it, it would be much more painful than stepping on LEGO - it was pointed instead of more current safety 4-siders with no points - or the rolling variety.
0:33 Oh, look at John Francis Daley! He's so widdle!
thanks nice story, i always thought about this from a simple math perspective,dice of trowing d20 as scales of 5% makes easy and add more "radomess" to the critical trows in the game.
Sicherman dice are underrated.
3:54 I remember the first game I played used the % die or 2 D10 that was the game Pleadium( I may have misspeled that) but I do know that d20s were used but they weren't the main focus
Fascinating story! Thank you for the history lesson.
They included low quality, small, and yellow dice. So we all naturally ran out and began getting new dice as soon as we could afford it. One of my favorite tricks for fast money was to ride my bike out the McDonalds, BK, and the 7-11's (we had a few nearby) after they closed. Then cleaning up all the change by teh drive through windows, and at 7-11, before there were leave a penny cups, folks might drop their pennies and change. One night for dice, maybe two or three for a module.