Thursday, June 9, 2016

Nice Dice


I like to listen to the podcast Fear the Boot (FTB). I have never met any of them but I feel like I know them all. Last week they dropped a show about an older version of Dungeons and Dragons Basic set purchased a garage sale (episode 402 http://www.feartheboot.com/ftb/index.php/archives/4575). The show was very funny as a group of thirty something year old gamers performed an anthropological study of this rare find. The discussion about the "caller" was worth the time all by itself. 

One item they focused on were the primitive dice (1983?). These were an off yellow and required using a crayon to mark them. FTB posted pictures of them and the rest of the find in their show notes. In the spirit of this discovery of the history of role-playing I am posting pictures of my first set of dice. 
My first set of dice circa 1977. Notice the lack of a fully numbered 20 sided and no 10 sided die at all.
Every set had the same colors. Notice how hard to read the D4 is.

The D20s. Also percentile dice. Also functioning as D10s. The numbers 11 to 20 are inked in red. Alternately, a D6 could be thrown with the D20. On a 1 to 3, don't add 10 and on a 4 to 6 add 10. In those groups a natural twenty became a SIX-OH!

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