It shouldn't be this hard to find d6s.

February 14, 2011 6:50 AM

Di(c)eFilter. I need help finding old dice!

My father gave me his old D&D dice to use when I play my first actual campaign with friends at PAXEast. I'm totally excited, but there is a small issue. The set of dice lacks matching d6s. There are six of your bog-standard white-with-black-pips d6s, but I'd love to find some that match the rest of the dice, but I have no idea where to look.

The dice are flat gray, plastic, with sharp edges. No rounded-off namby-pamby business. The numbers are inscribed in black, except for the d20s, which actually go to 10 twice, once in pinkish and once in blue. (As an aside, why is that? Someone mentioned they are that way for d100 percentage rolls. Is that the case? Is it "kosher" to use them as d20s by defining with the DM that one color is its number +10?)

So, D&D fans, where should I look for old-style dice to match my inheritance? Is it at all likely that I'll be able to find some?

I'll update with pics when I can.

posted by InsanePenguin to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (20 answers total)

Some d20s used to go 0 to 9 twice, yes, so you could two of them (or one of them twice) to do the digits of a percentage roll. d10s were not introduced until much later, for some reason. It's perfectly fine to use them the way you describe; that's why they were inked that way. In the old days (you kids get off my lawn!) they didn't come inked. You could ink a set of numbers yourself to act as the +10s, or you could roll the 20 along with a d6 (1-3 = +0; 4-6 = +10). The you could walk uphill, both ways, in the snow to get to your AD&D 1st edition game. You kids today.

Old dice of the kind you describe sometimes show up on eBay, though I don't see any there now. There are some of the old d&d box sets there, which would have them, but it's a lot to pay just for the d6. Also it probably wouldn't be gray. Those dice chipped and wore down pretty easily. I'm afraid you may be out of luck
posted by The Bellman at 7:02 AM on February 14, 2011

Bellman, is there some sort of keyword I should be using to search for these dice? How would you search eBay for them in particular?
posted by InsanePenguin at 7:09 AM on February 14, 2011

Old school.

A brief history of dice

It didn't help that 20-sided dice at that time weren't numbered 1 to 20. Instead, they were numbered 0-9 twice. A 0 counted as 10, and a "control die" was needed to run the full range from 1 to 20. (The control die, usually a d6, was rolled along with the d20. So if the d6 showed 1-3, the 1-10 on the d20 was read straight-up. If the d6 showed 4-6, then 10 was added to this number.) Why go through all of that? Because the 20-sider needed to do double-duty as both a d10 and a d20.

posted by zamboni at 7:10 AM on February 14, 2011

dicecollector.com might help you narrow down the particular kind, but it's not a sure bet - that website is a bit of a mess.

You'll want to find either the manufacturer, or the D&D edition that they came in - here's a thread where someone's looking for pictures of "blue box" dice.
posted by zamboni at 7:22 AM on February 14, 2011

Not really, I'm afraid. You want "opaques". Actually, now that I think about it.

http://www.gamescience.com/opaquerole-playingdice

Gamescience makes plastic, sharp-edged opaques in a huge range of colors. I bet you could gin something up that would be an ok match from that page. Let me know.
posted by The Bellman at 7:28 AM on February 14, 2011

Tada? You'll have to ink it yourself, though. Use a crayon of the appropriate color, probably black.
posted by The Bellman at 7:32 AM on February 14, 2011

There are also a goodly number of dealers at PaxEast, some selling nothing but dice, if you want to touch/feel/test roll your candidates before purchasing.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 7:36 AM on February 14, 2011

Ah, those are very close, Bellman! I'll have to poke around a bit more but I don't see any that are as dark a gray as mine. I'll keep searching with the terms "opaque" and "precision." We'll see what turns up.
posted by InsanePenguin at 7:42 AM on February 14, 2011

zamboni: you mean people back then were too stupid to just take the last digit?
posted by madcaptenor at 9:01 AM on February 14, 2011

Or search for Mud dice. They will be fairly hard to find in good condition as their edges wear off over time rendering them useless.

Good luck finding them, they are rather rare now.
posted by koolkat at 9:46 AM on February 14, 2011

madcaptenor: Old d20s had two of each "last digit." That's the thing: 0-9 twice, so you even/odd or hi/lo the d6 to figure out what the *first* digit is. What a bunch of stupids!
posted by rhizome at 9:52 AM on February 14, 2011

It doesn't make sense! I mean, maybe people really used d10s more than d20s then. But why not have, say, white 0-9 and red 0-9 on each die so that they could be used as d20 as well?
posted by madcaptenor at 10:36 AM on February 14, 2011

It doesn't make sense! I mean, maybe people really used d10s more than d20s then. But why not have, say, white 0-9 and red 0-9 on each die so that they could be used as d20 as well?

That's exactly what mine are, though through this thread I gather that wasn't usually the case.
posted by InsanePenguin at 10:45 AM on February 14, 2011

Damn. Screwed up the quote.
posted by InsanePenguin at 10:46 AM on February 14, 2011

Because they didn't come that way. In truth, there was really no reason to even HAVE most D20s, because they didn't differentiate... since you had to roll with a D6 for 1-10 or 11-20, a D10 worked just as well. But most sets came with a D20 regardless.

Even if they had been colored, you'd have ended up with arguments about whether the red numbers were 10 or the black numbers were, and people could potentially color extra numbers the wrong color 'by accident'. This sort of thinking wasn't that unusual in the teenage world.

They did have one redeeming feature; they rolled better than D10s, good for tense situations. :)
posted by Malor at 10:48 AM on February 14, 2011

A must-see for anyone anticipating a dice purchase: Colonel Zocchi, founder of Gamescience, expounding on dice accuracy and manufacturing methods.
posted by XMLicious at 12:52 PM on February 14, 2011

Okay, just got home from work, hope some of you are still looking at the thread! Here are the dice in question.

Bellman, I'm pretty sure I'm going to go with the ones you found at GameStation. Now I'm looking for a way to confirm that the ones I have are Game Science dice.

I know, I know. I'm now obsessed with dice. These are awesome.
posted by InsanePenguin at 5:10 PM on February 14, 2011

About the 20-sided d10s: They're numbered that way because they weren't invented for gaming. The gamers who started using them in games found the dice in an educational supply catalog. The dice were originally meant for teaching probability and generating random numbers for experiments. (Not everybody had easy access to computers in 1972, remember?) Generating 1-10 and 1-100 is more useful (for educational purposes) than generating 1-20. Turning a twenty-sided d10 into a d20 was gamer hack. (The ten-sided d10s everybody is used to now didn't come around until about 1980.)

As for matching the dice: There were over a dozen companies producing un-inked dice "back in the day." The photos you posted look like Gamescience to me. The ten-sided die is the tell -- most companies didn't include that extra "beveling" around the axis of the die. The number arrangements on the d8 and d20 are also highly diagnostic.

If I wasn't 500 miles from my dice collection, I would use the mold scars (the little blemishes, like on the "1" face of the d8) in your photos to make sure. Those are usually consistent among dice from a given manufacturer.
posted by faster than a speeding bulette at 7:12 AM on February 15, 2011

They are almost definitely GameScience dice! The mold scars on the d8 match and the "12" on the d12 is very slightly offset.

I'm going to order the ones in the link to GameStation the Bellman provided, hopefully they match the GameScience Classics that I have.

Thanks so much to everyone!
posted by InsanePenguin at 9:12 AM on February 15, 2011

Okay. Last update if anyone is still checking in.

I found a number on the GameScience website and called it. Who answered? None other than Lou Zocchi, the founder of GameScience and the creator of my dice. We chatted for a while. Sure enough, my dice are some of the first run, if not from the first run. Turns out there weren't any d6's available to buy back then because molds cost too much for their little company to make and they figured you could get d6's just about anywhere, so they didn't bother making molds for the d6's until quite a while later.

So, yeah, thanks so much to everyone in the thread, this is so awesome!
posted by InsanePenguin at 2:21 PM on February 15, 2011