Polyhedral Dice: Why Are They?
August 23, 2022 11:42 AM   Subscribe

 
excellent.
posted by wmo at 12:03 PM on August 23, 2022 [2 favorites]


The d10 is from 1904?!
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 12:08 PM on August 23, 2022 [1 favorite]


Fascinating!
posted by Gelatin at 12:17 PM on August 23, 2022


The idea of ancient Egyptians playing Cars & Computers™ is now my new happy place.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 12:21 PM on August 23, 2022 [4 favorites]


Panzerleader and Panzerblitz from AH was first, eventually hours alone playing solitaire Vietnam from VG. Good times with tabletop wargames, never really had much action with opponents. Oh and Advanced Squad Leader too, that was most excellent.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:30 PM on August 23, 2022 [1 favorite]


Loved the Phantom Tollbooth cameo.
posted by rouftop at 12:30 PM on August 23, 2022 [4 favorites]


Loved the Phantom Tollbooth cameo.

That's how I recognized the d12 that came in my D&D Basic Set was a dodecahedron.

(I learned they were all Pythagorean solids from watching Cosmos.)
posted by Gelatin at 12:49 PM on August 23, 2022 [4 favorites]


I don't have my copy of Jon Peterson's _Playing at the World_ handy, but Gary Gygax was pretty content to just use d6's in the early days of Chainmail and Dungeons and Dragons. (Rough intervals of 16 percent worked well enough for the first table-top war games in Prussia.) I think it was Arneson who found this very obscure Japanese company (in pre-internet days, natch) and brought d10s and d20s into the game?
posted by cidrab at 12:51 PM on August 23, 2022 [1 favorite]


Not a complaint, was a great video article... and the subsequent YouTube auto-play recommendations were amazing... It went from there to 50+ politically incorrect TV advertisements in history, and then to a documentary on the war of 1812...

Its just a triumvirate of random. They weren't content by the same people, just - truly random recommendations.

To tie this up with a neat bow... this is like rolling 2d10 and getting the 99-00 range roll both times for content switching.
posted by Nanukthedog at 1:03 PM on August 23, 2022 [2 favorites]


Advanced Squad Leader too, that was most excellent.
posted by Meatbomb


And most complex.
posted by Splunge at 1:12 PM on August 23, 2022 [2 favorites]


See Will Hindmarch as editor: The Bones: Us and Our Dice
posted by mfoight at 1:24 PM on August 23, 2022 [2 favorites]


I had the 1979 D&D basic set and a set of the dice pictured in the video, but I definitely also recall using the dice chits pictured at Stack Exchange as an alternative--drawing them from a cup. Randomizing through draws like this is an alternative that, aside from drawing cards, also shows up in the 15th C. game of "Ragman" where players would draw strings attached to descriptions of personality traits. And the earlier 13th C. game of "Ragemon le bon" shows people using wooden cards with essentially the same results--randomized "characters," maybe read pretty simply as something like fortunes.

So the history of randomized simulations and role-play could have been very different, at any point either making more use of alternatives like these or simply only using d6s the way that Tunnels & Trolls (1975) and Traveller (1977) did. To my mind, a relevant question besides "What changes [to make polyhedral dice common, usable, etc.]? Plastics!" is "Why weren't the alternatives used the way we use polyhedrals today?"

And what actually happened in the early history of story games let's say 1551 to 1867 is people came up with collaborative ways to introduce surprises that didn't involve dice at all: there are many examples here. And what happened in the early history of war gaming--both before and a little after "Strategos"--was people mostly didn't use dice but kept reinventing simulations like those in Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) or depicted as original childhood inventions in H.G. Wells's novel The New Machiavelli (1911)--a couple years before Little Wars (which even mentions dice but doesn't use them!) makes a similar point about war games being reinvented throughout time.

In other words, diceless mostly just worked fine for centuries, and people didn't even use d6s when they could have. Skipping over the later history of wargaming and the reintroduction of "Strategos," D&D specifically piled meaning upon meaning onto different kinds of rolls, in part because it seemed neat to have those choices (see the part about Gygax's 1973 article on polyhedral dice and/or pp. 319-320 in Playing at the World). But D&D's complex "kitchen sink" design and use of polyhedrals is what provided negative inspiration for Tunnels & Trolls soon after, so even then it wasn't a sure thing that their use would catch on.
posted by Wobbuffet at 2:22 PM on August 23, 2022 [16 favorites]


I still have my first polyhedral dice. From my first DnD game.
posted by Splunge at 2:49 PM on August 23, 2022 [5 favorites]


think it was Arneson who found this very obscure Japanese company (in pre-internet days, natch) and brought d10s and d20s into the game?

PatW Ch 3.2.1.2 is the chapter on dice, and largely follows the Jon Peterson blog post that Wobuffet links to. Like the video mentions, the Japanese Standards Association set of three d20s is Patient Zero for modern polyhedral dice, with Gygax likely learning about them from wargaming. What the chapter doesn’t have: David Weseley’s account that he bought Platonic solids from a catalog, which Peterson doesn’t buy. From the comments on the Playing at the World blog post:
Great post Jon! What do you make of Wesely's claims that he got a set from a scientific supply store and Arneson's that he bought a D20 in England.


Jon PetersonFebruary 7, 2013 at 10:30 AM
Don't leave out Gygax's account that he found them in a school supply catalog. I guess we have three plausible but mutually incompatible claims for who introduced polyhedral dice to gaming. They can't all be right, but they can all be wrong.

I'm sure there's a kernel of truth in all these stories. When Wesely was working on Strategos, no doubt he would have gone looking for a device that generates numbers from 1-12. But if he found them, where are the chance tables with ranges from 1-12 in "Strategos N" (1970)? If they were available to Arneson during Blackmoor, why does he say in the intro to the "First Fantasy Campaign" that they had "no funny dice back then," and why do we see no "funny dice" ranges in Blackmoor tables from the era? My piece above is about the causal chain that the surviving evidence shows. I think that causal chain is a sufficient explanation for the presence of these dice in D&D and subsequent games.
posted by zamboni at 6:02 PM on August 23, 2022 [2 favorites]




I believe that almost everyone could enjoy having a D100 die as a whimsical little desk toy.
posted by fairmettle at 11:16 PM on August 23, 2022 [1 favorite]


The Louvre also holds a 12-sided die from Ptolemaic Egypt:
The collections of the Louvre include a die in the shape of a rhombic dodecahedron dating from Ptolemaic Egypt. The faces are inscribed with Greek letters representing the numbers 1 through 12: Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ϛ Z Η Θ Ι ΙΑ ΙΒ. The function of the die is unknown.[2]
The rhombic dodecahedron is a fair die, but it's interesting that the die was not in the shape of the classical Platonic solid with pentagonal rather than rhombic faces, though that dodecahedron was discovered by the Pythagoreans and kept secret for awhile.

The discovery and disclosure of the pentagonal dodecahedron is attributed to Hippasus of Metapontum, and he was supposedly thrown overboard and drowned for spilling the beans — or perhaps for disclosing the very inconvenient for Pythagorean doctrine existence of irrational numbers.

In any case I couldn’t find out whether the Ptolemaic Egyptians would have known about the pentagonal dodecahedron, although it seems likely they would have.
posted by jamjam at 2:37 AM on August 24, 2022


I learned they were all Pythagorean solids from watching Cosmos.

All... except for the d10! (I'm crafting an Um, Actually question submission on that exact factoid)
posted by FatherDagon at 7:14 AM on August 24, 2022


Hey everybody, glad you liked the video. The history of dice is, to a great extent, Folk History. The people who were there swear by stories that contradict each other and physical evidence, and it seems unlikely that the entire truth can be known. If you want to listen to a rambling interview with David Wesely on a train to GenCon and hear his version, you can listen to this Theory From the Closet episode.
posted by GameDesignerBen at 10:23 AM on August 24, 2022 [7 favorites]


Normally my video posts are just me noodling on weird synthesizers, getting high double-digit views, so it’s been fun to make something that people are connecting with and talking about.
posted by GameDesignerBen at 10:26 AM on August 24, 2022 [8 favorites]


Sweet, story time... In 1986 when I was sixteen I went to a long summer program at a university where I met my first and second girlfriends, but that's not the story. The story is that at then end of that summer after girlfriend number two had left I was hanging out with her roommate the next day. I still to this day would describe her as the Gelfling from The Dark Crystal.... That's not the story either. The story is that somebody had given her a white box first edition of Dungeons and Dragons that she didn't want or even care about so she gave it to me. I went back home to my long time D&D 2nd edition playing nerd friends and plopped out that vintage first edition game. Sadly it's long lost, pretty sure I know when and where I left it, but I didn't have the means to take it with me along with tons of other cool stuff. Wish I still had it.
posted by zengargoyle at 11:02 AM on August 24, 2022 [1 favorite]


Been on a numberphile kick lately, so here's Fair Dice pt. 1, pt. 2, and Perfect Shapes (polytopes) in Higher Dimensions.
posted by Eideteker at 7:48 AM on August 25, 2022


Just got two new sets to add to my collection. Still haven't found a group of people to actually play DND with so I hope that with every D20 I acquire the shinier I'll be to other adventurers. :)
posted by The Adventure Begins at 8:18 PM on August 26, 2022 [1 favorite]


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