The twenty sided die, or d20, is the
most famous and infamous of the dice used in roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons. Players often describe a roll of the d20 as fate
itself or invoking the will of the dice gods! Despite its significance in RPGs, and the d20’s
iconic status as a symbol of mainstream nerdiness, few people, even few devoted fantasy roleplayers
and self-proclaimed “dice goblins” know the truth of how and why the d20 or any of the other “weird
dice” became associated with role playing games, but after watching this video, you will! Because I’m Bob, this is where we learn how
to have more fun playing RPGs together, and… Most fantasy RPG fans would be smart
to assume their favorite die is just another carry over from the Napoleonic
or medieval war games beloved by the creators of Dungeons & Dragons. Things
like hit points, armor class, morale, and other game mechanics that have come
and gone in various RPGs-- many of these are all rooted in war games after all,
but that smart assumption would be wrong! ...mostly, and remember
that. It’s important later. First, if we look into one of D&D’s immediate
predecessors, Chainmail: Rules for Medieval Miniatures by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren,
the former being one of D&D’s co-creators-- --there are no references to twenty sided dice! All the target numbers are
based on rolling the familiar d6. And this makes sense too. For decades,
the six sided die had been the standard for representing chance in war games,
board games, and of course gambling. So why not early RPGs too? These cubes
are easy to manufacture, pack, and buy anywhere! And if six outcomes aren’t enough,
you can simply roll more than one at a time! But of course, rolling two or more
d6s at once ~tilts~ the randomness by establishing a bell curve of results, and actually making it easier to design rules
around the most and least probable outcomes. For that very reason, hundreds of roleplaying
games today have circled back from the d20 and returned to using multiple or pairs of
d6s. …One quick example of a 2d6 game from the fantasy genre is Legend in the Mist
by Son of Oak, sponsoring this video! It has fun, familiar mechanics for anyone who’s
tried D&D or a Powered by the Apocalypse game, but Legend in the Mist is built firmly
upon narrative and player agency, where each character has multiple,
possibly conflicting motivations, and you can change your character’s abilities
by following one theme over another. But what really captured my attention is
the setting described as “rustic fantasy” and based more genuinely on settings like
Lord of the Rings through its mysterious portrayal of magic and monsters! You can
check it all out on Kickstarter today, using the link below so they know who sent ya… And this brings us right back to Chainmail by
Gygax and Perren which had a fantasy supplement of rules for creatures found in the Hobbit
and Lord of the Rings like hobbits, balrogs, ents, and orcs; but according to some articles and
blog posts documenting Gygax’s early work on D&D, he felt that the d6 didn’t quite fit this theme. Fortunately for Gygax, some of contemporaries
were already experimenting not only with their own fantasy adventure game, but also with weird
dice. Dave Arneson, who would soon become D&D’s co-creator with Gygax, got the idea to use
weird dice from his gaming buddy, David Wesley. While Wesley and Arneson were both innovative
gamers, they were obsessed with how older war games were run. And according to
this old forum post from Wesley, that’s where he first got the
idea to try using weird dice… “Back in 1965, I read the rules to a game
published in 1880 that said one could use a "12-sided teetotum" instead of a 6-sided die… I
had seen a set of models of the regular polyhedra in my High School trig class, and decided that a
"12-sided teetotum" must be the 12-sided thingy... Wanting to try out the game, I went to school,
got out the Edmund Scientific Supplies catalog, and ordered one set of the polyhedra from them
for $6.00 (gasoline was $ 0.20 /gallon then, so that would be about $66.00 in today's money). This set of five polyhedra came with the faces
already numbered, to make it easy to see that there were 12 sides on a dodacahedron, or 20 on an
icosahedron, which made them easy to use as dice… When Dave Arneson (one of the guys in our group)
invented his fantasy role-playing game, and took it to Gary Gygax to be cleaned-up and published,
they decided to use the cool polyhedral dice…” In Arneson’s own words “Magic, being the strange, arcane thing that it is,
cried out for strange dice.” Obviously Gygax agreed, but funny enough,
David Wesley didn’t! His post continues: “...they decided to use the cool polyhedral dice,
even though I told them that they should just use regular dice, because "No one is going to buy
your game for $10 if they then have to spend another $6 to get the special dice before they
can play it". But they ignored me and of course, Dungeons and Dragons did not sell,
and no one has ever heard of it.” Gotta love his sense of humor here,
and it sounds like we can thank David Wesley not only for introducing
these unique dice to Arneson and Gygax but also for convincing them
to include the dice in the box sets! And remember what we said about these dice MOSTLY
not coming from war games? Wesley goes on to say that his coveted wargaming 12-sided teetotum
was never exactly a 12-sided polyhedral die, rather he learned later that
it's just a top with 12 sides. However, we aren’t quite at the origin of the d20
in ALL of gaming. A few short years before Wesley got his hands on them, Fredda F. S. Sieve patented
the Zazz Polyspheres game in 1963 using the same d4, 6, 8, 12, and 20. In Zazz, not a sponsor
by the way, players roll all five dice at once, adding all the pairs and anything over 12 on the
d20, getting bonuses for 3 or 4 of a kind or, quote, “blast off” when you get no
matches and roll under 12 on the d20. And there you have it, the history
of-- wait, there’s another game!? Going back a few more decades, there’s a 1925
patent from one Hill Bernstein using a d20 with letters on most of the faces, and the words
“Honest Abe” on two of the faces, perhaps the original critical hit or fail, but I couldn’t
find anything on how to actually play the game. So, after all that, we finally have
covered the history of-- Oh, there's more? Okay so there’s apparently no record of
a twenty sided polyhedron used for gaming purposes between 1925 and ancient Rome around the
second century AD, and a little bit before them, the ancient Egyptians a few centuries
BC, had the faces in Greek symbols. And no one knows if it was used for a game or
perhaps for some sort of divination ritual, but in either case, they were obviously
invoking the same dice gods we honor today. If you learned something from this video
please give it a thumbs up and share it with your gaming group, remember to check out
our sponsor Legend in the Mist linked below, or another fine video like the one on
your screen! Thanks to the Bob World Builder Patrons for making this video possible!
Thank you for your support, and keep building!
