Identifying the Dice of the 1970s

How can you recognize a polyhedral gaming die made in the 1970s? The video above gives my tips for collectors and researchers who want to roll old school. After the cut, I give a quick reference guide to identifying these dice.

The Origins of Dice Notation

As a previous post here covered, Dungeons & Dragons was the first game to make practical use of all five Platonic solids as dice. The first printing of Dungeons & Dragons (1974) did not, however, employ the classic abbreviations of dice notation: d4, d6, d8, d12 and d20. Instead, we see constructions like, "From 2-16 snakes can be conjured (roll two eight-sided dice)." Initially, TSR had no need for dice notation, instead favoring number ranges which assumed players could infer the dice needed: this was the convention through the Holmes Basic Set (1977), which is full of systems of the form, "Damage: 3-24 points." These same conventions prescribe dice throws in the contemporary Monster Manual. 

The Players Handbook (1978), however, suddenly makes liberal use of dice notation, without any preamble, as if players were expected to recognize a "d20," and more significantly, qualifiers like "5d20." This strongly hints that dice notation had been in use long before TSR embraced it, and we can in fact trace its origins to the very dawn of D&D fandom: as we see above in Alarums & Excursions #1, in an article by Ted Johnstone on "Dice as Random Number Generators."

How Gaming Got Its Dice

For those of us who grew up with Dungeons & Dragons, it is easy to take the polyhedral dice of gaming for granted. Dice had played an integral role in gaming since Prussian wargamers of the early nineteenth century first developed combat resolution tables. Those games and the many works they influenced, however, relied exclusively on 6-sided dice, apart from a few experimental dead-ends (like Totten's 12-sided teetotum in the late nineteenth century). When modern hobby wargaming culture began in the 1950s, it too stuck with 6-siders: the first Avalon Hill game (Tactics, 1954) requires a "cubit" for combat resolution, and the miniature gamers who contributed to the War Game Digest similarly seemed content to rely on the d6. By 1970, however, polyhedral dice had begun to creep into the wargaming community, as we see in the advertisement above from a 1971 Wargamer's Newsletter. Why do we need those funny dice anyway? What purpose did they serve that an ordinary 6-sider couldn't?

[UPDATE: See my guide to identifying 1970s dice here.]

Fredda Sieve and Her 1963 "Zazz" Dice

 

Dungeons & Dragons required the use of five polyhedral dice when it first came out, and back then in 1974, the only place TSR could acquire them was from Creative Publications. But theirs were not the first set of plastic Platonic solids marketed in America as dice. A decade before, Advertising Attractions, Inc. of New York sold the Zazz "Polyspheres" game, an invention of Fredda Sydney Sieve, which featured all five polyhedra with numbered faces. Today, we're going to look a bit at Sieve and how she came to make these plastic polyhedra.

d6s to Roll for Wandering Monsters in 1980

 

It doesn't get more old school than rolling a d6 to check for wandering monsters in a dungeon. In the early 1980s, rolling a "1" meant you were in for a fight. Back then, you could even acquire dice which replaced the "1" with a monstrous face: like the Flying Buffalo "Death Dice" (above left), or Lou Zocchi's Gamescience "Demon/Orc Dice" (right). But the very first dungeon delvers encountered wandering monsters when the die came up "6" -- the rule shifted to encounters resulting from a "1" around the time these two dice appeared. Read on for a bit more about dice in this tradition, and the change in the wandering monster rules that went along with them.

The Edmund Scientific Polyhedron Set (1966)

In cataloging the polyhedral dice available to early gamers, we shouldn't neglect a few products that weren't marketed as dice at all. In the 1960s, educational supply companies made models of the regular polyhedra available for classroom use, like the classic Edmund Scientific set shown above. Although they are unnumbered, a flick of the pen (or marker) might fix that. The question is, how well would they have served as dice?

The Sansu Set d10

Scouring through the polyhedral dice available to early gamers, you can sometimes stumble across a peculiar looking ten-sided die numbered 0 through 9. While these are obscure dice in America, they are well known in Japan, where they were included in an elementary school toolkit called a "Sansuu Setto" (さんすうセット, or  算数セット), which just means "arithmetic set." Today, let's unbox a Sansu Set, and look at a few variations on the d10s you can find within.

The Invention of the d4

 

When it comes to using Platonic solids as dice, the d4 is something of a special case. There are precedents that stretch back into ancient history for the use of the d6, d8, d12 and d20 as dice, as all four of those solids, when rolled, will land with a single face up, visible to all parties watching. A tetrahedron, however, lands with a vertex up, one face down and three faces on display. As the example of the Zazz Polyspheres shows (their d4 is on the left above), simply putting a number on each of the four faces of a tetrahedron does not immediately turn it into what we know as a d4. For a tetrahedron to generate a random number between 1 and 4 that will be visible to people observing the die from all angles, some innovation was required.

D&D in the News (1978): Funny Dice in Iowa, with Zeb Cook

"We're known down here as the strange people with the funny dice," begins Bob Waltman, describing the reputation of the group that met at the University of Iowa's Memorial Union. Before the game of Dungeons & Dragons became famous, it looked strange to pretty much anyone who saw it from the outside--especially reporters. But the game gets a favorable notice in this February 1978 article, "'Funny dice' creates Dungeons and Dragons' by Marlene J. Perrin.

D&D Turns 50, and Something Else Turns 200

2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Dungeons & Dragons. Nailing down the exact release date of a product as informally produced as D&D is difficult: I've written about that before (and amended it a bit further). Personally, I still choose to celebrate it on the last Sunday of January, which this year is the 28th. A lot of things will be happening in 2024 to mark D&D's birthday: among them, a re-issue of my first book, Playing at the World. But 2024 also marks another momentous occasion, one that we should honor along with D&D's release: the 200th anniversary of the 1824 publication of Reiswitz's Kriegsspiel, the game that pioneered many fundamental system concepts that would later underpin role-playing games.

Arneson's Hit Points for Characters

 

Game Wizards is very decidedly not a book about who invented which system in D&D. But early drafts of the book did track one design choice in D&D that Dave Arneson perennially criticized: the system wherein characters gain more hit points as they go up in level. Arneson held that character hit points should instead be fixed at character creation, and that characters should become harder to hit as they rise in level. While that story thread failed its save against manuscript bloat, restoring it does add context for Gygax and Arneson's subsequent disputes. Probably the most well-known place Arneson mentioned his system was in the introduction to the First Fantasy Campaign (1977), as shown above.

A Forgotten Variant: The X-Fragments

Gary Gygax explicitly called the Guidon Dungeons & Dragons document the "first draft" of the game in a cover letter. In that draft form, the game circulated to a number of playtesters in the Midwest. Some early adopters quickly engaged with the rules and produced their own versions: various structural properties show us that the Dalluhn Manuscript cribbed directly from the pages of Guidon. But it wasn't alone: the Prize Matrix shown here is from a partial draft similarly based on the original 1973 text, a draft we will here call the X-Fragments (compare this table to other post-Guidon drafts).

A Precursor to the Chainmail Fantasy Supplement

Chainmail (1971) is correctly regarded as the first commercially-available fantasy wargame system. The Fantasy Supplement that Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren tacked on to the end of Chainmail inspired Dave Arneson as he created the Blackmoor setting, and formed the basis for the original set of monsters and spells underlying Dungeons & Dragons. Something has been forgotten, however, in the forty-five years since Chainmail was published. Chainmail itself drew on a two-page set of rules developed for a late 1970 game run by the New England Wargamers Association (NEWA), which were designed by one Leonard Patt. Patt’s system shows us the first fantasy game with heroes, dragons, orcs, ents, and wizards who cast fireballs at enemies, though his contribution today goes entirely unacknowledged. The picture above shows this system in play at a Miniature Figure Collectors of America convention in October 1970 representing the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, a demonstration that won a “Best in Show” award.

[Updated: Now read Jon's conversation with Len Patt about these rules!]

The First Critical Hits

Nothing is more satisfying than rolling the dice and seeing not only that you hit, but that you hit exceptionally well. The adrenaline rush of critical hits proved so compelling that there is scarcely a game today, be it on a tabletop or a computer, where hits can be scored in which they don't have a chance to be critical hits, dealing additional damage. But the time-honored tradition of getting double damage on a natural 20 did not ship with the earliest version of Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, D&D spent decades resisting this idea of critical hits. Even without TSR's endorsement, critical hits still became a part of gaming everywhere, largely due to the impetus of fans like Gary Switzer, who sent the critical hit rules above to APA-L in May 1975.

A Forgotten Variant: Mythrules (1978)

The Elusive Shift talks about around 50 games published before 1980 that we might consider role-playing games -- "we might" because there was so much contention then about precisely what qualified as an RPG. Among the early games that self-identified as RPGs was the obscure Mythrules (1978) by Colin R. Glassey and Aaron Richardson Wilbanks. It escaped the attention of Heroic Worlds, and reportedly had a print run of just 100 copies. It is thus a game that is of interest not for any vast influence it exerted on posterity, but instead, as a manifestation of the creativity unleashed by the publication of Dungeons & Dragons, and the way that early adopters made role playing their own.

Character Sheets in 1975

The first edition of Dungeons & Dragons did not ship with any sort of character sheet. The Men & Magic booklet did provide "a sample record of a character" (pg.10) which comprised only the example character's name ("Xylarthen"), his class, his six abilities, and his gold and experience totals: it omits even fundamentals like level and hit points. Nowhere in the original game did there appear a pre-printed, fill-in-the-blank form for recording the vital statistics of characters. The fan community immediately grasped the usefulness of keeping one such form per character, especially in a campaign with many players. It is therefore not surprising that the first fanzine dedicated to a Dungeons & Dragons campaign included just such a character sheet: the one we see above, from the Haven Herald #1 of Stephen Tihor's Endore campaign in New York, dated May 3, 1975.

D&D in the News (1977): You, Too, Can Be a Wizard

Leslie Kemp, in the summer of 1977, gives us a rare mainstream perspective on the progress of Dungeons & Dragons, this time in the city of Tampa, Florida, for the Tampa Tribune. She reports the existence of four D&D groups known to her at the time, and calls it a game that "is just now gaining popularity." No doubt a notice in a major city newspaper would boost that, especially with the promise that "You, Too, Can Be a Wizard."

Why Did Armor Class Descend from 9 to 2?

One of the great riddles that has vexed D&D players for generations is this: why did armor class in original D&D descend from 9 to 2 instead of increasing as it gets better? The answer is spelled out in the first draft of D&D: if you were a first-level fighter rolling to hit, the number you needed was equivalent to 20 minus the armor class of your target. To hit AC 2, you needed an 18, to hit AC 3, a 17, and so on. Armor class descended to make it easy enough to calculate your needed roll that you wouldn't even have to consult a table. Unfortunately, the published D&D game broke this algorithm, which has obscured the motivation for descending armor class ever since.

Artistic Arcana: Scruby Fantasy Miniatures and TSR

Dungeons & Dragons grew out of a tradition of miniature wargaming, and distributors of figurines were among the first companies to supply D&D to hobby shops. Although the D&D rules downplayed the necessity of using minis, they do tout their value in adding "real spectacle" to the game through "the eye-appeal of the varied and brightly painted miniature figures." Miniatures were to early D&D what graphics became for computer games. Supplying miniatures suitable for fantasy RPGs ultimately grew into a substantial industry of its own, but at the humble beginning, the first miniatures that TSR sold along with D&D were made by the father of American miniature wargaming: Jack Scruby. Above are examples of some of these early Scruby miniatures arrayed for combat.

History of D&D in 12 Treasures

[for best results, watch on YouTube directly]

In honor of the fortieth anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, and for a change of pace, in this video I review the development of Dungeons & Dragons through twelve rare artifacts from the period leading up to the first publication of the game. They include original documents from Braunstein, an early letter from Gary Gygax on the medieval setting, Dave Arneson's notes for his own early medieval game, fanzines and maps associated with the Castle & Crusade Society, and various pre-publication D&D rules. Readers of my book will see quite a few things from my personal treasure chest that I haven't discussed before. A full breakdown of the contents is after the jump.