Another Guest Blog Post by Berin Kinsman of UncleBear.
You kids today think you have it so rough. The D&D Online Tools aren’t ready yet! I can’t play a Bard or a Druid in 4e! I don’t have a flying car to take me to my game session! Spoiled, whining brats, I tell ya!
When I was your age, we didn’t even have dice! My first D&D boxed set had a sheet of cardboard with numbers printed on it that we had to cut up into chits, and we drew numbers out of a cup! We took turns shaking the paper cup and tried to avoid paper cuts! And we had to reload the cup for every die type! Just “rolled” a d20? Now you need you roll a d4? Dump out the 20 chits and put in the 4. Now you need a d6? Dump the 4 and put the 6 in. We had little piles on the table for each die, and had to keep them separated.
And when we did finally get dice, they were crap! They were made out of the lowest grade plastic and were probably toxic, and they crumbled like hard cheese when you rolled them. I had a d20 that only rolled 7 and 13 because most of the corners were sheered off. It was like rolling initiative with a marble. One guy I know got to a game session and his dice bag with filled with nothing but plastic grit, because his books had crushed his dice to powder inside his backpack. You think old grognards won’t let you touch our dice because we’re superstitious? It’s because we’re afraid you’re going to break them!
Those dice didn’t come in all kinds of fancy colors, either. Everyone I know had pale blue dice, because that was all the hobby store sold. By hobby store I don’t mean game store or comic shop, because there weren’t a lot of those around back then. I mean a place that sold model kits and Lionel trains. And balsa wood. Aisles and aisles of balsa wood and dowel rods. It was like buying dice at a tiny, tiny lumber yard. People back then needed a lot of balsa wood and dowel rods, unlike today when all you kids do is play video games and never go outside in the fresh air!
Dice didn’t come with the numbers painted on so you could read them easily, no sir! They were blank plastic. You had to use a crayon to color in the grooves so you could read the numbers without picking the dice up and squinting. Buying the deluxe dice meant the crayon was included and you didn’t have to supply your own.
There were no 10-sided dice. Those weren’t invented until later. The d20 was numbered 0-9, twice. You used two different crayons and declared one color “high” and the other “low”. If you used red and blue, for example, and declared red high, a red 7 was 17 and a blue 7 was just 7. To roll a percentile we rolled the d20 twice, the first time for 10’s and the second time for 1’s, because few people had two 20s at a time. Not that we didn’t buy them, they just disintegrated from use and you couldn’t buy just one die, you have to buy a whole new set. So you’d end up with 47 d6’s and 22 d8’s and only 1 d20.
And as for your lack of flying cars, we had to ride dinosaurs to our game sessions! Uphill! Both ways! In a snow storm! It was an ice age back then. You kids should make the most of your global warming and all the nice weather. Now get off my lawn!
Boy, I sure do miss the good old days…
Awesome article!
My first set of dice in from the D&D Pink Box, were this sickly orange, and crumbled. The d20 from that set, is nearly round.
I can remember opening my original Top Secret box set and getting two different colored d20’s numbered 0-9. It would not be until Star Frontiers, that I would get actual d10’s in a boxed set.
Several years after my orange dice, I came upon a comic store, that was half comics, and half games. It was there, that I encountered my first set of fancy dice. They were clear blue plastic, with white inked numbers. They were the most amazing things I had ever seen. I bought them at once, and a felt die pouch to hold them in (since before my Orange dice were in a baggie–no a zip lock, but a baggie).
I loved those blue dice, and still have them. Since then I have developed a dice fetish, and make my annual trek to the Chessex booth at GenCon to see what’s new. I never leave empty handed.
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(From a handcranked wooden DSL modem at my mother’s cottage… campign plans fell through because of rain).
Excellent post! I started a few years after you Berin and I bought my first dice piecemeal at a hobby store (along the DMG and a copy of Village of Homlet). They were 2nd generation clear plastic and uninked.
It never occured to me that we could ink them. I was 12 and didn’t read English, what did I know?
I think that may be the best article I have ever read.
Mostly because it’s all true! (except the dinosaur part…I rode a mastodon to my games but at least it was good on gas)
Ah, happy times when our maps were blue and the covers weren’t attached to the adventures; when monster stats took up a single line and were buried in the text and writers seemed to CAPITALIZE random words FOR no reason; when the Lords and other important people were named, and they probably only appeared at the beginning or end of the adventure.
And out character sheets were landscape, with a shield for AC.
Monsters went Wandering with a Table and didn’t shift squares, and books were coloured-coded (red, blue, green, black, gold – remember?).
Ah, happy times indeed 🙂
Good post, Bear. I remember it well.
I remember playing in boy scouts back in the early 90s and not being able to bring anything D&D related with us on camp-outs. As a result, everything was verbal with no paper, pencil, dice, or anything. The DM would declare when you have leveled and what gear (if any) you’d find. Only after we returned to civilization did we record anything.
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Dice Chits, as of July, 2008, print your own!
http://www.yog-sothoth.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownloaddetails&lid=659&ttitle=Dice_Chits
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This post had me rolling with laughter in my chair. What an excellent way to start off my Friday morning!
I probably started gaming a little less than a decade after you, Berin, but it began with the old blue box set with the dragon on it that I had acquired at a yard sale. I remember finding the dice and wondering if they had let their dog eat it… but now I know it was just from use.
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I remember carrying my chits around in a paper cup with plastic wrap over it at summer camp, so proud I was to finally own a copy of the basic set myself (the one with the wizard & fighter taking on a red dragon on its treasure heap). And when elves were character classes and the game stopped at 3rd level…things were so simple back then. No one worried about how much crunch vs. fluff there was, or whether or not the game was too tactical vs. story-oriented…we just bashed down doors and splatterd goblins counting coins.
Berin: remind me about those paleodice at the next SAGA meeting. I still have my brothers’ set, with the vidalia onion d20s, the largest d12 in existence, and a few others from about 30 years ago.
I’m please that folks have liked my posts here. There’s a certain pressure when you’re guest blogging for a popular and beloved figure like the ChattyDM. I told my wife it’s like sitting in for Carson on the Tonight Show, back in the day.
Of course I also have to plug that I do have my own blog, part of the RPG Bloggers Network, and you can read more of my stuff on a regular basis at UncleBear.
This certainly brings back memories…I remember how bad the dice were in the mail order game I got called Man, Myth, And Magic (from Yaquinto).
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That was very funny stuff.
I wasn’t there at the very beginning, but I heard about the chits… the stuff of legends, they were. When I started playing D&D, in second edition, there were those that scoffed because *real* men played Rolemaster, for some reason.
Your post washed me in nostalgia.
Ooo~! I remembered my first RPG gift (sort-of) was a full set of dices (a d4, d6, d8, d10 and a d20). It was probably the best and coolest gift that I ever got cause it was the main tool I use to brought my first gaming group into AD&D back then…
Look, strange dices!
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This is the kind of crusty crumbling dice we had to deal with back in the day, folks, in the hoary days before the Intervention of Zocchi. Not such a pretty sight.
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My first DnD experience was played with a copy of the Holmes Basic set from the local library. It had the crummy blue dice *and* the chits. The chits actually came in handy when a friend and I played “Keep On the Borderlands” during a long road trip (his parents drove while we gamed it up in the back seat).
I was sent a link to this article this morning, and it was inspiring, So inspiring in fact that I wrote my own personal addendum and sent it to the less chronologically challenged gamers we know. I think my 12 year old daughter may actually not ask me about rules changes for at least a week, so something good may have come of it.
To the post dino-riding , no powdered dice hauling, non-diabolic gamer generation::
Don’t’ forget my pampered 4E friends that back in the boxed set days we had to play in the basement of the library or pretend we were playing star wars ( actually Star Frontiers / Gamma World). This was due to the fact that at least 2 players in any given game had parents who “knew” that the Satanists were recruiting and training new members by brainwashing their innocent children through Dungeons and Dragons.
Really, stop laughing…
They “knew”.
Interestingly enough the Jewish, Baptist and LDS parents in my town were particularly paranoid…
I remember Sitting in 7th grade english with a backpack full of stolen wooden hall passes and recovered D&D books,
What ? Yes, the hall passes were wooden boards with chains attached to them, sigh.
We would use class writing assignments to develop module content disguised as fantasy short stories which we then played after school in the “Science fiction book club”. This was mainly done to avoid drawing attention from the actual Church of Satan constituents among the faculty as well as MR. Dube the Health teacher. He was just … creepy.
We covertly played our illicit campaigns in tents , library basements , English classrooms, and the latch-key kids houses just to get our FIx. Hell I remember helping the DM deliver newspapers after gaming all night just because we were allowed to play at his house. Ah the glorious, actually more infamous and somewhat Diablo-esque, Jello-rod campaigns. Those were the days.
In summary, just to play the game we had to :
1. Disguise our activity
2. Avoid religious zealots
3. Sneak out of the house
4. W.O.R.K. (No, selling Warcraft gold does not count)
5 Play with people who smelled like booger and looked like pointdexter (ask to borrow your dad’s copy of revenge of the nerds, just don’t tell him I suggested it)
Those were the days alright. Opening your 11th birthday present to find *gasp Cyborg Commando! My first gaming experience…20 minutes of laser beams before having both legs chewed off by a bug…the stuff of legends.
Luckily for me, Another box had fallen behind the table…a really cool boxed game called “Greyhawk”. Good times!
My first d20, d10, d8 and d12 were included in the Spanish edition of Runequest in 1989… until then, we have played MERP with little pieces of paper numbered from 0 to 9 that we pulled out of a bag.
Oh, and in Spain we STILL ride dinosaurs ;).
Best regards,
Carlos
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I’m not as old as all of you. I didn’t have unpainter die, or D20 that were 0-9 & 0-9.
I started on 2nd Edition. The covers were black with a color photo and the pages were white with blue ink. THAC0 was all the rage and a 10 AC was bad and an AC of Zero was good. There were campaign settings from TSR as far as teh eyes could see. SOme good, some that were avoided like the plague. Yes, Yes, we had Forgotten Realms like the namby pamby players of 3rd and 4th edition, but we also had Ravenloft (Personal Favorite) and Greyhawk (Yes it was actually its own setting and not just assumed that it was what was in teh PHB like 3rd), Planescape and Spelljammer just to name a few.
And my first die. I remember it well. It was this ugly Orange D20 with black numbers that a friend gave me because he was angry that I kept needed to borrow from others since I didn’t own my own, even though I had been playing for like 5 years already. Had it since this past April where it seemed to have gotten up and ran away on me.
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I’m too young to remember the dice of yore…when I first started gaming we played 3e and only had one set of dice that the group shared…and the miniatures we used were little blocks of pine that we had all carved to vaguely resemble our characters…I was a lawn gnome rogue…
Those were the days before coffee too…we drank Dew constantly to keep ourselves up for days on end…took the tabs from the cans and made it into chainmail, just in case the mormons came a knockin’ again…
That was awesome, Berin — one of the most enjoyable RPG blog posts I’ve read recently.
I painted in the numbers of my first “set” of dice — a d10 and d20 from Avalon Hill’s godawful Lords of Creation — and then actually tried to seal them with a matte sealant (like you’d use when painting minis). It, uh, didn’t work out so well.
My first full set was an Armory bonus pack: seven poly dice plus a matching dice bag, all purple. I still have the d4, d8 and one other one (I forget which), and they faded to a pale pink years ago.
I love dice. 🙂
@ Carlos, my wife has been bugging me for a while to take our next vacation in Spain, and now I’m sold! Do I get to pick my own dino-mount, or is there a local custom? 🙂
As for myself, I started on the boxed set pre-AD&D, and though I never had to use chits while walking uphill barefoot in the snow, I can attest that the transformation of a dodecahedron into a sphere took less licks than a tootsie pop. And wax pencils worked better than crayons for coloring the numbers. I recently unearthed my original set a few weeks ago, and had to toss them despite their sentimental value. It turns out handling objects with sweaty teenage hands and then packing them away for a couple decades does not do good things for plastic.
@gospog –
The mastadon was probably far more effective, anyways. Giant lizards don’t move too fast during ice ages.
@greywulf –
Check out a copy of the Free RPG Day adventure from WotC this year. Cover = not attached, with maps on the inside cover. Very, very similar to the old ways.
Ahhhh crayoned dice. Inventing rules for using D6 from old board games around the house (Roll four D6 first three are actual last one is “1or2=0” “3or4=1” “5or6=2”
Its a logical choice.
BTW I couldn’t afford a dinosaur to get to my gaming group (even the wooly mammoth was out of my price range). I had to settle for a second-hand deluxe-size tortoise
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Oh, and trivia time!
Who knows why the first d10s were d20s numbered 0-9 twice?
[ Jeopardy music starts now ]
The 20-sided die has a more regular shape — it’s a platonic solid — so therefore it rolls more easily.
The d4, d6, d8, and d12 are also platonic solids, but the d10 is not. In order to achieve the better rolling, the easiest method is to double the number of sides, to 20, repeating each number twice.
I remember borrowing a friend’s DMG, skipping school for a day, and copying the tables. On a typewriter. On onionskin paper. The ribbon was half red, half black, and never aligned correctly.
Ding ding! Ninetail wins.
Even more specifically, Gygax’s original polyhedral “dice” were regular solids made as educational aids. They didn’t have non-regular ones, hence the funky numbering in D&D.
Aww. yeh. I remember the Good olde days.
At $12 the white bookset was way too expensive… That would mean my allowance for like, the entire summer, or mowing lawns every weekend for a month.
Even though I mowed lawns every weekend until the middle of June, Picked up a copy of Ready Ref Sheets, and along with the Bluebox set we made do just fine… Inventing completely new monsters for an encounter and just statting em up on the spot while everyone was rolling for initiative!
Star Wars? No Problem. Lightsabres statted as +5 with Vorpal qualities, meaning with a natural 20 the Jedi got to pick the body extremity removed from the hapless victim, and if it didn’t happen to be the head the Jedi was striking the victim would continue taking bloody damage from the severed limb each round equal to the damage taken from the attack. Laser Pistol d6+2, Laser Rifle? 2d6+2 Laser Cannon 4d6… Force Powers = PSIIIONNIICS!
Oh, and where I lived in Colorado and Wyoming, It was winter all the year around. It snowed once there more than an inch, on July 14Th! And we rode Worgs… These huge half wolf/half dog things to our games when the snowplows broke down.
This article was awesome! I was lucky in the fact that both of my folks were D&D geeks. They had started playing in ’78. My dad had about every book you could get your hands on, boxes of modules, and tons of minis that we would sit around for hours painting together as a family hobby. I still have all of those minis. Almost three hundred of them sitting in my curio cabinet in my living room on constant display. They had started me playing when I was a wee lass at the age of seven. My first set of dice were light and dark blue that I had painstakingly colored the numbers in with a white crayon. I have those dice in with all of my other ones. The corners are worn completely off and have turned this odd brown color. I love them even tho’ they don’t roll worth the crap.
Fond memories of great battles, heroes, sorceresses, wizards, dragons, and Cheetos…
MADNESS!
First games were with my cousin’s bits and pieces of BD&D and AD&D 1e. We had the crumbly blues and some yahtzee dice.
Then a fateful summer with my parents on a 24 foot sail boat on Nantucket Sound. I had yahtzee dice, pencils, and Muppet stationary. I so impressed my Mom with my enthusiasm that she bought me the red box for Christmas.
No chits though. I missed that.
So… You might say that I road a whale to my first sessions.
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Great article! Truly hilarious!
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This post was a riot. I usually like to include a big about having to keep a potato in my pocket to keep warm – which also served as lunch, so the uphill snow walk home was chilly.
I laughed, and then memories of playing Gamma World and coloring in cheap red ten-sided dice are all coming back to me now…
This is great. I bet at least some of it is true too. Although I haven’t played for that long I do remember when there were very few shops to buy D&D games and supplies at.
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Oh, god… those chits! I had those!
Kids these days…
Ah. It’s not funny, it’s so true. I am post-chit but still in the crappy colour-in your own dice generation. We played Basic D&D and Traveller, and I think it was 1980. I don’t think I saw a dedicated games shop until 1983 when I went to University and went to a Games Workshop. Mind you, GW sold all sorts of stuff including computer games then.
This is Britain, so obviously I rode a penny farthing to gaming sessions.
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