Thebones Usandourdice

www.
game
pla
ywr
i
ght
.
net
Also from Gameplaywright Press:
Things We Think About Games

by Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball
Hamlet’s Hit Points

by Robin D. Laws
THE BONES: US AND OUR DICE
Gameplaywright press
The Bones is © 2010 Gameplaywright LLP.
All essays are © their respective authors, printed or reprinted with kind
permission.
Broadsword attack table and slashing critical hits table reproduced
with the kind permission of Iron Crown Enterprises, the publisher of
Rolemaster.
Screenshot from The X-Files reproduced under fair use.
Cover photograph © Chuck Wendig.
Cover and interior design by Will Hindmarch.
Six-sider typeface design by Fred Hicks.
Special thanks to Hal Mangold of Atomic Overmind Press.
Revised Electronic (PDF) Edition

Print Edition: ISBN 13: 978-0-9818840-1-1 • ISBN 10: 0-9818840-1-6
Table of contents
Foreword by John Kovalic i

Introduction by Will Hindmarch 1
1d6 Article Page

1 A Random History of Dice, Kenneth Hite 4
2 A Brief History of Gaming, John Kovalic 25
3 My Astragal! with Irving Finkel 38
4 Randomness: Blight or Bane, Greg Costikyan 44
5 A Hobbit’s Chances with Cardell Kerr 67
6 One Point Three Million with Scott Nesin 74
1d20 Essay Page

1 A Glossary for Gamers, Will Hindmarch 82
2 Wonderbones, Wil Wheaton 91
3 The X Factor, Mike Selinker 94
4 Daryl Hannah’s Dice Saved My Marriage, Matt Forbeck 104
5 Rolling in the Aisle, Jess Hartley 109
6 The Dice They Carried, Russ Pitts 117
7 How Dicelessness Made Me Love the Dice, Fred Hicks 123
8 Gott Wuerfelt Nicht... But the Devil Does, Jesse Scoble 126
9 The Die of the People, Jason L Blair 136
10 Totally Metal, Jeff Tidball 143
11 The Unrollable, Pat Harrigan 156
12 Who Am I To Say No?, Paul Tevis 163
13 1d20 Places I Found My Dice, Jared Sorensen 170
14 Make A Wish, Monica Valentinelli 175
15 Damage Dice, Chuck Wendig 182
16 Fortune’s Tyranny, Ray Fawkes 190
17 The Double-Bladed Axe, James Lowder 194
18 Monkey In My Bag, Kenneth Hite 202
19 A World Without Dice, Keith Baker 205
20 Roll twice and read both essays
Foreword
john kovalic
When you come right down to it, few ideas are strong enough to last
countless millennia.
Walking upright. Hunting. Gathering. Dice.
Dice have remained virtually unchanged in both form and function
since the dawn of recorded history. Oh, sure, binary lots have been
replaced by flipping a coin, and knucklebones are now the sparkly four-,
six-, and twenty-siders that gamers covet and coax at the gaming table,
like tiny lovers, both beautiful and unfaithful. But dice are dice, and
nothing’s taken their place in about 12,000 years.
Which came first: gaming or dice? If the jury of anthropology is to
be believed, dice preceded actual gaming (as we know it) by leaps and
bounds. Indeed, it gets worse for the games themselves: it is probably
no coincidence that many of the rules that early dice were used for are
long-forgotten. Yet the dice remain, near-timeless artifacts — reminders
that at our core, we’re not so incredibly different from our gaming
ancestors.
Did the ancient Persians have favorite knucklebones? Were there
Romans who moaned “by JOVE, I always roll a monas! Why do I always
roll a monas when I need a tetras?”
i
Foreword
Alas, the answers are lost to history. Yet the fact that neither seems
so far-fetched tells us something — both about dice and about ourselves.
The person who, in 2003, paid nearly $18,000 for a second-century
Roman icosahedron at auction would probably have done well to find
out beforehand if the original owner considered it a lucky d20 or an
unlucky one.
Which is it better to be: lucky, or good? Nobody who has ever
owned a Crown Royal bag chock-full of d4s, d6s, d8s, d12s and d20s
(with the occasional D30 and D100 thrown in… just because) will
hesitate with the question at all. Look how quickly those shiny new
six-siders are relegated to the back of the gaming closet should they
— Shock! Horror! — disappoint their owner during that one critical
round of combat in Warhammer 40,000.
Ask almost any gamer, and he or she will have yarns galore about
the dice: good rolls, bad rolls, disastrous rolls (perhaps making for the
best tales of the lot). Stories of hitting that magical saving throw remain
etched in our memories for decades, and gain near-mythic status.
Board- or miniature-gaming equivalents of the poker player’s “bad
beat” are told with palpable pain in the voice. If you think roleplayers
can go on about their characters, you should hear them yak when it
comes to their beloved polyhedrons.
This is a book about dice — the “bones” of the title — and in it, you’ll
discover that there are probably as many views, stories and thoughts
on dice as there are gamers themselves. Each one of us knows we’re
just one roll of the bones away from glorious victory… or ignominious
defeat.
Cherish this little book. Hold it close to your heart. Love it, and
care for it… almost as much as, say, your dice.
Your sparkly, sparkly dice…
John Kovalic
October 2009
Madison, WI
ii
Introduction
Will Hindmarch
This book was supposed to be about how dice make us crazy.

You’re sitting there waiting for your next turn in D&D and you’re
rolling your damage dice over and over, to see how they’re doing. To get
a sense of what result they’re going to give you. To see which way they’re
leaning tonight. Because, you know, that’s how dice work. Dice make
us crazy.
You accidentally drop a die on the floor and it rolls a natural 20.
“Damn,” you declare, “I just wasted a perfectly good roll.” Because, you
know, that’s how dice work. Dice make us crazy.
You avoid challenging the campaign’s big villain, putting it off to
another night, because you’ve been rolling lousy all evening. Because,
you know, that’s how dice work. Dice make us crazy.
Take this excerpt from the blog of game designer Fred Hicks,
describing what he calls “the best d20 die I’ve ever come across,” the
d20 from the Torg boxed set:
So what makes it special?

[T]he die is psychic (or, as Rob Donoghue put it,
dramatic). It knows things. This is not a die that you roll
simply because you’re looking to get a 20 consistently. The
1
Introduction
Torg die does not yield to such whims. Instead, it tends to

produce dramatically appropriate results. In a GM’s hand, it
rolls high when the players are getting cocky, and low when
they’re trying to squeak out a victory. In a player’s hand it
yields criticals when the time is right.
Psychic. Dramatically sensitive. Charmed. Call it what
you will.
It is the holy flippin’ die of Torg and, no, you may not
touch mine.
Hicks even keeps a shrink-wrapped copy of the game, just in case it

contains another incredible die. Dice make us crazy. Wonderfully so.
Putting this book together, it became quickly clear that dice don’t
simply make us crazy. We’re already crazy. What dice do is influence us.
For good or ill, we give those little polyhedral ne’er-do-wells a measure
of power over ourselves. We assign them numbers and we listen. We ask
them questions and we trust their answers.
Louis Zocchi (rhymes with rocky) is a founding father of American
dice manufacturing. Zocchi’s been in the polyhedral business since
1974, which means he was right on the RPG hobby’s forward edge.
Speaking of edges, take a gander at Zocchi’s dice-manufacturing spiel
by searching for “Lou Zocchi” or “Game Science” at YouTube. I’ll never
look at round-edged dice the same way again. As Zocchi tells it, all
dice should be like casino dice, with sharp, crisp edges “so that they
will surrender a uniform amount of energy as they galavant across a
tabletop.”
Ever seen those 100-sided dice that look like textured spheres inside
of clear orbs? Those are called Zocchihedrons — Zocchi invented them.
Lou Zocchi is crazy about dice, but in a good way. He’s not crazy
about dice the way I am. He’s not irrational. He just wants dice to give
us “equal access to all the digits” as they’re supposed to. It’s what they’re
designed for, right?
Dice are tools.
Word is that Starbucks has dice with things like “mocha” and
“grande” on different faces, to use as training tools. (Starbucks declined
to comment on this rumor when I asked about it.) Roll up a random
drink order and see if the trainee knows how to put it together. I wish
2
Will Hindmarch
they’d been doing that back when I was a nascent barista — I’d have
geeked what fierce over the combo of coffee and dice.
Look at J.S. Kingfisher’s “musician’s dice:” twelve twelve-siders
etched with the chromatic scale. (When you read the phrase “chromatic
scale,” did you picture the lizard-like hide of D&D-style dragon? Then
welcome home, nerd.) Those dice have the power to inspire music.
Yet I’m sure that some music student somewhere has sat there rolling,
hoping for a note, cursing and re-rolling until those dice, in their
chaotic, cosmic authority, dole out a G#. Sure, he could just write it
down, but that would be cheating.
Our notions of how dice behave seem to be something we have
in common. Our ability to appreciate the little flights of lunacy that
dice inspire certainly is. I believe this is something we have in common
across the breadth of the world and through the depths of time. I take
solace, somehow, on those nights when I can’t roll a coveted number
on any die, in the image of ancient gamers pleading with their dice, in
the torchlight, at the feet of great guardian-bull statues.
I suppose it reminds me that the dice don’t have it in for me. Rather,
at one time or another, they’ve had it in for all of us.
So it’s not that dice make us crazy. I was wrong about that. They
drive us to take action. They provoke things and settle things. They
give us access to a decision-making power outside of ourselves, like tiny
secular oracles.
They inspire us. Read on and see how.
3
A Random History of Dice
Kenneth Hite
Because if we don’t start with the Einstein quote, you’ll just be marking
time until we get to the Einstein quote, we’re starting with the Einstein
quote. Which isn’t quite the one you’re thinking of, because he never
said it, or not quite. What Einstein said (or rather, wrote) in 1926,
instead of “God does not play dice with the universe” was: “I, at any
rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.” The “He” in question
being “the Old One,” which was Einstein’s way of referring to God, or
the Aquinian Prime Mover at any rate, and although my subconscious
itches to remind me that H.P. Lovecraft was writing “Old Ones” into
“The Call of Cthulhu” in 1926, that’s probably a coincidence. What
Einstein was saying was that all this quantum mechanics business was
maybe a nice way to get some pretty math done, but it couldn’t amount
to anything real in an orderly world. Which may not be the Single
Wrongest Thing Ever Said (Or Rather, Wrote) By A Genius, but it will
do until a better example comes along.
Here’s how wrong it was: Ralph Waldo Emerson knew it was wrong.
The great Transcendental windbag, the Deepak Chopra of 19th-century
New England, got it right, and Mr. E-Equals-Emcee-Squared bobbled it.
It’s enough to shake your confidence in an orderly world. Maybe even
enough to make you take up quantum mechanics. Emerson said, in
4
Kenneth Hite
1841, “The dice of God are always loaded.” Which, to be fair, he basically
ripped off (without attribution, may I add) from the Greek tragedian
Sophocles, who wrote “The dice of Zeus fall ever luckily,” or in our
own argot, “Zeus rolls behind the DM’s Screen.” Which may explain
how Zeus got Heaven when he “threw lots” with his brothers Poseidon
and Hades to divide up the cosmos. In short, we (or rather Homer) can
almost say that the gods literally did play dice for the universe.
I say “almost” because Homer wasn’t talking about dice, specifically,
but about astragaloi, or “knucklebones,” so called because they don’t
come from the knuckles at all. Properly speaking, the gambler’s
knucklebone is actually a “hucklebone,” meaning a bone from just
above the heel of (usually) a goat or a sheep. (Antelope astragaloi, we are
assured by leading authorities, “were much prized on account of their
superior elegance.”) Per the OED, gamblers’ usage shifted from the
obscure “huckle” to the more familiar “knuckle” around 1750, although
knuckles — and even whole fists — were probably used to resolve dice
games much earlier (and later) than that. For instance, Homer, to bring
him back into this paragraph again, tells us that as a young lad the hero
Patroclus (Achilles’ future life partner) killed someone in a fight over
a game of astragaloi. More important than the astragalus’ relation to
sheep feet, or even heroic homicide, is its relation to dice. Astragaloi
naturally have four faces that can land upright when tossed (and two
rounded edges that don’t), making it nature’s own four-sided die. So in
sum, astragaloi aren’t knucklebones or dice, except that they are.
2 3
Sophocles, he of the accurate assessment of God’s dice, ascribed

the invention of astragaloi to the Greek hero Palamedes as a means
of killing time during the Trojan War. (This either makes the Trojan
War casualty Patroclus very precocious or makes Sophocles very bad at
reading comprehension, but let it pass.) Herodotus, by contrast, said
that the people of Lydia, in what is now western Turkey and what was
then far-western Persia, invented dice to distract themselves from a great
famine. (As opposed to modern gamers, who use Doritos to distract
themselves from both famine and dice.) Plato, meanwhile, said that
the Egyptian god Thoth invented dice, and petteia (board games with
5
pieces) to boot, making Thoth the true father of wargaming.

Plato also said:
No one in the world would be a good dice

or petteia player who merely took up the
game as a recreation, and had not from his
earliest years devoted himself to this and
nothing else.
Or rather, Plato said that Socrates said it. Plato’s dialogues are full
of references to dice: the Lysias and Phaedrus, for example, as well as the
lines from the Republic quoted above. You get the sense that Plato and
his fellow keen philosophers are sitting at Socrates’ feet asking not just
“Socrates, what is the nature of the Good?” and “Socrates, is human
society capable of justice?” but “Socrates, why can’t I roll a nine to save
my freaking life, here?”
Note that I said “dice,” just then, not “astragaloi.” Well, so did Plato
and Herodotus, or near enough: they used the word kuboi, meaning,
well, “cubes.” So does Apollonius of Rhodes, when he describes the
gods (well, godlings) Eros and Ganymede playing golden dice. (Eros
cheats. Big shocker.) Because at some point between Homer and
Herodotus, which is to say between the 8th and 5th centuries BC, the
Greeks traded up from messy sheep huckles to neat ivory cubes with
spots on them. Which is to say, to dice.
4 4
Astragaloi show up in the archaeological record wherever sheep and

deer and cows and goats do, which is pretty much everywhere. And they
don’t just indicate an interest in huckle sandwiches by the locals, either.
Pre-Columbian settlements in southern California, for instance, turn
up more than twice the number of deer astragaloi than the number of
ambient deer skeletons should produce. So many extra astragaloi imply
that the Chumash Indians or someone just as good were “rolling the
bones” back in prehistoric times. So were pretty much everyone else,
except (according to the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber) the Eskimos,
the native Australians, the pre-Bantu East African tribes (and not all of
6
Kenneth Hite
them — David Livingstone met “dice doctors” along the Zambezi), and
a few scattered clumps of killjoys. But we’ll stick to the Indians for right
now.
The Arapaho, to pick a tribe at random, went astragaloi one better,
carving specialized dice out of bone and painting flashy designs on their
sides. All the better to play ta-u’sttu’tina, a game in which five dice are
tossed in a basket and players bet on the eventual throw. The Cheyenne
version of the same game was monshimout, the Micmac version (invented
by a magical turtle) was woltestomkwon, and the Onondoga version was
called hubbub, which may be the best ever word to come out of dice
games. Over 130 different tribes played some version of hubbub, under
at least 30 different unrelated names. In 1907, the ethnologist Stewart
Culin went into perhaps excessive, but delightfully colorful, detail on
the types of dice used:
The dice … are of a great variety of materials

— split canes, wooden staves or blocks, bone
staves, beaver and woodchuck teeth, walnut
shells, peach and plum stones, grains of
corn, and bone, shell, brass, and pottery
disks.
Wait till you dump those woodchuck teeth out of your Crown
Royal bag next game day — the GM will definitely let you re-roll crocks.
The Zuni, by the way, identified the four dice with their four war
gods, making Stone Age tribesmen who ate crickets also smarter than
Einstein. If you’re still counting.
The Aztecs had a whole god devoted to dice games, Macuilxochitl,
who was also in charge of hemorrhoids, male prostitutes, and
psychoactive mushrooms. (Insert your own White Wolf Game Studio
joke here.) His big game was patolli, which was similar to Parcheesi, only
with human sacrifice to spice things up a bit. Depending on which
expert you read, his other favorite game totoloque may either have
been yet another hubbub variant or something more similar to jacks.
(Which itself derives from seic seona, an astragaloi game played by the
ancient Gaels. Or so say Victorian historians of gaming, and who am
I to question their stuffy ukase?) According to eyewitness testimony,
7
Montezuma and Cortez played totoloque with golden dice while the
Spanish held the Aztec emperor captive. Cortez cheated… but then he
was a god, after all.
1 2
Speaking of Indians… No, the other Indians. The Hindu scripture

known as the Rig Veda was composed starting about the same time
that Palamedes was inventing “seven come eleven,” namely some time
around 1200 BC, give or take a few centuries. In the Rig Veda’s Mandala
X, the 34th hymn is the “Hymn to Dice,” also known as the “Gambler’s
Hymn.” It contains such timeless truths as: “The dice transport me as
they turn on the table,” and “Dice carry whips and goads, teasing and
tormenting, causing endless woe and snatching back the gifts they give.”
It ends with a prayer to the dice themselves: “Make me your friend;
show some mercy. Don’t kill my character, you little monsters. Kill some
hapless NPC.” (I may have taken some slight liberties with the original
Sanskrit in that last one.) In other Hindu texts the god Shiva dices with
his wife Parvati and when she accuses him of cheating (just like Zeus!)
he blots out the stars. Take that, Einstein!
The Indian epic poem the Mahabharata dates from about the same
time as Homer’s Iliad, namely some time around 800 BC, give or take
a few centuries. It tells the story of two rival families: the Pandavas
and the Kauravas. But they’re not both alike in dignity, my, no. At the
beginning of the action, the Pandavas are on top and the Kauravas are
jealous, so Duryodhana of the Kauravas double-dog dares Yudhishthira
of the Pandavas to a dice game. Then he brings in a ringer, Sakuni,
who (of course) is a dice shark. Sakuni declaims “the dice are my bows
and arrows,” which implies he was playing a Ranger build. Using
loaded dice he strips Yudhishthira of his wealth, his elephants, and
his kingdom. He almost strips Yudhishthira’s wife Draupadi, too, but
Krishna magically extends her sari until she can make the argument
that since Yudhishthira lost his own freedom first, he could no longer
gamble away her virtue, or her sari. So the game continues until the
Pandavas wager themselves into exile, where they stew and steam and
plot 72,000 more verses worth of epic-level campaigning.
Even before the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata, there were dice
8
Kenneth Hite
in India. (And before that, there was the five-sided vibhitaka nut.)
Archaeologists have excavated dice from Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus
Valley dating as far back as 2750 BC. A single die about that old shows
up in Tepe Gawra in northern Iraq, and a pair of dice a little older
turn up in the “Burnt City” in Iran between those two sites. And make
no mistake, these are dice: cubes of fired clay, with dots on the sides.
(Dice are a couple of millennia older than numerals, after all.) The
dots aren’t quite our dots, yet. In some early dice (such as the dice in
Tutankhamen’s tomb) the pips go in consecutive order: one opposite
two, three opposite four, etc. But by about 1300 BC, most dice (not
counting a few outliers like Silla Korea and Etruscan Italy) start to look
like ours: ivory cubes whose opposite faces add up to seven.
The first dice may have come from some enterprising gamer filing
down the round sides of his astragaloi, or (as gambling historian John
Scarne guesses) from split sticks tossed for divination. From a split
stick to a rolled stick is no great leap, after all, and four-sided stick-
randomizers appear in the Americas, Africa, and Asia by 6000 BC. Or
it could have gone the other way: the I Ching (traditionally cast by using
split yarrow stalks) postdates dice and conveniently divides everything
out by hexagrams — groups of six results. Like dice outcomes, say.
Dice have been oracles for as long as there have been dice, or even
longer. There are astragaloi in the priestly precincts of the Early Bronze
Age city of Lachish in Palestine; dice have been found in Babylonian
temples and in the Parthenon carved with the names and symbols of
the gods. The Shona in what is now Zimbabwe still use their hakata, or
oracle dice, to keep up with the gods’ will. In the temple of Hercules
in Rome, the priests would throw dice with the god to gain his favor.
(Once, says Plutarch, the god won a mistress — the courtesan Larentia
— in such a holy dice game.) To cast the Seic Seona, or “bone oracle,”
the Druids used five astragaloi — coincidentally, the number of oracular
astragaloi used by Hermes, aka Thoth, when he’s in Egypt inventing
dice. John Lydgate’s 1410 poem “The Chaunce of the Dyse” gives
fortunes for each of the 56 possible rolls on three dice; it was huge at
15th-century slumber parties. And dice remain oracles today: the Magic
8-Ball is actually the Magic 20-Sider floating in that watery window.
From the “lots” cast by Haman to pick the best date for a pogrom (Esther
3:7) to the die roll on the Wandering Monster Table that foretells your
9
character’s death, dice continually read futures and plot fates. In at least
one case, the dice were used to determine the past: in 1405, the mother
of what turned out to be the future Prince Anibale I of Bologna settled
his paternity with dice.
To sum up, the universe plays dice with God, too.
3 4
In the year 1020 AD, or another year just as good, King Olaf II “the Fat,
or Maybe Just Big-Boned” Haraldsson of Norway and King Olof III “the
King Who Owes Money” (really!) Eriksson of Sweden got together to
settle something with the dice. Not, as it happens, the proper spelling of
“Olaf,” but the ownership of the island of Hising, which was apparently
an island blessed in all respects save its geographic positioning on the
border between Norway and Sweden. Rather than go to war over the
matter, the two kings decided to dice off. We’ll let Snorri Sturlusson
finish the tale in the Heimskringla, not least because he is pretty much
the sole source for it:
The Swedish king threw two sixes, and said

King Olaf need scarcely throw. He replied,
while shaking the dice in his hand, “Although
there be two sixes on the dice, it would be
easy, sire, for God Almighty to let them
turn up in my favour.” Then he threw, and
had sixes also. Now the Swedish king threw
again, and had again two sixes. Olaf king of
Norway then threw, and had six upon one
die, and the other split in two, so as to make
seven eyes in all upon it; and the district was
adjudged to the king of Norway.
Snorri continues, a tad snarkily, “We have heard nothing else of

any interest that took place at this meeting,” as though divine dice
intervention on behalf of the future Saint Olaf of Norway wasn’t
enough. Olof of Sweden, if you’re curious, was also a Christian, so
it’s nationalism, not religious fervor, that caused the 13th-century
10
Kenneth Hite
Norwegian monastic chronicler Edvin of Tautra to hotly deny the

rumors that Olaf might have hocused the throw just a little. And if
he did, says Edvin, it’s because he was just that holy — some kings cure
scrofula by their touch, while others can throw boxcars on demand.
So it’s not just Zeus, or Macuilxochitl, or Shiva, or Hercules, or
Thoth, or Wotan (who the Germans said invented dice), or Baal-of-
Lachish who play dice with the universe and vice versa. It’s God, the big
“G” himself. Through, of course, his duly designated representatives,
such as the King of Norway, Aaron the brother of Moses (“He shall cast
lots upon the two goats; one for the Lord, and one for the scapegoat.”
Leviticus 16:8), and St. Peter. St. Peter, you ask? Wasn’t he conspicuously
absent when the Roman soldiery “cast lots” (or as Fra Angelico, among
others, depict it, shook dice) for Christ’s robe during the Crucifixion?
Well, he apparently got over it.
As the early 13th-century Old French fabliau known as “Saint-
Pierre and the Jongleur” tells it, an extraordinarily wicked jongleur (or
traveling minstrel; in our terms, a dual-classed Rogue-Bard) was (no
doubt quite rightly) sent to Hell for his sinful ways, including dice-
playing, drunkenness, wenching, and such. In short order, he became
a boon companion to the Devil, and whenever the Devil had to leave
Hell on business he left the jongleur in charge. On one such occasion,
St. Peter showed up to borrow a cup of brimstone or what-have-you,
chatted up the jongleur, and allowed himself to be inveigled into a dice
game with souls as the stakes. Of course, St. Peter totally sharked the
jongleur, and the poem makes much of the various dice throws and
strategies with which the saint wins every soul in Hell for Jesus. When
the Devil returned, he was so irate that he banished all jongleurs from
Hell, which is why nowadays they have to go live in Vegas forever instead
of dying.
Not that Jesus is always cool with the elbow-shaking, mind you. On
May 29, 1187, at least, he was downright steamed about it. In the church
at Deols in France, a bunch of mercenaries were killing time between
killings playing dice underneath the statue of the Virgin and Child.
And wouldn’t you know it, one grimy sell-sword just couldn’t buy any
luck. Maybe he got wigged out by the Holy Family looking down his
shirt while he played, but he threw something (poetry insists one of the
dice, but it was probably just a handy rock) at the statue, busting Baby
11
Jesus’ arm clean off. Miraculous (and creepy) blood sprayed out, and
the unfortunate dice-chucker lost his marbles and died right on the
spot. And that, my friends, is why you need to keep your rolls on the
damn table.
I can, however, adduce at least one case of a king playing dice for
Jesus: King Henry VIII was playing dice with one Sir Miles Partridge,
and being temporarily short of the ready, wagered the “Jesus Bells” of
St. Paul’s Cathedral against £100. (“Table stakes” is apparently not the
done thing when gambling with kings, then or now.) Henry lost, and
Sir Miles pulled the bells down and melted them for scrap. You will
doubtless be as gratified as the Edwardian historian of gambling John
Ashton was to learn that the bell-ropes “afterward, catched about his
neck, for, in Edward the Sixth’s days, he was hanged for some criminal
offences.” And good riddance.
5 3
Speaking of Merrie Englande, it has apparently been dice-crazy since the

veriest beginnings. The 12th-century poet Wace says that King Arthur’s
knights played dice during his coronation banquet, while Richard the
Lion-Hearted tried to regulate the amounts that English Crusaders
were allowed to bet on dice. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Pardoner calls dice
“the bitchéd bones two,” which sounds like someone’s halfling missed
a saving throw. William Harrison’s 1589 Description of England says of
Elizabethan university students that “most of them study little other
than histories, tables, dice, and trifles,” which will do as a summary
of roleplaying games until a better one comes along, surely. Charles
Cotton’s definition of gaming comes close, from his 1674 compendium,
The Compleat Gamester: “Gaming is an enchanting witchery, gotten
between Idleness and Avarice.” Or we can go with Sir Walter Scott’s
description of an RPG in embryo, from Guy Mannering:
The frolicsome company had begun to

practise the ancient and now forgotten
pastime of High Jinks. The game was played
in several different ways. Most frequently
the dice were thrown by the company, and
12
Kenneth Hite
those upon whom the lot fell were obliged

to assume and maintain for a time a certain
fictitious character … If they departed from
the characters assigned … they incurred
forfeits, which were compounded for by
swallowing an additional bumper.
Drinking, house rules “played in several different ways,” dice, and

“certain fictitious characters.” Sounds like high-school Friday night in
the basement to me.
Shakespeare mentions dice a dozen times, including an allusion to
Hercules’ fondness for the ivories in The Merchant of Venice:
If Hercules and Lichas play at dice

Which is the better man, the greater throw
May turn by fortune from the weaker hand.
His lovable rogues Edgar and Falstaff both dice, the latter “not more
than seven times a week.” In Love’s Labours Lost, Berowne calls “well run
dice” three sweet words, while japing that Boyet is the sort of poser who
“when he plays at tables, chides the dice.” While Hamlet makes “dicer’s
oaths” synonymous with perfidy, Shakespeare shows an alarming
knowledge of cheating at dice in Merry Wives of Windsor. Finally, Richard
III goes out with a dice-rattling Caesarian bang, swearing “I have set my
life upon a cast, and I will stand the hazard of the die!”
3 3
The hazard of the die. Thereby hangs a tale…

In the year 1127 AD, or another year just as good, a Crusader knight sat
outside the castle of Anazarbus on siege duty. “I’m as bored as Palamedes
outside Troy,” our imaginary Crusader (for such, sadly, he likely is) says to
himself. “Like Palamedes, I shall therefore invent a dice game, and I shall
name it after my barbarous Old French mispronunciation of the castle
I am besieging, to wit: Asart. Or maybe Hasard.” No few sources ascribe
this romantic tale to the episcopal chronicler William of Tyre, although
it actually springs from an unknown French copyist of William’s work,
13
who slipped it in while nobody was looking. Be that as it may, after a

simple change of one letter to spell “hazard,” it made it into the Oxford
English Dictionary, which should have settled the question. But killjoy
etymologists prefer to derive “hazard” from the late Arabic word az-zahr,
meaning “a die.” Which word is such late Arabic that it’s later than the
siege of Anazarbus, but no matter. Just who are they to question the OED,
to say nothing of an anonymous copyist of William of Tyre?
If a dice game named for a castle never happened (and we’re not
counting Castle Wolfenstein, or even Castle Falkenstein, which is played
with cards, not dice, anyway) there is one rock-solid case of a castle named
for a dice game. The brothers Ildebrandino, Bonifacio, and Guglielmo
Aldobrandeschi were big wheels in 13th-century Tuscany. (Don’t worry,
they’ve never heard of you, either.) On the shoulder of Mount Penna
in 1212, they built a castle to protect Tuscany from whatever was on the
other side of Mount Penna. But who would run the place and collect
the tasty toll money from grateful travelers across Mount Penna? Like a
pack of Olafs, the brothers threw dice to settle the matter, and named
the eventual fortress Castell’Azzara: the Castle of Hazard. (What’s that?
Oh, Bonifacio won.)
As that charming anecdote indicates, the game of hazard immediately
became a smash hit on both sides of the Mediterranean. Dante refers
to “the game of Zara” in Canto VI of the Purgatorio, comparing pushing
your way through souls in Purgatory to trying to get out of a dice
game with your winnings intact. King Alfonso X “the Wise” of Castile
included hazard in his Book of Games, published in 1283 for “those
who liked to enjoy themselves in private … or for slaves, prisoners, and
seafarers.” (Market research for game books has gotten no better in the
last 700-odd years.) Hazard was huge in England; Charles Cotton said
that “having accustomed himself to play at hazard, [the gamer] hardly
ever after minds anything else.” The French brought it to America,
where it was called “Jean Crapaud’s game,” or “craps.” (Unless you
believe the more prosaic derivation, from “crabs,” which is hazard-talk
for snake-eyes.) In 1907, the American elbow-shaker John Winn added
rules allowing players to bet against the dice, and more importantly
allowing casinos (or bars) to earn a guaranteed percentage stake, and
completed the job begun by that bored, brave, fictional Crusader eight
centuries before.
14
Kenneth Hite
6 6
As great as craps is, though, it’s not the granddaddy of dice games.
That honor goes to a board game you probably last played with an aunt
who smelled like Aqua Net. Nope, not Parcheesi; that only goes back
to 500 AD or so. That’s plenty long ago — back then, chess still had
dice, and was called chaturaji, but that’s not what we’re talking about
either. No, the godfather of tabletop gaming is good old backgammon.
Backgammon was (believe it or not) a huge fad in the 1960s and in the
1930s, supercharged by the introduction of the doubling cube in 1920.
(J.P. Morgan was a devoted player.) New York’s first gambling clubs were
low backgammon dives; it was the despair of Puritan parsons in New
England. The word “backgammon” is only about 400 years old; before
that, it was called “tables.” Caravaggio painted it into “The Cardsharps,”
and sure enough King Alfonso X butted in with his advice on how to
win. During the Middle Ages, kvatrutaefl was the rage in Iceland (where
magicians would burn ravens’ hearts over the dice to make ‘em lucky)
and sugoroku was big in Japan (where the Emperor Temmu played it so
much that his successor, the Empress Jito, banned it). In Persia, it was
called nard, and they apparently spread it to India and China in the
6th century AD The Persians got it from the Romans, who called it
tabula (meaning “tables”) or alea (meaning “dice”). And the Romans,
ultimately, got it from the Persians again: the oldest backgammon set
in the world — 2800 BC, more or less — comes from the Burnt City in
Iran, along with two dice.
The Egyptian game of senet is even older than that; Egyptologists
have found complete senet boards from 3050 BC, and fragmentary
ones from 4000 BC! But way back then, its randomizers were just
painted sticks that the Arapaho would have sneered at. Eventually —
around 2000 BC, give or take a couple of centuries — senet players
upgraded to astragaloi, setting off the first ever Edition Wars. During
the Middle Kingdom, say 1750 BC, players used senet for necromancy,
to communicate with the dead. (Until their moms found out what they
were up to.) By 1550 BC, senet had become an accepted symbol for the
journey of the dead in the afterlife. Victorious players were considered
blessed by Osiris or Thoth (who did, after all, invent the darn game).
One papyrus of the Book of the Dead even includes “the Book of playing
15
Senet” in its subtitles. This, for those scoring at home, is the soul playing
dice with the universe.
The final contender for the title “oldest known tabletop dice
game” is almost certainly more recent than either senet or Burnt City
Backgammon, but it had the best marketing guy ever. Sir Leonard
Woolley dug it up in 1927 in a Sumerian palace and dubbed it “the
Royal Game of Ur.” Sir Leonard’s find dates back to 2600 BC, and
bored Assyrian guards were still carving it into statues and temples
two millennia later. It’s another board and track game, played with
seven markers per side and three “pyramidal dice.” More technically,
tetrahedral dice. That’s right. The lowly d4 is the Royal Die of Ur. Take
that, d20.
1 1
Similar four-sided dice show up in Egyptian tombs, including that of

Tutankhamen. This is because many Egyptian nobles were magic-users.
(I’ll bet nobody in Egypt ever called d4s “pyramidal dice.” They’d be all,
“No, dumbass, pyramids have an extra side. Here’s a handy mnemonic
for you: Look over there, at the giant freaking pyramid.”) Around the same
time that Egyptians were picking up their four-siders and astragaloi, the
Picts were carving stone spheres with incised lines matching the edges
of our familiar polyhedra — and more. As a result, there are over three
hundred 20-sider, 12-sider, 8-sider, 6-sider, and 4-sider “sphere dice”
strewn all across northeastern Scotland, along with 3-siders, 9-siders,
55-siders, 70-siders, and 160-siders. It’s as if my cat had gotten into the
Picts’ national Crown Royal bag. Some of these spheres have markings
on the “sides,” and some are eroded or blank. Hold on a second —
nearly spherical, no markings left, show possible signs of once being
polyhedral — I think the Picts may have crafted my first set of D&D
dice, actually.
This mania to accumulate polyhedral dice didn’t stop with the Picts.
It lives with us today. “Why so?” might you ask. If you believe Pythagoras,
it’s the magic of the equilateral sides and equal angles. Of course, if you
believe Pythagoras, the planet Venus is singing to you, and you’ll be
reborn as a beaver. Pythagoras wouldn’t have held with all this Pictish
nonsense, believing as he did that only the regular “Platonic” solids were
16
Kenneth Hite
magic. (It’s a good thing that Lou Zocchi wasn’t around in Pythagorean
times, or Greek culture might have gotten sidetracked before it built
the Parthenon.) Be that as it may, around 530 BC Pythagoras invented
the d12, if you ignore the Picts, as indeed, most people were doing
around 530 BC (And still are.) Shortly thereafter, people started using
the d12 for astrological divination: one 12-sider in Geneva marked with
the signs of the zodiac dates back to 400 AD
Evidence for other polyhedral dice is fragmentary. We know from
the Book of Games that Alfonso X invented eight-sided dice — and
seven-sided dice, just to mess with Pythagoras. And archaeologists have
discovered enough d20s in various ancient basements and high school
cafeterias to posit some sort of regular, oracular use for the things.
Possibly gematria, word or number magic: faience and onyx d20s from
Egypt’s Hellenistic era, and the glass Roman d20 sold (for $17,925) at
auction at Christie’s a couple of years back, all have Greek letters on
their sides. Or maybe the Romans had one mother of a complicated
Boggle set somewhere, possibly one my cat got into.
2 4
The Romans didn’t just produce d20s. They also produced the other
great dice quote that everybody knows. When, on January 10, 49 BC,
Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon river into open rebellion against the
Roman Senate, he said “Alea jacta est,” or “The die is cast.” Rolling to
hit, in other words. Unless he was talking about the dice game alea, in
which case his quote might have meant “Game on!” Plutarch said he
quoted it from the comedian Menander, making it the equivalent of
repeating a movie catch phrase like Reagan’s invocation of “Make my
day.” Plutarch also said Caesar said it in Greek, for what that’s worth.
But “Anneriphtho kubos” doesn’t sound as cool somehow.
The more common Roman word for dice was tesserae, and boy did
they love their tesserae. And their tali, which is Latin for astragaloi.
They adopted the Greek four-tali game as their own, renaming the
lucky throws after their own gods, the “Venus throw” (I, III, IV, VI)
being the best. Archaeologists have found dice and game boards all
across the Roman Empire, especially (and unsurprisingly) at legionary
camps and forts. An inscription on the wall of a tavern in Pompeii
17
reads, “If you don’t know how to play, get up and let someone else
roll.” The Romans had a favorite drinking game in which the player
threw the dice and drank a cup of wine for each spot on the result.
This may have been the origin of the Roman law under which a tavern-
keeper could not sue for damages caused by dice-players. Drinking and
dice were so inseparable to the Romans that they were surprised to
learn from Tacitus that the Germani played dice even while sober.
Julius Caesar’s adopted heir Octavian was another ready gambler.
During the Civil Wars, having been trounced badly by the pirate warlord
Sextus Pompeius, he mounted a huge propaganda blitz emphasizing his
good luck at dice. The echoes of his braggadocio show up in Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra, where Antony says of Octavian that “the very dice
obey him.” But the Roman populace wasn’t fooled: as the popular rhyme
of the time went, “He lost at sea, defeated twice/But tries to win at least
with dice.” Octavian had the last laugh, however, eventually winning the
Civil Wars to become the Emperor Augustus. Augustus used to stake his
friends at dice so that they wouldn’t feel bad losing to him. This makes
an interesting contrast to later emperors like Caligula, who would stop
losing dice games to order the execution of the nearest rich man (and the
confiscation of his estates) so that he could keep playing. The Emperor
Claudius would order dead rich people to play dice with him; when they
didn’t show up, he’d gamble against their estates. Claudius may have
been the biggest dice fan ever to order a political execution: he had a
special traveling chariot rigged with a tabula board on gimbals so he could
dice while on the move. He even wrote a book called How to Win at
Dice, which is sadly lost to us. (One imagines that Rule One is “Be the
Emperor.”) When he died, the playwright Seneca wrote a satire called
The Pumpkinification of Claudius (the joke makes more sense in Greek), in
which the late Emperor is sentenced to an eternity in Hell playing dice
with a bottomless dice box.
4 4
This is the kind of behavior that makes people pass laws against dice-
playing. The Romans, for instance, had very strict laws against dice-
playing, much like Amsterdam’s very strict laws against pot-smoking.
Under Roman law, you could only get away with playing dice if you were
18
Kenneth Hite
the Emperor, or if you were an old man, or during Saturnalia, or in the

back room of an inn, food stall, or tavern. Before their time, Alexander
the Great supposedly banned professional gambling, allowing dice only
as a sport.
But it was the Christians who started stirring things up on the
anti-dice front. The 2nd-century Bishop of Ephesus, Apollonius,
anticipated Einstein by asking “Does a prophet play at dice?” Once the
Christians ran everything, the bans started coming down. In 534 AD,
the Emperor Justinian forbade the clergy to play dice, or even to watch
other people play dice. (And just try getting a cleric for your D&D party
since then. Thanks a whole lot, Justinian.) Charlemagne insisted on
the excommunication of dice-players, and Bishop John of Salisbury
denounced “the damnable art of dicing.” It wasn’t all bone-hate: in the
10th century, Pope John XII was an enthusiastic dice-player. Of course,
he also turned the Lateran into a brothel, fornicated with his niece,
and according to witnesses invoked Jupiter and Venus “among other
demons” while playing dice. I smell a Chick tract coming on!
The much more holy, if much less Roman, Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick II banned dice entirely in 1232, as did Louis IX (“St. Louis”)
of France in 1254, and the Templar code anathematized both dice and
chess. Richard II of England banned dice in 1388, Cardinal Wolsey
banned them in England again for good measure in 1526, and John
Calvin banned dice in Geneva in 1536. In Nuremberg in 1420, the
public executioner burned 40,000 dice in a bonfire, in between burning
witches and heretics. Given their choice, though, the heretics claimed
to be dice-players: the Huguenots in France held prayer meetings
surrounded by dice to make it look like they were gambling instead if they
got caught. From this custom comes the charming French story of the
fritillary (or “dice-box”) flower, which blooms every St. Bartholomew’s
Day — the day the French massacred the Huguenots.
2 2
Yes, dice can be dangerous. In 1250, King Erik IV “the Plow-Taxer”

of Denmark was ambushed and captured by a treacherous host (his
brother, Duke Abel of Holstein) while playing backgammon. Even
being invited to dice can be dangerous: In 1568, Jhujhar Khan, ruler
19
of Ahmedabad in India, invited his rival Changez Khan to a dice game

and killed him on the way there. Being the stakes of a dice game is
no picnic either. Queen Parsyatis of Persia had two sons, Cyrus the
Younger and Artaxerxes. They squabbled, as boys will, over who got to
be Emperor of Persia, and after Artaxerxes beat his brother at the battle
of Cunaxa in 404 BC, he had his slave Mesabetes execute Cyrus. Queen
Parsyatis, after a decorous mourning period, invited her surviving son
to play dice, and sharked him hollow. Cleaned out, Artaxerxes offered
Parsyatis the choice of anything she wanted to pay off his losses. Of
course, she chose Mesabetes, and whiled away the idle hour thereafter
having him tortured to death for killing her son.
Just standing near a dice game can lead to trouble. Although the
source of this tale is ultimately the Roman historian Livy, I prefer to
let Andrew Steinmetz tell the story in his 1870 masterwork The Gaming
Table: Its Votaries And Victims, In All Times and Countries, Especially in
England And in France. Not only because that gives me an excuse to
quote that great title, but also because the good Steinmetz provides
details unavailable anywhere outside the mind of the good Steinmetz.
But herewith, a tale of the year 436 BC, or another year just as good:
Tolumnius, King of the Veii, happened to

be playing at dice when the arrival of Roman
ambassadors was announced. At the very
instant, he uttered the word KILL, a term
of the game; the word was misinterpreted
by the hearers, and they went forthwith and
massacred the ambassadors.
I can see it now: “What’s that, your Majesty? Waste ‘em with
your crossbow? You got it.” Other sources say Tolumnius merely said
“Excellent” upon making a spectacular throw, by coincidence just after
the locals had asked him if they should kill the ambassadors. Livy quite
reasonably says that story makes no sense, which is another reason why
we used Steinmetz in the first place.
Probably the worst dice game ever was the Frankenburg Dice
Game in May, 1625. The Duke of Upper Austria, on his uppers after
suppressing a peasant rebellion, assembled its leaders in Frankenburg
20
Kenneth Hite
upon a promise of leniency. Instead, he forced them to play dice against

each other, the losers to be hung. The result, 17 gamers hanged out
of 35. (I like how His Grace didn’t insist on rounding up. Must have
been a GURPS player.) The English army used a similar method of
jurisprudence during a mutiny at Tangier in 1663, and on deserters after
the Battle of Neerwinden in 1693. The Spanish used the same method
on American filibusters in Nacogdoches in 1807, but only hung the low
roller out of the nine mercs imprisoned at Chihuahua, a low death toll
for even a normal game of craps in Nacogdoches.
1 5
It’s on occasions like these — or any occasion, really — that you want
to make sure the dice are truly on your side. Occasions like the year
1608, or another year just as good. The sallow, grave dice-player Manuel
Pimentel (called “Pimentello” by authors who can’t tell an Italian from
a Portuguese, although Pimentel was Jewish) is back in Paris, ready to
fleece the noble marks he has been harvesting for years in one last big
score. He has one advantage: the friendship of King Henri IV, who said
to him: “I am the King of France, but you are the King of Gamblers.”
All right, he has another advantage: he’s much smarter than the entire
French aristocracy. Using his profits from previous seasons, and working
with an accomplice — possibly with ten accomplices — Pimentel buys up
a major dice-maker — maybe all the dice-makers — in the city. He then
swaps out their entire run of dice for loaded dice, and drops the price
until his are the dice in every gaming parlor in the city. And then he
moves in, with every set of ivories in Paris playing his tune, and cleans
out every noble purse he can. They say that when the Duc de Sully
approached Henri with word of Pimentel’s grift, the King said that he
found bankrupt nobles much easier to deal with. Pimentel got away
with it, and he got away to the Netherlands. When he died in 1614,
Manuel Pilmentel was buried in a cemetery he had endowed, and left
an estate of 250,000 guilders.
Loaded dice are almost as old as dice, being found wherever dice are
strewn in the archaeological record. Crooked dice show up in Pompeii,
in Egyptian tombs, and in Shakespeare. In The Merry Wives of Windsor,
Pistol references “gourd and fullam holds, and high and low,” being
21
hollowed dice, dice slugged with mercury, and dice shaved to roll high or
low, respectively. The word “fullam” derives from the London suburb of
Fulham, where such dice were apparently manufactured, although even
more were made in prisons. Gilbert Walker’s 1552 opus A Manifest
Detection of the Most Vile and Detestable Use of Dice-Play advises the
reader to buy loaded dice in the Marshalsea or King’s Bench lockups;
if you wish to learn to use them, in his 1618 Essays and Characters of
a Prison and Prisoners Geffray Mynshul suggests a spell in stir for your
further education. Little wonder that Mynshul’s cellmate, the London
playwright Thomas Dekker, proclaimed in 1608: “Of all the Laws, the
Highest in place … is the Cheating Law or the art of winning money by
false dice.”
False dice — “bones of function” — came in all kinds of forms, not
just gourds and fulhams and highs and lows. Walker lists fourteen types
of crocked dice: “bars” and “flats” are designed to prevent (or assist)
specific throws, while shaved dice are “langrets.” “Bristle dice” have a
hog’s bristle attached to one face to prevent the die from landing on it;
Walker says that’s too obvious a trick to work, much. “High cuts” were
dice with missing low pips (“tops” in modern dice grifter slang), while
“low cuts” were the opposite. “Dutch dice” were high cuts with sharp
edges to further encourage a correct fall; “graviers” have one light side,
often made of hartshorn instead of ivory; “demies” are only half as
barred (or flattened) as normal.
3 5
But the best cheating method in dice turns out to use no special
equipment, no hogs’ bristles or mercury bubbles or hartshorn. It’s a
method mastered by one man, Girolamo Cardano, aka Jerome Cardan.
Cardano’s system? Probability theory. He invented it. In an era when
you could get 200-to-1 odds on a 1-in-216 result (three sixes), knowing
probability theory could make you rich. Cardano spent 25 years playing
dice, stopping only after his other academic works (in medicine, law,
ethics, astrology, mathematics, cryptography, and mechanics) gained
him a well-paid position at the University of Pavia. He wrote Liber de
Ludo Alea or The Book on Games of Dice in 1560, but never published
it. In it, he lays out the general law of probability: stakes (and hence
22
Kenneth Hite
chances) depend on the ratio of unfavorable results to favorable results,

over the total course of time. And he specifically works out the odds for
results from one, two, and three dice.
Galileo worked out the same odds, and published them in his essay
“Concerning an Investigation on Dice” in 1623. Once Galileo laid it
out, the rest of the scientific A-list got involved. The mathematicians
Blaise Pascal (he of “Pascal’s Wager” — believing in God is a good bet)
and Pierre de Fermat essentially invented calculus working out how
to divide a best-of-11 pot if the series is called 5-3 after 8 games. The
astronomer Christian “I discovered Saturn’s rings” Huygens wrote
On Reasoning in Games of Chance in 1657; the mathematician Jakob “I
invented Bernoulli’s Law” Bernoulli built on Huygens’ work in The Art
of Conjecture in 1713. Even the Biggest Brain Ever (sorry, Einstein) got
in on the act: Sir Isaac Newton. The diarist and bureaucrat Samuel
Pepys wrote Newton on November 22, 1693, asking about dice odds
ostensibly on behalf of “his friend Mr. Smith.” One wouldn’t have to
be Isaac Newton to see through that, but Newton and Pepys were pals,
so he put up with the pretense. “Smith” wanted to know if you had
better odds of throwing one six out of 6 dice than of throwing two
sixes out of 12 dice or three sixes out of 18 dice. (Pepys was apparently
playing Champions.) Newton gave the right answer (one six out of 6 dice
is easiest), but didn’t bother to work out a general equation. Nobody
did until Abraham de Moivre, 25 years later.
As the Enlightenment got ever more enlightened, folks started
finding patterns everywhere. And where they didn’t exist, they built
them. For example, in 1757 Johann Philipp Kirnberger, a pupil of
Johann Sebastian Bach, devised a random system for composing
minuets or polonaises by cross-referencing the result of two dice on
a table. Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach came out with a game using a
nine-sided die (or a teetotum) to randomly generate individual notes
for double counterpoint. In 1770, one Pierre Hoegl came up with a
random minuet generator driven by 8d6, while Maximilian Stadler
used 2d6–1 in his Table pour Composer, published in 1780. A Neapolitan
publisher plagiarized Stadler’s game and put Haydn’s name on it,
and one Michael Wiedeburg published an expansion (a splat-book?)
for Kirnberger’s original game for organ preludes. How do you top
that? With Mozart. In 1793, just after Mozart’s death, an Amsterdam
23
publisher released Mozart’s Dice Game, which used 2d6–1 to select

random measures from an extensive set of tables to produce one of
45 quadrillion waltzes. From the randomness and chaos of the dice,
Mozart (or his agent) had produced beauty and order. And thus he (or
his agent) refuted Einstein.
4 1
Allow me, if you will, one last dice quote to sum up our random walk
around the boneyard. It seems somehow apropos, and even oddly joyful,
or at least pugnacious, in the spirit of Palamedes or Pimentel or Pepys.
It’s Charles Bukowski in 1969: “We have wasted History like a bunch of
drunks shooting dice back in the men’s crapper of the local bar.” That,
I believe we have. And what better way to waste it? Someone’s playing
dice with History, with time and space, with the universe. It might as
well be us.
24
dork tower:
a Brief history of gaming
john kovalic
The following few pages are torn from the comic book, Dork Tower,
by famed cartoonist and game designer John Kovalic, featuring his own
take on the history of gaming.
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
My Astragal!
An Interview
with Dr. Irving Finkel
Will Hindmarch
The British Museum in London has a wonderful collection of historic

games, some from antiquity and some merely centuries old, which any
curious gamer should visit if given the chance. I spent a day taking notes
on ancient games in the museum and researching dice in the museum’s
library, but it wasn’t enough time.
Fortunately, after my visit, I managed to contact Dr. Irving Finkel,
an expert on dice and ancient games, who was kind enough to answer
a few of my questions.
Dr. Irving Finkel is a curator in the Department of the Middle East
in the British Museum, where he is in charge of their collection of
cuneiform tablets from Ancient Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq). “These
tablets,” writes Dr. Finkel, “which are made of clay, carry inscriptions in
Sumerian or Babylonian. I studied these languages at University, and
then worked at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago for
three years, and then got the job in the British Museum in 1979. I had
wanted to work in the British Museum since childhood.”
It was Dr. Finkel who worked out how to play the mysterious Royal
Game of Ur. Several sets of the ancient racing game were recovered by
Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s at the site of the Royal Cemetery at
the city-state of Ur. One of those sets now resides at the British Museum,
38
Will Hindmarch
but countless other improvised game boards are scratched into ancient
objects throughout the world, carved by players of the game thousands
of years ago.
Dr. Finkel’s fascination with games and expertise with ancient
languages combined to help him to recognize and decipher the ancient
instructions for play, after all three key ingredients — the game, the
rules, and Finkel — were finally together at the British Museum.
The Royal Game of Ur, also known as the Game of Twenty Squares,
is a dice-driven racing game, a little like backgammon, in which pawns
are moved along a board according to values given by the dice. Roll a
three, move a pawn three spaces. You could use four-sided dice, four
two-sided dice (like cowrie shells or coins), or your favorite other means
of generating a result from one to four. The goal was to get your seven
pawns into play and then safely away before your opponent achieved
the same for hers. In this game, your fate was largely subject to the
whims of the dice.
For more information on The Royal Game of Ur, Dr. Finkel directs
us to two articles in his Ancient Board Games in Perspective (London, 2008,
ISBN: 978-0714111537). For more on dice, he recommends Ricky Jay’s
Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck (New York, 2003, ISBN: 0-9714548-
1-7) and Leo van der Heijdt’s Face to Face with Dice: 5,000 Years of Dice
and Dicing (Groningen, 2002, ISBN: 90-76953-88-0)

Will Hindmarch: You have a dice collection of your own, is that right?
How did you start collecting? What are some of your prized dice?
Dr. Irving Finkel: I started collecting as a boy of about 9 after I

met R.C. Bell, who showed me his collecting and gave me an old set of
Bell and Hammer, which had strange dice in it. As a schoolboy I found
some old Chinese dice with red 1’s and 4’s, and once I found an ivory
Indian long-die in a small country fete miles from anywhere. Since
then I have been collecting dice of all types and designs and all periods
from all round the world. Lots of dice collectors specialise, but I just
like dice. The one thing I do not have is very modern plastic dice. I
have a huge collection of Indian specimens because I collect traditional
Indian games, as well as Roman and other odd things.

39
My Astragal! Irving Finkel
Dice have a long history. We’ve been playing games with dice for as long
as we’ve had them on hand to throw, but they haven’t always been toys. How
has our relationship with dice changed over the centuries? How has it stayed the
same?
The oldest die known to me is a cubic example, with opposite faces

adding up to seven, from Syria of about 4500 BC, so they are very
old. Some people think they evolved for the purpose of playing games
right from the start, while others suggest that dice might first have
functioned in divination or fortune-telling procedures and only later
served to move game pieces.
Games and dice have been adult activities since the beginning;
children only became players of games from about the 18th century
AD. People take dice for granted and never think about them, because
such a high proportion of games even today depend on them and they
are in everyone’s homes, but they are so fascinating, due to their age
and variety in form or material or numbering system; then there are
fake dice used by gamblers and a myriad other things. Some people are
afraid of them; earlier in our time people considered them the tool of
the devil and game manufacturers responded by issuing their products
with teetotums or spinners!
How commonplace were dice in antiquity? Were they specialized gadgets

or everyday objects? Were they as common as knucklebones would seem to have
been?
The problem of tracking the spread of dice in the ancient world is

considerable. Dice are small and are easily lost in daily life but do not
always come up or get found in digs; then many excavators think that
games and toys are all the same and childish and do not attend to them
particularly thoroughly in dig reports (they are usually mentioned at the
back of the book). On the other hand the spread such as we do see it
suggests they were always plentiful.
Globally of course dice divide into two categories which affects their
survival and identification: cheap and cheerful, and carefully-made and
expensive. The former category are very often natural products such as
various kinds of hard seeds or knucklebones or two-sided sticks of wood
40
Will Hindmarch
and none of these will usually survive for archaeologists, and if they do
no-one would know that they had been used as dice. Knucklebones are
extremely hardy and their prevalence on digs, rarely covered with teeth-
marks, suggest that they were for play, although they also functioned
as jacks (for tossing games) as well as dice. In addition, articles and
publications about the dice of the world are scattered everywhere
throughout books and journals and it is really a complex question to
know about all this stuff and to control it.
No one individual could ever write a full history of dice. And there
is a not a good deal of good literature readily available.

One of the oldest games we know of is the Royal Game of Ur, and you’re the
one who sussed out how to play it. How did you reverse engineer the gameplay
from the object itself?
It was a real wrestling match to fit the content of the cuneiform

rule tablet, which was written in the 2nd century bc, with the boards,
dice and pieces we know from archaeology, some of which go back to
2600 BC. At that time the board had turnings off both right and left
from the central path, one for each player’s side. After 2000 BC these
squares straightened out into one line, so there were then 12 squares
up the middle. It is this form that the rules apply to. Also the ancient
inscription was not like a modern set of rules (“open the lid,” “take
out the pieces,” etc.) and they are written rather poetically. Also, the
rules do not describe the route to be followed by the pieces because
everybody knew that already, so this has to be presumed.

How old is the Royal Game of Ur? Who played it? Why do you suppose we
stopped playing it?
The game was played from around the middle of the third millennium
BC in what is now Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, in other words, across many
countries. Archaeologically we can see that in time it was played at both
ends of the social spectrum; the first boards are all rich fancy goods from
graves, but we soon find graffiti boards and cheap scratched boards on
bricks and so on. The game died out after well over two and a half
thousand years of popularity, and I think this was due to the rise of the
41
My Astragal! Irving Finkel
Roman game that in due course became backgammon. This was also

a race game with dice and pieces but the balance between strategy and
chance in the later game gave a superior alternative.
Dice have long been divinatory objects as well as pastimes. How did the
spiritual factor inherent in the dice affect the play of games like the Game of
Twenty Squares? Were these divination objects as well as games?
The Game of Twenty Squares as known at Ur is on boards from

graves, and people have suggested that the play of the game had some
funerary connection in the Middle East as Senet did among New
Kingdom Egyptians. I do not believe this and consider the game a
true pastime that would also be needed in the next world. We know
however that the 20-square playing grid could also be used for fortune
telling predictions, at least in the late first millennium BC, because
the cuneiform rule tablet published in the British Museum book
demonstrates this.
However I do not believe that this was what the grid was “normally”
used for, and that the 100 or more boards that we know from around
the Middle East were used for games not divination. To my mind there
was always a distinction between games and divination, and although
the same apparatus might be used within both fields, there was never
confusion among the ancients about what they were doing.

On my last visit to the British Museum, I saw a Royal Game of Ur board
that had been carved into the base of a huge guardian bull statue. It’s easy to
imagine ancient sentries playing a game there by torchlight, to pass the long
hours of a nighttime watch. Do you imagine the Royal Game was a widespread
pastime? How was the etched-in board discovered? Has it affected your notions
of the game’s role in ancient life?
Game boards scratched in suitable places occur all over the world;
by a wall, on theatre steps, at thresholds, in gateways, often where there
is shade. The scratched example on the plinth of the 9th-century bull
from Khorsabad came to light for the first time in the 1990s, when my
colleague Dominique Collon went down to measure the carved feet of
42
Will Hindmarch
the bull in answer to a technical enquiry from someone in the USA,

and carried a torch with her. The beam of the torch showed her the
game grid for the first time. The same was found on the opposite bull,
and on one in the Musee du Louvre, and even on one in Iraq. This kind
of discovery shows us better than any other he widespread fondness for
the game that must have existed in ancient Mesopotamia, and it was
surely played by kings and dustmen alike.

Modern gamers often hoard and cherish favorite dice, whether for luck or
sentimentality. We sometimes chastise dice that let us down and prize those that
treat us well. How long do you figure we’ve been doing this? Did those ancient
sentries bring their favorite casting bones along with them to the city gates? Is
this something we have in common?
It is likely that the cherishing of one’s lucky dice is as old as dice

themselves. There is a Gambler’s Lament in Babylonian, a kind of
poem, that begins “Woe is me! Woe is me! My astragal! My astragal!”
Knucklebones were used as dice by the ancient Babylonians just as by
the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Do you have any personal superstitions that surface when you play with
dice? Any rituals or customs you have about storing or rolling the bones?
I only collect them and study them, never play with them. As for
storing, it is more than superstition that recommends the removal of
celluloid dice from the collection.1

Do you have a question that you wish museum-goers or game-players would
ask about dice or ancient games? What is it?
Why don’t we have a dice museum somewhere?
1. Celluoid, an early form of plastic, is notoriously unstable over time. Outgassing

causes celluloid dice to disintegrate, sometimes spectacularly. See Ricky Jay’s book,
Dice, for brilliant photos of dice in various states of disintegration.
43
Randomness: Blight or Bane?
Greg Costikyan
In general, we tend to think of randomness in games as a bad thing.

Our sense of fiero or accomplishment at winning a game depends
on the feeling that we have, in some sense, mastered it, and either that
we out-played our opponents, or at least, in a solo-play game, overcame
the challenges it posed by dint of hard work and skill. If, instead, we feel
that we just got lucky — or, worse, that someone else won even though
we were obviously the smarter player, because they just got lucky — we’re
likely to think less of the game.
But clearly many, many games have some random elements, and
some are highly luck-dependent, and yet people continue to play them.
What really is the role of randomness in games, and how can game
designers work to harness it to beneficial effect?
Magical Thinking
Randomness has been part of games since their earliest inception —

and when I say “earliest inception,” I mean deep into the unwritten
Neolithic past. Game scholars sometimes point to The Royal Game of
Ur as the earliest known game, and in a sense it is — but we also know
of games from any number of Neolithic cultures that survived into the
44
Greg Costikyan
modern era, many of them documented by Stewart Cullin in a series of

books for the Smithsonian, published in the early 20th century.
The simplest games, variations of which exist in innumerable
cultures, are what Dave Parlett (in the Oxford History of Board Games)
calls race games, and what others may think of as track games. Lines are
drawn in the dirt with sticks to represent the spaces of the game. Binary
lots — cowrie shells, acorn cups, almost anything that can fall easily on
one side or another — are tossed. Some simple algorithm is used to
determine what a particular number of up-lots versus down-lots means;
players advance their tokens along the track in accordance with the lots
thrown. The first player to reach the end of the track wins.
Needless to say, games of this type exist in modern cultures too,
many of them deriving directly from Pachisi, an ancient and popular
game in India: Parcheesi, an American commercial variant; Ludo, a
British commercial variant; Sorry!; Trouble; and so on. Typically, these
games add some element of strategy — blocking, sending pawns back to
start, etc. — but the line of descent — from track games that seem to exist
in almost every Neolithic culture to modern Pachisi variants — seems
clear.
For Neolithic cultures — and for some people in modern society too
— randomness is not merely a feature of gameplay: It has a magical, in
some cases religious aspect. A random test is viewed as divinatory.
In reality of course, “luck” is not an external force. Randomness
is randomness, and nothing more; in a sequence of random tests,
occasional streaks will show up, but there is no real significance to this
fact. It’s simply how randomness happens. It’s not a consequence of
mystical forces.
Ancient cultures, of course, had no concept of statistics, and humans
by nature tend to find patterns in things and ascribe meaning to those
patterns even when there is none. Hence the very concept of “luck.”
The Romans played dice games not merely for the thrill of gambling
— but also as a means of testing their favor with the gods. Many
Neolithic cultures use binary lots or other forms of random number
generation as a means of divination, ascribing predictive value to the
results. Very likely, track games arose not as entertainments, but as a
means of recording the results of a series of divinatory casts. And Cullin
documents a number of cases in which games are used by Neolithic
45
cultures as part of their religious practices.

And even today, some people continue the practice: the Ching is an
“oracle” consulted via the throw of binary lots, the Tarot uses randomly
selected cards in divination. They are not games in themselves,
obviously, though games have certainly been devised that use the Tarot
deck, and one could, I suppose, make a game of the Ching if you so
wished. Though if you take the Ching seriously, I suppose you might be
reluctant to mock it thusly.
In the French noir movie Bob le Flambeur, the protagonist, who is
a professional gambler, keeps a slot machine in his hall closet. Before
going out each day, he inserts a coin and operates it once. If he wins,
he considers that he is “lucky,” and cheerfully goes off to a day at the
casino. If he does not, he finds something else to do with his time.
As did the Romans, as did Neolithic cultures, he is using a game for
divinatory purposes, and ascribing a magical aspect to its results.
Most of us, of course, scoff at the notion that there is anything
significant about the outcome of random tests. And that perhaps is the
main reason why serious gamers, at least, tend to view games that are
excessively luck-dependent as poor games by nature; unlike primitives,
or the superstitious, we see no significance to the outcome of random
processes, and therefore no sense of triumph at winning a luck-
dependent game. We do not have the favor of the gods, the mystical
forces of nature are not aligned in our favor, it is not an omen that our
endeavors today will likewise be met with triumph. It was just a game,
over which we had no real control, and therefore not a very interesting
one.
Skill vs. Chance
The law, at least, divides games into two categories: games of skill and
games of chance. Games of skill are always legal. Games of chance, if
played for money, are generally illegal, because gambling is viewed as
an addictive and destructive vice. Although if that’s true, it’s hard to
reconcile government’s suppression of gambling with the promotion of
government lotteries; a libertarian would say that government suppresses
other forms of gambling because the state doesn’t like competition. But
perhaps a more accurate statement would be that we have, somewhat
46
Greg Costikyan
confusedly, adopted toward gambling the attitude that some people

think we should also adopt to other vices, like recreational drugs and
prostitution: People are going to gamble whatever you do, so better that
we permit gambling but tax and control it carefully, to limit the damage
it does and to prevent organized crime from earning the proceeds. In
this light, advertisements for the lottery are an example of a somewhat
confused government, part of which wants to limit gambling and part
of which wants the revenue it generates.
Just as government is confused about whether it wants to restrict
or promote gambling, however, government is also confused about
what gambling is. Games like Roulette or Craps (at least when played
with honest wheels and people who don’t try to manipulate the dice)
are indeed pure games of chance, but the same is not true even of all
casino games. Blackjack has at least some element of skill, and some
Poker players will tell you that their game is absolutely a game of skill.
(The claim is, however, not entirely true, as I’ll explore later.) And some
forms of gambling, such as betting on the horses, are almost entirely a
matter of skill.
Horse racing bookmakers use what’s called a parimutuel system of
betting. In a parimutuel system, the posted odds are dynamically adjusted
as bets are made. By contrast, in a game like Roulette, the house earns its
money by having some numbers on the wheel (0, and in some cases 00)
that do not fall under the conventional bets of even/odd and black/
red; and the payoff for betting on a single number (36-to-1) is lower
than the actual number of slots on the wheel (37 or 38). Consequently,
over repeated spins, the house is guaranteed to come out ahead.
In a parimutuel system, however, the house simply ensures that,
regardless of how the horses come in, the total payout, based on posted
odds and bets received, will always be smaller than the amount of money
bet. As new bets come in, the posted odds are dynamically adjusted.
Consequently, the house doesn’t care if one bettor is a better “player” of
the horses than another, or has some scheme that lets them consistently
win; the house’s rake is guaranteed.
In fact, it’s possible to make a living betting on the horses, and some
people do. It isn’t easy; it requires a lot of work, and considerable self-
discipline. The way to do it is to study the horses, pore over statistics
of their performance, learn which do well or poorly in different track
47
conditions, and then pay careful attention to the posted odds. Most
bettors are naïve, and will not have the same expert knowledge as you;
consequently, you will have a better sense of the likelihood of different
outcomes than they, and when a spread opens up between the posted
odds and your actual expectation of outcomes, you can take advantage of
that by betting against the mass of naïve bettors. It’s a form of arbitrage,
in other words.
In truth, the outcome of a horse race very rarely depends on
chance; it depends on the characteristics of the horses involved, and
the condition of the track on which they run, and perhaps more subtle
variables; but, pace quantum mechanics, it takes place in the Newtownian
phenomenological world, and a sufficiently advanced student of the
horses can win consistently, because posted “odds” are not based on
actual odds, but on the pattern of betting.
The only element of chance that intrudes, really, is that unexpected
events can happen in a universe as complicated as ours; thus, a horse can
stumble and fall, say. This isn’t “chance” either, of course, but it’s the
kind of event that no student of the horses can anticipate — it’s the sort
of thing we’d simulate in a game by introducing a chance element.
The common dichotomy between “games of chance” and “games
of skill” therefore is something of a false one; there are pure games
of chance (such as Roulette) and there are pure games of skill (such as
Chess), but almost everything else is some mixture of the two.
Different Aesthetics
Different games appeal to different aesthetics. People who love story-

driven Japanese CRPGs will tell you how much they loved the story
of Final Fantasy X, while others, blind to this genre, will characterize
the game as “interminable cut-scenes separated by boring and repetitive
gameplay.” A more broadminded gamer may see truth in both
viewpoints — the Final Fantasy games do provide interesting characters,
well-written stories, and gorgeously-rendered cut scenes, and players do
come to care about the characters surprisingly deeply; yet there’s far
less variation in moment-to-moment gameplay, and in terms of strategy
and puzzle-solving, than in almost every other game genre. Final Fantasy
X is a wonderful story, and is also characterized by dull and repetitive
48
Greg Costikyan
gameplay between story elements.

Part of my objective in general is to foster the aesthetic of a
“broadminded gamer,” able to see what people find appealing in any
game; but that’s because I’m a game designer and pretentious ludeaste
(a word I just coined by analogy to cineaste). Most gamers prefer to find
games that they like, and often look down on ones they don’t, even
if enjoyed by others. My games rock; your games suck, and never the
twain shall meet. If you don’t like Final Fantasy, you’re obviously an
idiot, or conversely, sucked in by the story and don’t really understand
what games are really about. This is a short-sighted view.
But to return to the question of randomness, in light of the idea
that there are different, and equally valid, aesthetics of “the game.” One
sort of game aesthetic says: Games should be won by skill and not luck.
Hence any recourse to randomness by a game is bad.
Curiously, it’s an attitude held by two sorts of gamers who otherwise
have very little in common: Fans of abstract strategy games, and fans of
first-person shooters.
To an abstract strategy gamer, games like Chess and Go are the ne plus
ultra of gaming: mechanically simple but strategically profound. You can,
and people do, spend a lifetime studying and mastering these games. To
a serious abstract strategy gamer, a game like Risk is a trivial and even
appallingly stupid waste of time, a mere die-rolling exercise; and even
something like backgammon, a game of no little strategic depth in its
own right, is inherently suspect, and inferior, because of its reliance on
dice. The ideal is a game that pits mind against mind in a clean contest
of strategic planning and anticipation of the opponent. Anything that
involves even the slightest degree of randomness is inferior, because
victory should come through mastery of the game and superior play.
The notion that someone might win through luck is almost repulsive.
Never mind the fact that factors external to the game itself, such as one
player’s third margarita the night before or another’s existential despair
over the affair her husband is having might affect their quality of play;
within the magic circle itself, everything should be pure.
Similarly, for an FPS player, winning a deathmatch involves mastery
of the interface, perfect knowledge of the level layout and the location
of spawn points and power-ups, and superior knowledge of (and ability
to perform) tactical tricks of the trade, such as the bunny-hop and the
49
rocket jump.
Chess is about as different a game as you can possibly get from
Quake: one is a game of mental domination, and the other a “twitch”
game, a game that depends almost entirely on the mastery of a limited
set of physical skills.
No Chess player ever leapt from a board shouting “Woot! Ph34r
my l33t sk1llz!” and “pwned” is not likely to become synonymous with
“checkmate” anytime soon. Yet Chess players, too, prefer to feel that it is
their “l33t sk1llz” that bring victory, not any random element.
Gamers often divide games into two categories by the type of skill
they require: “player skill” games, like Counter-Strike, depend on physical
mastery, while “character skill” games, like Final Fantasy, depend
primarily on the characters’ stats and the player’s choice of special
actions to determine outcomes. To a serious FPS gamer, character skill
games are obviously inferior; all they take to win is perseverance, while
player-skill games reward those who work to master the gameplay.
And yet, if you look under the hood (that is, at the source code)
you’ll find that weapon damage in FPSes is partly random; typically,
weapons do some set amount of damage (X) plus some additional
amount of damage determined randomly and linearly between 0 and
another factor (Y).
This fact isn’t normally perceptible to players, who may assume that
any variation in damage is a consequence of variation in accuracy or
range; and indeed, in actual play, the randomness of FPS damage has
little impact on ultimate outcomes. Except perhaps in very marginal
circumstances, it’s not enough to let an inferior player beat a superior
one. Nor is it particularly clear why id (Quake’s developer) felt it necessary
to make variable damage part of the game: in the solo-play game, most
monsters are killed with a definable number of shots from particular
weapons, and the randomness isn’t enough to cause any surprises; in
deathmatch play, there’s enough variability in a system of chaotic fire-
play to prevent a non-random system from becoming dull. I suspect the
random element of damage derives not from a conscious design choice,
but from an unconscious and automatic adoption of a game mechanic
— variable weapons damage — that stretches back into the tabletop
roleplaying and miniatures gaming prehistory of the videogame.
But miniatures gaming, certainly, and tabletop roleplaying, to a
50
Greg Costikyan
lesser degree, need a degree of randomness to sustain player interest.

Why might that be?
Value in Simulation
Let’s start by examining Little Wars, H.G. Wells’s landmark miniatures

rules, the first commercial rules published for gaming with toy soldiers.
It does not rely on chance, at least on the surface. Infantry may move
such-and-so many inches per turn, cavalry somewhat farther, artillery
less far. Melee combat is resolved according to a simple, non-random
rule: if the two sides are equal, everyone on both sides dies. If unequal,
the inferior force is eliminated, doing damage to the superior force
according to this paraphrased formula:
Thus, if the inferior force has 4 units, and

the superior one 6, the superior force loses
2 units: doubling the inferior force gives us
8, and subtracting the superior force of 6
produces 2.
No randomness here.
Artillery fire is, however, resolved in a different way. The rules to
the game assume that both players have what Wells describes as “spring
breech-loader guns.” You slide a stick into the cannon, depress the
spring, aim the cannon, then release the stick. If it strikes an opposing
figure, that figure is lost.
It seems clear to me that without this second rule for artillery,
Little Wars would be a very dull game indeed. If melee combat was all it
permitted, you could almost predict before play begins who would win:
The side with the greater strength, of course. Only poor play by the
superior side, or brilliant play by the inferior one, could prevent that
outcome.
Artillery changes the equation, however. It’s still non-random, in
the sense that the effectiveness of your artillery depends on your ability
to aim it, your feel for the power of the cannon’s spring, and of course
your ability to maneuver your troops to leave clear lines of sight from
your cannon to opposing units. But all of these are tricky things, not
51
as cut-and-dried as the rules for melee. In the Newtonian universe, they

are not random elements — but they provide, in this context, the sort of
variability of outcome essential in any true wargame.
Why do I say that variability of outcome is essential in a wargame?
For a simple reason: wargames are supposed to be simulations. They
are supposed to represent, with greater or lesser fidelity, a real or
hypothetical military conflict. There has never yet been a general who
can confidently predict the outcome of battle.
Part of the reason for that is, of course, fog of war; at the inception
of battle, both sides generally don’t really know how strong the opposing
side is (something few games do a good job of simulating). But even if
they knew what they were up against down to the last man and piece
of equipment, they could not be certain of the outcome. So much is
dependent on the actions, or failures, of individual men on the field; so
much on vagaries of weather and lighting; so much on improvisational
genius or confusion and sloth.
As von Moltke says, “No battle plan survives contact with the
enemy.” The phenomenological world may be Newtonian, and hence
in principle calculable, but thousands of men in desperate struggle is a
messy, incalculable situation. “For want of a nail, a kingdom was lost” —
an extreme statement of the situation, but illustrative. You can’t know;
all you can do is plan, take your best shot, and hope things work out.
“Alea jacta est,” Caesar said as he crossed the Rubicon, leading his
army to Rome in defiance of the orders of the Senate — the die is cast.
Surely he thought he had the power to triumph, as he ultimately did;
but he knew also that he was taking a huge risk. As in Poker, military
command is a matter of minimizing risks and making the best bets you
can — but as in Poker, you cannot be sure of the outcome.
To properly simulate war, therefore, unpredictability is essential,
and the easiest way to ensure unpredictability is to harness the power
of randomness. Like Caesar, we cast the die, in our case to simulate the
impact of all the multifarious factors that no commander can control.
In other words, a wargame that contains no random elements is, by
nature, a poorer simulation than one that incorporates randomness.
Accuracy, or at least verisimilitude — the feeling of accuracy — is
essential to the aesthetic of the wargame: When playing a simulation
of the Second World War, we want it to feel like the war, to feel that
52
Greg Costikyan
as commanders of one side or the other, we’re making decisions about

what to do that were within the realm of possibility for the opposing
sides. If things happen that strike us as ludicrously infeasible — like,
say, Sweden conquering Russia in 1943 — then it’s clear that the game
is flawed. To a wargamer, at this point it doesn’t matter whether the
game system is strategically deep, or provides an interesting narrative,
or satisfies any of the other aesthetic criteria that some bring to games:
it’s a bad game, because it’s a bad simulation, and for a wargamer, value
as a simulation is a major part of his aesthetic.
The notion that randomness is bad is an aesthetic one, and
appropriate to games characterized by a spartan commitment to pure
strategy; but that is only one valid aesthetic lens. A wargamer might,
in fact, consider a game like Chess too dry, too moldy in antiquity,
and ultimately uninteresting because of its lack of color, aesthetically
unsatisfying because of its severe divorce from anything real. It simulates
not, neither does it spin (the dice).
The use of chance as an element in heightening the realism of a
simulation isn’t unique to wargames; indeed, almost any game that
purports to simulate real world phenomena uses chance to a degree.
In Roller Coaster Tycoon, when one of the little people wandering about
your theme park completes their current action, the game chooses a new
action for them to perform that is partly dependent on the character’s
current stats and partly based on a random factor. In SimCity, the
paths taken by individual “sims” through the city are determined semi-
randomly. In Kremlin, whether or not one of your geriatric Politbureau
members dies this year is determined by a die-roll. Just as war is too
complex to simulate accurately through an entirely non-random system,
so are almost all real-world phenomena, at least addressed at a high level,
and thus a degree of randomness increases the simulation’s fidelity.
When Chance Isn’t Random: Regression to the Mean
In reality, the reliance by games on chance does not necessarily mean

that the game’s final outcome is random. In a game with chance
elements, there will typically be dozens or hundreds of random tests
over the course of the game — many, many times in which dice rolled,
or an algorithm that uses a random number as an input applied.
53
Paradoxically, the greater the number of random tests, the less effect
chance has on the outcome. Over time, random systems regress to the
mean.
Consider a single die-roll: there is exactly a 1/6th chance of each
possible result. Now consider a 2d6 roll: There is a 1/6th chance of
rolling a 7, but only a 1/36th chance of rolling a 2 or 12. A single die-
roll produces a flat curve, with all outcomes equally probable; a 2d6
roll produces a bell curve, with numbers toward the center of the curve
more probable, and the extremes less likely. Adding more dice increases
the sharpness of the curve.
In other words, the more random tests, the lower the likelihood
that the outcome will be at one extreme of the bell curve, and the more
likely that it will be near the center.
Suppose that the outcome of a game is based on a single random
test that can go either way — 50/50 odds. In this case, I will win 50% of
the time, and you will win 50% of the time. The outcome of the game
is purely random.
Let us suppose instead that, over the course of the game, we have
100 random, 50/50 tests — but in addition to those tests, there’s an
element of strategy — in a wargame, the element of strategy might
depend on choosing where and how to maneuver, taking advantage of
terrain, deciding where to follow up success and where to retreat, and
so on. Over the course of the game, the likelihood is that I will win
roughly half of those random tests, and you will win roughly half. It’s
possible, though highly unlikely, for me to win every one, and therefore
the game, purely by luck. It’s far likelier that the random tests will give
no player any strong advantage, and that instead, strategy will dominate
— that victory will, as in a purely non-random game, go to the superior
player.
Or to put it another way, if a game contains even a small element
of strategy, then as the number of random tests approaches infinity, the
outcome of the game is more and more likely to be dictated by strategy
than by chance. The point at which strategy begins to dominate over
randomness depends on how much effect strategy has — in a game where
random elements are small and strategy vital, strategy dominates with
even a handful of random tests, while if strategy is a relatively modest
54
Greg Costikyan
dictator of outcomes, then many random tests are required before

strategy dominates.
But the net effect is clear: in a game that relies on chance to some
degree, has many random tests, and also has highly strategic elements
— typical of all sorts of simulations — the outcome will only in very rare
cases be dictated by chance.
Mind you, this analysis presupposes that each random test has
roughly the same impact on the game as every other such test; there
are cases when this is very much untrue. It might be that a handful of
random tests are critical. As an example, in Jim Dunnigan’s Empires of
the Middle Ages, the players’ success is critically affected by the military,
administrative, and diplomatic capabilities of their monarchs, each
represented by a number from 1 to 9. When a monarch dies — which
happens only a handful of times during a game — the new monarch’s
stats are randomly generated. Being lucky in monarch generation is so
important that it overwhelms almost every other factor of the game;
strategy still plays an important role, but if one player has a 9-9-9
monarch for most of the game, he’s very likely to win, almost no matter
what the other players do.
Dunnigan would doubtless argue that in this regard, Empires is
an accurate simulation of conditions in the Medieval era, that the
characteristics of monarchs were critical to their nations’ success or
lack thereof; and indeed, the color and historicity of the game are
sufficient to make the game enjoyable despite its largely random path.
But considered as a game qua game, as opposed to a simulation, this is
undeniably a design flaw: if you have bad luck, it’s frustrating to play,
and if you have good luck, it’s hard to feel a sense of accomplishment
at winning.
Empires is, however, an outlier in this regard; most wargames are
consciously designed to take advantage of regression to the mean, in
order to preserve the simulation value of randomness in a military
context, while also ensuring that the game remains strategically
interesting to the players.
The point remains: the criticism by strategy-purists of games that
involve some degree of chance is not wholly valid, not only because
random tests can improve other aspects of the game, such as fidelity of
simulation, but also because if chance is used sufficiently frequently,
55
and with sufficient care, strategic elements will still dominate outcomes.
Thus, strategy and not luck will remain the most important factor in
play.
Poker: Strategy as the Epiphenomenon of Randomness
Poker is a perfect illustration of this point. On the surface, Poker appears

to be an entirely random game: cards are allocated randomly, and the
best hand wins. Hard to get more random than that.
Of course, we’ve described only two of the game’s mechanics: card
distribution and hand comparison. What transforms Poker from a
random game to one that is highly dependent on player skill is, for the
main part, one thing: betting strategy.
Versions of Poker vary, but in all cases, there are multiple rounds
of betting before hands are revealed. Each round, some information is
revealed to the players; in draw Poker, after one round of betting, players
may discard some cards and request more, and the number of cards
discarded by your opponents gives you a bit of a clue as to what they hold.
In stud Poker, cards are dealt out to the players each round of betting, with
some displayed face-up. In Texas Hold ‘Em, “community” cards that are
shared by players are revealed over several betting rounds.
Thus, in all cases, players gain information during the hand that,
while imperfect, gives them some sense of the odds. They know what
they have, they have some clues as to what the other players may have,
and they can drop out after any round of betting. And of course,
there’s also the information provided by the facial expressions and body
language of the other players.
The trick, then, is to minimize your losses when the cards are against
you, while maximizing the pot when you have the cards. One typical
strategy is “fold early and bet aggressively;” don’t hold onto weak cards,
and if you have a strong hand relative to what you see on the table, work
to maximize your potential win.
Let us imagine a game between several average players and one
superior player — a player who knows the odds backwards and forwards,
and reads other players well. If only one hand is played, the outcome
of that hand — in terms of who wins — is wholly random. The flow of
money in that hand is not; in all likelihood, the superior player will
56
Greg Costikyan
fold early on a weak hand, and ramp up the betting to win substantially
on a strong one. That’s only “in all likelihood,” however; the superior
player could have a flush (an excellent hand in most versions of Poker),
bet aggressively, and still be beaten out by an inferior player who, this
hand, just had the luck to get a full house. In a single hand, the superior
player has an advantage, but the advantage is modest.
Poker is almost never played for a single hand. It’s typically played for
many hands in succession. The superior player’s edge in a single hand
is modest, but over time, that modest edge means that, all things being
equal, the pile of chips in front of him will grow, while the piles in front
of the other players will shrink.
Random tests regress to the mean. The superior player can be beaten
by luck over a small number of plays, but over a lifetime of play, he will
dominate.
As with the horses, there are people who make their living playing
Poker, and as with the horses, doing so requires work and commitment,
and either the ability to calculate odds quickly on the fly, or a strong
gut feel for odds learned by long-time play. In this regard, Poker players
and racetrack bettors rely on something very similar: for the horses,
the arbitrage opportunities opened up by naïve bettors in a parimutuel
system; for Poker, the opportunities created by the inferior strategies of
more naïve players.
Is Poker a game of skill or chance? If Roulette is the measure, it is
unquestionably a game of skill. Yet even in, say, a typical Texas Hold
’Em tournament, with a single buy-in and a relatively limited number
of hands, a perfect player can still be defeated by the luck of the draw.
Poker is a mix, but over the long term, strategy beats luck.
And, please note: the strategy of Poker is based on its randomness.
Without random card allocation, it would be an entirely different, and
inferior game. The strategy of Poker lies in understanding the statistical
nature of the game, and managing statistical outcomes. That’s true,
to a lesser degree, of many other games that rely on random factors;
in a board wargame, for example, you always know the probabilities
of different outcomes before you commit to an attack. But Poker is
almost unique in its pure reliance on probability as the creator of real
strategic depth. Poker in particular belies the abstract strategy gamer’s
idea that randomness is in opposition to strategy: in Poker, strategy is an
57
epiphenomenon of randomness.
Randomness as a Way to Break Symmetry
Chess and Go, the abstract strategy games par excellence, are almost
perfectly symmetrical: both players have equal forces, with equal
positions and equal capabilities. The only element of asymmetry is their
turn-based nature, which gives one player a turn-order advantage — in
both of these games, the first player has a slight advantage, but in some
other games, the last player, or some other player in the order, may have
some advantage.
Symmetry, at least in terms of starting position, is common, though
not universal, in virtually all games that involve two or more players. In
multiplayer games, players prefer to feel that they begin on a level playing-
field, and the easiest way to ensure that they do is to start them off equally.
Symmetry is also a real danger in any game design. Symmetry can
lead to a host of ills. Symmetry works in Chess and Go because these are
games of enormous strategic depth, and symmetry is quickly broken by
the moves or placements of the players.
Contrast this with John Nash’s Hex or Alex Randolph’s Twixt
(which, despite minor variations in tessellation and play, are extremely
similar games). The object of both games is to build a connected line
from your side of the board to your opponent’s, with the opponent
trying to do the reverse, with neither player able to play through the
other player’s line.
At first, this may appear interesting, but in actuality, the game has
an optimum strategy — a fact mathematically proven up to 9x9 Hex
grids. Given optimum play, the first mover wins. The problem with Hex
is that it has nothing like the strategic depth of Chess or Go; symmetry
never gets broken.
Games in which all players pursue the same strategy result in a win
by the player who makes the fewest mistakes — or, if none, by the player
who has the player-order advantage.
This is dull.
To make a symmetrical game interesting, you need to break the
symmetry as quickly as possible. You need to put the players into
somewhat different positions, so that they have different concerns to
58
Greg Costikyan
think about, and different strategies to adopt. Chess begins symmetrical,

but with a single exchange of moves, it begins to open up; your first
pawn move opens a line of potential attack for a bishop, while my first
move signals a potential castling. Immediately, it’s a different game.
Chess can pull this off because of its strategic complexity. Chess has
been refined over centuries, pondered by millions of minds. Good luck
to you in devising a game of equivalent depth.
How else can you break symmetry? One way is by providing slight
asymmetry in starting positions. Puerto Rico does this by having different
players start with different plantations, and by forcing players to adopt
different actions each turn. But one easy way to break symmetry is to
provide a degree of randomness — and in fact, almost every Eurogame
does so.
This seems paradoxical on the face of it: the Eurogame aesthetic
prizes strategy and disparages luck, and yet at the core, many games in
the genre depend on some degree of randomness.
In Settlers of Catan, for example, new players are advised to set up the
board as per a diagram in the rules that provides a balanced, symmetrical
arrangement of terrain — but more advanced players are encouraged to
lay out the board in a random fashion. Discs with different numbers
are distributed semi-randomly across the board’s hexagonal tessellation,
and dice are rolled each turn, and compared to those numbers, to see
which areas produce resources. The players begin with symmetrical
resources, but the asymmetry of the board, coupled with the random
nature of resource production, quickly produce asymmetries as players
settle different areas of the board.
Or consider Torres, which at heart is a purely symmetrical abstract
strategy game — but breaks the symmetry by giving players “action
cards,” each of which provides some special benefit. Different players
hold different action cards, and the opportunities they offer therefore
provide them with an incentive to adopt slightly different tactics during
play, opening up what would otherwise be a pretty dull game.
Similarly, in Ticket to Ride, players begin with a number of “route”
cards, and the victory points they earn mainly (though not exclusively)
come from completing routes (e.g., New York to Los Angeles). Played
without the route cards, Ticket to Ride would be a dull exercise in trying
to complete the longest rail lines first; with the route cards, each player
59
is striving for different objectives in an asymmetrical landscape, and

therefore the game has far greater strategic depth.
The danger with the use of randomness as provider of asymmetry
is that the game becomes too chance-dependent, which in a genre like
the Eurostyle is a flaw, since the aesthetic of the genre prizes strategy
and planning. There are, however, three ways to harness the virtues
of randomness without falling into the trap of allowing randomness
to determine the winner: Regression to the mean, as we’ve discussed;
ensuring that random elements are “balanced;” and ensuring that
random elements face all players with the same opportunities.
Lets start with “balance,” a term I used advisedly: it’s an awkward
term to use, because “balance” can mean many different things in the
context of a game, depending on exactly what you’re talking about.
In this context, what I mean is that if randomness is used to open
up different possibilities to different players, thereby fostering different
approaches to the game, but if all opportunities opened up are of roughly
equivalent game value, then the random element does not unbalance
the game, that is, make it luck-dependent.
As an example, the action cards in Torres allow players to do different
things but, at least a priori, none of the actions they permit is obviously
better or worse than the others. In addition, to draw a new action card, a
player must forgo taking some other action in the game, so the question
of whether or not to draw a card becomes a strategic concern. Chance
is not entirely eliminated through this scheme, however; in a particular
strategic situation, drawing a new action card might provide you with
an ability that is precisely what you need at this moment, or something
that is of no immediate benefit — and so luck continues to play a role.
The route cards of Ticket to Ride, and how they have evolved over
the course of the game’s expansion, are particularly interesting here. In
the original game (set in North America), your original draw of route
cards has a huge impact on your likelihood of winning or losing. If you
have cards that involve nice, high-value, long-haul routes that overlap
to a high degree, so that you can complete them with a relatively few
number of rail car placements, you are likely to win. Conversely, if you
are stuck with short-haul routes in the central US that do not lay the
groundwork for later long-haul successes, you are most likely screwed.
Alan Moon, the game’s designer, seems to have recognized the
60
Greg Costikyan
problem here; subsequent versions of the game, such as the European

board and the “Mega Game” that replaces the original North American
card set, are designed to ameliorate the problem. On the European
board, all players are guaranteed one long-haul route with their initial
route cards; and the Mega Game provides players with a choice of more
cards initially, making it less likely that you will be stuck with duds, while
also giving bonus points to the player who completes the most routes,
providing more benefit to the short-haul route cards. Both games are far
more balanced, in the sense that initial card distribution is less likely to
determine the outcome.
The concept of “balance” in this context assumes that the game’s
random elements apply to individual players; but it is possible to have
random elements that offer the same opportunities to all players. Think
of these elements as akin to the weather; you and I are equally subject
to the rain.
Consider Reiner Knizia’s Medici; in this game, competing Medieval
merchants bid on lots of luxury trade goods. At the beginning of each
round, counters representing the trade goods are placed in a cloth bag.
On his turn, a player draws between one and three goods from the bag,
and these become a lot on which all players bid.
Clearly, there’s a random element here, because goods are drawn
blindly, that is, at random. Yet all players are bidding on the same lot of
goods; the distribution of goods does not, in itself, offer any immediate
advantage or disadvantage to any player. Though this is random, the
randomness does not in itself have any immediate impact on the game’s
outcome.
In Medici, you earn points both for the raw value of the goods that
are shipped — but also for shipping more goods of a particular type
(say, spices) than other players. This is, in fact, how Knizia breaks the
symmetry of an otherwise perfectly symmetrical game with perfect
information: different goods suddenly become more valuable to you
than others, because you have previously purchased or shipped goods of
a particular type. But this in itself is not chance dependent — it depends
purely on your decisions, that is, on what lots you bid on. Randomness
isn’t being used here as the key way to break symmetry — Knizia does
that with his scoring system. Instead, randomness is being used to
ensure that players cannot predict what goods will be auctioned next,
61
and to ensure that each auction is likely to be somewhat different from

the previous one, thus preventing the game from becoming static and
predictable.
In summary, adding a random element to any game creates a risk
that the outcome will depend on luck rather than strategy; but it also
helps to break open a symmetrical game, which is essential to prevent it
from degenerating into strategic gridlock.
Too, designers can adopt strategies to minimize the impact that luck
has on outcomes, such as balance among random elements, exposing
all players equally to random elements, and/or regression to the mean.
Leveling the Playing Field
In children’s games, in particular, randomness is often used as a way

of leveling the playing field — that is, of ensuring that everyone has an
equal chance of winning, regardless of age or skill.
Please note that we’re talking about yet another game aesthetic here:
for most styles of games, and for most gamers, the idea that everyone
should have an equal chance of winning regardless of skill is tantamount
to saying “this is barely a game.” You might as well roll a die to see who
wins. Why even play?
Suppose, however, that you are a parent with a small child, with
whom you want to play a game. You could choose Chess, I suppose, but
unless you purposefully play badly, you will beat your child every time.
And very likely, will wind up trying to comfort a crying child who will
never, ever, want to play a game with Daddy again.
Consider Snakes and Ladders, a classic and centuries-old game of
childhood (popularized in the US as the commercial title Chutes and
Ladders). Everyone begins at square 1 and strives to reach square 100,
in a 10x10 matrix of squares numbered sequentially. Each turn, you
roll a die (or use a spinner), and advance your token as many spaces as
the number generated. At various points on the board are “snakes” (or
“chutes”) that cause you to slide from one square to a lower one — or
“ladders” that cause you to advance from one square to a higher one.
The first to square 100 wins.
A moment’s thought will show that there is no strategy to the game;
the outcome is purely dependent on chance. This fact is not readily
62
Greg Costikyan
apparent to a small child, however, who may well experience a moment

of fiero when landing on a ladder, and momentary annoyance when
landing on a chute — and will be gleeful if and when she beats her
dad.
From the perspective of an abstract strategy gamer, say, Snakes and
Ladders is nugatory, a degenerate game, not worth the time to play. But
it is actually perfectly suited to its niche in the ecosystem of games.
Playing Snakes and Ladders, a child learns how to take turns, make moves,
experience some of the emotions that games evoke, gains practice with
counting — and also learns to internalize the “magic circle,” the idea
that what happens in the game stays in the game, that you strive to win
but loss has no consequences external to the game and is therefore not
to breed ill feeling.
Examine almost any halfway decent game designed for small children,
and you’ll find the same factor at work. Candyland, 3D Labyrinth, and
the innumerable forgettable licensed “track” games that appear each
year are all, in the final analysis, dependent wholly on luck. And even
games aimed at slightly older children are generally mostly a function
of luck, though they start to add strategic options: Go Fish, Sorry, Uno,
Parcheesi, and Ludo all have minor strategic elements, but luck is the
main determinant of outcome.
Even in sophisticated games, the use of randomness as a leveling
factor has a role to play. Poker is a good example here. Every Poker player
knows that better players win more over time — but also know that,
this hand, you have some shot at winning, even if you’re not one of the
elite. The game’s randomness doesn’t level the playing field entirely, as
it does in Snakes and Ladders, but it does given you a reason to play, and
a hope of winning, even if you are not a studious master of the game.
The leveling nature of randomness, for Poker, serves a highly important
function, and one that sophisticated players of the game prize rather
than despise: It keeps the suckers playing.
Wild Cards
B-17: Queen of the Skies, a long-out-of-print game from Avalon Hill,

simulates the military career of the crew of a single B-17 bomber engaged
in repeated raids over Germany during the Second World War. As a
63
game, it is a little more than a series of tables on which the player (it’s a
single-player game) rolls dice. Dice are rolled to determine the player’s
mission, what opposition in terms of German fighters, flak, and so on
the crew faces during the mission, the effects of combat with enemy
fighters, how successful the aircraft is in damaging its targets during
bombing runs, which crew members get killed or injured, and how
badly, and so on. There are almost no decisions to be made, just dice to
be rolled. It sold relatively well during its lifetime (by board wargaming
standards).
Part of the reason for that was undoubtedly that there are very
few solitaire board wargames (a mainly two-player genre); but part
of it was that B-17 was, in its own weird way, fun to play. There was
some enjoyment to be gained by rolling the dice and seeing what came
next.
Interestingly, I don’t think a digital adaptation would be remotely
popular; you’d just click “next” and see the next event. The process of
operating the game system, of physically rolling the dice and looking up
the results, felt something like gameplay, even though it wasn’t, really.
The mechanization of resolution that digital games provide would make
the underlying dullness of the game obvious.
B-17 is an example of randomly generated algorithmic content.
What made it (mildly) interesting was that interesting stuff happened
in the game — even though your ability to respond to or manage that
stuff was, well, essentially non-existent.
I’m not holding it out as an example of good game design; it’s
not. But it is a good demonstration of another utility of randomness:
providing variety of encounter, a mechanism for letting “interesting
stuff happen.”
As an example of digital games with something of the same dynamic,
consider Rogue-likes. Rogue-like games are single-character, hack-and-
slash, dungeon-crawling RPGs in which almost everything is randomly
generated. Each level of the dungeon is laid out according to algorithms
that rely on a random seed; the level is populated with monsters and
treasure generated by tables referred to with a random index. Almost
nothing is “level-designed,” in the sense of most digital games, though
some Rogue-likes, such as NetHack, intersperse a handful of levels with
designed elements among the randomly generated ones.
64
Greg Costikyan
Rogue-likes are highly luck dependent; you are often faced with
hordes of monsters, or other problems that you cannot overcome, and
can contrariwise (though not often) gain some key magic items that let
you advance quickly. But they are far from devoid of strategy; they’re
turn-based, and every turn you typically have a choice of a wide variety
of actions — not just the usual movement and attack, but things like
using spells or potions, praying to your god, locking doors behind
you, and so on. There are a host of tactical tricks to learn, counters to
special monster abilities, and so on. If the mark of the superior strategy
game is that it makes you stop and think about your next move, then
Rogue-likes qualify — even though they are so heavily luck-dependent.
In exchange for accepting an almost perverse level of chance, Rogue-
likes offer an almost unparalleled level of variety. Because they are
randomly generated, no two play sessions are identical. They typically
have dozens or hundreds of different monsters, magic items, and other
capabilities, and quite often dozens of “verbs,” actions the player may
trigger. Some of the more involved Rogue-likes, such as NetHack, contain
so much rococo detail, handle so many unlikely possibilities, that even
after years of play you may discover new features. As an example, in
NetHack, if you toss a ring down the sink, the sound the sink makes in
response may give you a clue as to what that kind of ring does — one of
NetHack’s innumerable coders (it’s a long-standing open-source project)
having a bit of fun, there.
Obviously, you cannot play a Rogue-like with the kind of seriousness
that a Chess master brings to that game; no matter how experienced a
player, the next corner may bring you face to face with instant death. It
requires a sort of cheerful resignation, a willingness to enjoy the often
humorous ways in which you die (“gnawed to death by rats on level 17
while paralyzed”).
Despite the randomness of the game, the sheer variability it offers
means that it is infinitely replayable. Games like Diablo — a commercial,
graphical dungeon-crawler, similar in many ways, but with designed
levels — is hardly worth playing more than once. You might try it a
second time with a different sort of character, but the challenges and
story elements will be the same. By contrast, NetHack is one of only two
games that has been on the hard drive of every computer I’ve owned
since I first encountered it. (The other is Civilization.)
65
There’s a lot to be said for sheer variety of encounter, and random

shuffling of game elements is perhaps the easiest way to provide it.
Conclusion
So. Randomness: bane or blight? It all depends. If randomness dictates

outcomes, many players will find the game unsatisfying. But there are
times when a degree of randomness plays an important, and useful, role
in a design.
66
A Hobbit’s Chances:
An Interview
with Cardell Kerr
Will Hindmarch
Cardell Kerr’s degree is in Biology, with a specialization in Cellular/

Molecular Biology. “A friend convinced me to apply [at Turbine],”
Kerr writes. “I was in the Vanguard team (sort of the early versions of
shadow worlds/alpha releases) and I’d also been an admin on multiple
MUDs.”
Today, Kerr is a Creative Director at Turbine, responsible for the
quality of execution and ideas for Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO). “In
addition, I managed the LOTRO design team as a whole,” Kerr told me.
“I’m pretty home grown; I was hired in 2000 as a Content Designer for
Asheron’s Call (AC1). Since then, I’ve just moved up the ladder, really.”
Lord of the Rings Online has seen two major expansions since its launch:
Mines of Moria and Siege of Mirkwood. Each refined and expanded the
play experience begun in the game’s first volume, Shadows of Angmar.
Kerr took time out of devising the wicked machinations of Sauron
and Saruman to answer some questions, via email, about the role
randomness plays in a big MMORPG like LOTRO.
Will Hindmarch: During a content update around the time of Mines of
Moria, LOTRO made the transition from expressing some stats as percentiles
67
A Hobbit’s Chances: Cardell Kerr
to expressing them as higher and higher abstract scores — why was that? What
sort of scale are these numbers on and how do they interact with the game to
determine the chance of success?

Cardell Kerr: When we launched the game, we felt it was very
important to ensure that loot was something that people really felt. At
the time, we believed we had a very good handle on exactly what our
growth rate was, and how much content we as a team could realistically
maintain. We were resoundingly wrong on both counts, further
cementing [the fact] that no matter how many MMOs you make or
play, you can’t predict the future.
In Mines of Moria (and even more so in Siege of Mirkwood) we began
migrating to a system that allowed us to give players more moments
of progression; percents only really allow 100 areas of advancement.
And realistically, once you get to 90, those last 10 don’t matter as
much, so you have even less. We moved to a system that allowed us to
really showcase the difference in stats, in addition to making our game
more level relative (thus allowing those relative scores to become more
meaningful). At the end of the math/road, these numbers are used
to derive the same percentage; we just didn’t want people getting too
focused on that number.

What role does randomness play in LOTRO? When is the computer
randomly generating results during play?
Randomness is an important aspect of most RPGs. It determines

pretty much everything but the decisions you make for your individual
character’s (or characters’) advancement. In LOTRO, we use randomness
to determine a surface area that the player, through planning, can
navigate their way through.
Take a basic monster, for example. The combat is weighted
randomness, based on the decisions the character has made in terms
of gear (assuming they are the same level [as the target monster]). A
player can use fixed occurrences ([the character’s] skills) to master this
randomness, and thus succeed in a place where they might fail. Monsters
of higher difficulty (Signatures vs. Normals) require more skills, due to
the fact that randomness is more weighted in the nature of the monster
68
Will Hindmarch
than it is to the player. Our combat system is being determined on the

server before you as the player see it, though with the latest changes in
Mirkwood we’ve tightened that loop considerably.

To this day, players use the word “roll” to describe creating a new character,
even though randomness isn’t a part of the character-creation process in most
modern MMORPGs like LOTRO. Other old-school RPG terms get used too,
like “treasure table” — do treasure tables actually exist in LOTRO? How much
does my luck have to do with me getting that rare drop that I’m after?

Quite a bit, actually! While most games have steered clear of the
randomness in front of the character experience, very few have removed
the randomness on the other side (the loot gathering). We do have
treasure tables in LOTRO, though they aren’t as complicated as the ones
for Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO) or AC1, and luck can determine
the difference between a yellow or a blue piece of gear falling off a
creature.

Why make the likelihood of an essential quest item being discovered on any
given monster anything less than 100%? Why doesn’t every boar have the pelt
I need for my quest?

Believe it or not, it’s just variance. If we made them all 100%, they
might as well all be kill quests. And a game full of only kill quests isn’t
very fun at all (or so I hear). Ultimately, we’re looking to allow for
a saturation of tasks that a person can work on belonging to one of
the following categories: Explicit (one step, short play cycle), Medium
(few steps, full play cycle), Long term (multiple steps, multiple play
cycles). Variance in quest completion allows you to thread the needle of
Explicit and Medium more often. While it may get tiring, it is necessary
to mix things up.

Obscuring the game’s behind-the-scenes calculations means that it’s
sometimes less clear how the machinery of the game operates. Do you think
this makes players superstitious — believing, for example, that a streak of bad
luck can actually be the result of a game bug or that unconnected systems are
69
interacting in some mysterious manner to produce great or terrible effects. Is this

a problem?

I think that players, and people, inherently try to make patterns
out of chaos. You see this in Vegas casinos all the time (“This is my
one-armed bandit of choice!”). Opacity in terms of how numbers are
calculated certainly doesn’t help this, though. Ironically, it also masks
bugs from developers! There was a bug in AC1’s treasure system for
years that we simply didn’t know about due to how opaque our own
random number calculations were. Since then, we’ve tried to push
more information to the user as it even helps our QA team, in addition
to aiding the designer when it comes to tweaking values for fun factor.
I do think that the tendency now is to be less opaque, especially since
gaming is becoming more and more mainstream.

Why does “mainstream” equate to “less opaque” randomization? What do
you think makes mainstream game-players more interested in the transparency
of a system?

I think it has to do with the cause and effect nature of gaming
interaction. Veteran players (sometimes dubbed hardcore, but that’s a
separate argument/discussion) tend to have more experience in breaking
down systems. This action taps into their exploration drives, and intrigues
them. People that have less time to commit to learning something new,
or who are new to a genre, don’t understand the more complex/obtuse
systems, and get frustrated long before they can determine what’s going
on. There is always room for a game to have systems that do both of these
things, mind you, but the more of the former you have, the more niche
your game will become (as players who have a frustrating experience will
typically just bounce off of the game).
Sometimes players devise explanations for random events in the game, such
as believing that dealing too much damage to a boar in a single hit will ruin
the vital pelt needed for the quest, thereby keeping it from dropping as treasure.
What are some suppositions or theories you’ve seen emerge from play that just
aren’t true?
70
Will Hindmarch
Wow. There are a ton, actually! I think it’s important to note that
the majority of disconnects I see are often based on a hint of truth. In
DDO, players thought that if you used your Diplomacy skill against
treasure chests, you’d get better loot. Another good example is how,
shortly after a patch, a person [might] miss four 70% chances to crit in a
row, then post an angry message stating that we, Turbine, have changed
something.

Do you find yourself getting superstitious when you play MMOs, even
though you’ve been behind the curtain?
Ha! Not normally. I subscribe to more of the Occam’s Razor

approach, which is to say, “The less polished an interaction is, the more
I think there’s a developer somewhere, wishing either their last checkin
was approved, and/or that they had more time in beta.”

I know I’ve had days where vital quest items just never seem to drop off
the monsters I’m hunting. It’s easy to get superstitious on those days. What can
you do, as a designer, to reduce (or utilize) the sting that sometimes comes with
random chance during play? Is there anything in place to protect the player from
a string of plain old bad luck?
Absolutely. There are numerous systems (some of which we’ve since

implemented in LOTRO) that can curb that. This is typically a form of
weighted randomness that simply increases the chance that you’ll get a
rare drop as you go longer without getting one. There are some concerns
about how often you use this (performance, quest pacing, etc.), but it’s a
very useful system. Especially for situations like “land rush” where large
numbers of players are trying to crowd to a specific area.

Are there aspects of the game that are randomly generated that people might
not realize? How about the other way around?

Well, none of our terrain is randomly generated at all; it’s
handcrafted by our world team. Our pathmaps are all generated
autonomously, meaning while [they’re] not random, they aren’t placed
71
by people either. Generally, if a design feels random even though it was

handcrafted, that’s a bad thing — it shows wasted work. ;)

What about something like the Burglar class’s Gamble abilities in LOTRO?
The animation for these abilities even includes the roll of a six-sided die. Do
Gambles utilize a simple random-effects table or something more complicated?
Gambles are all about random opportunity, though their strength

and magnitudes can be increased through the Item Advancement
systems. So, in many ways, they are perfect examples of the role of
randomness in LOTRO. The basic Gamble is simply a random roll;
the player makes choices that add to the Gamble’s efficacy, weighting it
more and more in their favor.

What makes randomness fun?

The feeling that you can beat the odds. I think the concept that
a person can defeat randomness is a pervasive thing, and one that
gambling has tied into for some time.

How much do you tap into that appeal when designing the play of an
MMORPG? Are MMORPGs a form of gambling in which players wager their
time?

In many ways, MMO design is more affected by their billing model.
In a subscription style of approach, you tend to simply weigh towards
time = advancement. There may be some randomness along the way,
but you can rest assured that if you gather enough barter tokens, you’ll
get the prize you seek. Back in the day, things were more prone to rare
drops for big prizes. Now we amortize that gain as much as we can
throughout the industry.

With so much randomness involved in the actual play of an MMO, how do
you keep the game from feeling like a slot machine? How do you find the sweet
spot between the fun of a random system and the fun of the scripted, narrative
experience?

72
Will Hindmarch
The character is the big thing in any MMO. So long as the player
doesn’t see their character as a random assortment of interchangeable
pieces, we are okay. Part of the creative tension that we constantly play
with is the ability to deliver a directed experience that has leaf nodes into
more extreme versions of gameplay. This is actually our new approach to
our Epic story; we’re trying to ensure that it is a soloable experience that
everyone can partake in, delivering a compelling narrative. From there,
we have many types of gameplay that allow fans of the more random/
hardcore/esoteric systems to pursue the experience they enjoy. As usual,
making an MMO is complex; explaining one is even more so.

Thanks for taking the time to talk with me, Cardell. I appreciate it.

No problem! Randomness is an important part of RPG design, so
it’s always a pleasure to talk about it.
73
One Point Three Million:
An Interview
with Scott Nesin, Inventor
of the dice-o-matic
Jeff Tidball
Scott Nesin, GamesByEmail’s owner and proprietor, has heard it

all. “People think [the dice] get stuck in a rut,” he writes in what he
himself describes as a rant on the subject of dice. Scott’s website hosts
correspondence games played by e-mail, and it burns about 80,000 die
rolls a day for people playing games like backgammon, Gambit (a clone
of Risk), and WWII (a clone of Axis & Allies).
For a long time, the six-sided die results those three games need to
operate were generated randomly using a variety of computer algorithms,
all entirely statistically random. And even if they weren’t, the “stuck in
a rut” criticism is still ridiculous. The chances of a single player using
consecutive die rolls generated by whatever method, given how many
players use the service at once, are minuscule.
And yet, the players complained, so Scott asked them to suggest
sources of random numbers that they felt would be more random. “If
you know of a good source, I will be very happy to give it a try,” he wrote.
“I don’t mean to sound flippant or curt, I’m serious, I’m willing to try
anything at this point.” He once even started to code a roll substitution
routine for players who had complained about their die results. Instead
of giving these players truly random numbers, his program would
analyze their previous die results and skew new results toward an ideal
74
Jeff Tidball
distribution. Their results would be more random than the definition

of the word. He eventually abandoned the project, though, finding the
idea of tinkering with the dice distasteful.
On a lark, Nesin decided to build a physical machine from Lego
bricks to physically roll six-sided dice, take pictures of the results,
digitize them, analyze the pictures, and feed the results into his game
system. “Players understood it,” he said, “and no one questioned the
authenticity of the results. If there is only one truth in this universe, it
is that Legos do not lie.” The complaints died down.
But the Lego machine, which he dubbed the Dice-O-Matic, had to
be disassembled in a move, and naturally, the grumbling returned. Back
at the drawing board, Nesin tried using freely available random numbers
derived by third parties from sources as diverse as radioactive decay,
atmospheric noise, and the motions of lava lamps. None staunched the
steady flow of complaints.
So Nesin started to tinker with the idea of a “professional grade” dice
rolling machine. The expense was prohibitive, especially for a camera
that could photograph ungodly quantities of dice second by second. He
put out a request to his site’s players and got an overwhelming response.
People were enthusiastic about the idea, and feared for Nesin’s sanity if
some solution to the problem was not found.
The result was the Dice-O-Matic mark II, “a machine that can
belch a continuous river of dice down a spiraling ramp, then elevate,
photograph, process, and upload almost a million and a half rolls to the
server a day.”
The Dice-O-Matic II is seven feet tall, with an 18” × 18” footprint.
A shaft in the center of the machine run nearly its height. A bucket
elevator inside the shaft lifts dice from a hopper at the bottom of the
apparatus upward at a rate faster than a foot per second. They fly past a
camera, are photographed, and then tossed back down a spiraling ramp
that agitates them until they land back in the hopper, ready for another
trip. The Dice-O-Matic II’s aluminum frame is covered with Plexiglass
panels that allow viewers to gape in awe at the storm of randomness
within.
There are 200 dice in the machine. It takes about 13 seconds for
each one to make a round-trip. Do the math: That 1.3 million (and
then some) rolls per day.
75
One Point Three Million: Scott Nesin
2 3
Scott Nesin was kind enough to conduct an interview by e-mail

about the trials and tribulations of needing a steady stream of tens of
thousands of random numbers seven days a week, 365 days a year, and
about the joy and pain of building not one but two marvelous die-
rolling machines.
Jeff Tidball: First things first: Is there any statistical difference in the
results when you analyze, say, a million computer-generated die rolls and a
million die rolls from the Dice-O-Matic II?
Scott Nesin: Honestly, I do not know. I have not done any statistical
analysis on the results for the Dice-O-Matic, not even a histogram. I have
had many requests and offers for bulk data analysis, from cryptologists
to casino operators to publications to hobby statisticians. I have turned
them all down.
Statistically, I do not think the rolls from my machine are much
different — better or worse — than the many services out there. I think
the pseudo-random number generators built into computers are just
fine for games. The other services that use atmospheric noise, lava
lamps, radioactive decay, and the like are also just as good.
Do you have a sense of why the people who play games on your site complain
about computer-generated die rolls and not the Dice-O-Matic’s results?
I do not think it is because the rolls are necessarily any better, only
that there is less to argue about. I think they find it harder to call the
process biased or unfair when they know real dice were involved.
Does the fact that the Lego Dice-O-Matic and Dice-O-Matic II are Rube
Goldberg devices that capture the imagination have anything to do with peoples’
response?
Absolutely. The Dice-O-Matic placates angry rollers better than

every other method I have seen. It is quirky and fun, and the players
who write in with complaints generally have no idea the machine exists.
76
Jeff Tidball
When I send them a link, it catches them off guard and charms them.
The responses are overwhelmingly positive after seeing the video of the
machine in action. Only a very few have still been angry, but they are
simply people you can do nothing for.
The Dice-O-Matic shows the level of effort I have been willing to
put in to solve the “problem,” and make it apparent that I have not
shrugged off their concerns. I can honestly say “I have done all I can
possibly do,” and just about everyone agrees.
And we understand that you’re willing to go one step further for those who
still aren’t satisfied with their rolls.
Yes, I promise that if you have donated to the site and are still
unhappy enough about the rolls to let me know, then I will pull a die
out of the machine, melt it flat, and mail it to you, as an object lesson
to the other dice. I offer tangible revenge, suitable for mounting.
Has anyone ever taken you up on the offer?
None so far, which is almost disappointing. However, I find that a

great indication that the machine is performing its function well, and
that players prefer the randomness of a physical die.
Why do you think game players accept the randomness of physical die rolls
more readily than they accept the randomness of computer-generated numbers?
It is the transparency of the method that trumps all. If any part of

the process is vague in any way, the entire process will be called into
question. I have no idea how a pseudo-random number generator
works. Atmospheric noise, radioactive decay, and lava lamps are all
great sources of bulk randomness, but each of those requires sampling
an input and deducing randomness. Though each process might be
explained in great detail and have excellent merit, a player looking at
a game log filled with “unlucky” rolls will not hesitate to declare the
process flawed because it is less tangible.
The Dice-O-Matic uses a process that has been reduced to the bare
essentials: roll a die, count the pips. There is no inference required. One
77
could question the fairness of the tumbling ramp or the pip-counting,

but both of those tasks are demonstrably trivial. The only non-trivial
part of the Dice-O-Matic is producing the rolls in bulk. It takes a lot of
effort to keep the mechanical process running.
Why not just tell the whiners to take a flying leap?
That thought has occurred to me once or twice, but in the end, I

provide a service that I would like people to enjoy. The machine has
not only placated the “analysts,” but has also amused the rest. It is all
in good fun.
Can you talk about why you’ve decided to turn down requests from outside
researchers to statistically analyze the Dice-O-Matic II’s results?
First, with no analysis done my players are happy, so I have achieved

my goal. It took a lot of work to get here and I do not want to upset that
balance. If analysis shows the machine to be statistically perfect nothing
changes, the players remain just as happy as the are now. Anything less
than perfect and some players will become less than happy, and my
achievement slips away. There is no benefit for me in analyzing the data,
only risk.
Second, the rolls the Dice-O-Matic generates are perfect by definition.
Not one board game calls for players to seek a statistically perfect source
of randomness and obtain values from one to six. Instead, each says “roll
the dice.” If my rolls were statistically perfect, one could justifiably argue
that I had strayed from the rules of the game. The games do not stipulate
perfection, they stipulate dice, and the Dice-O-Matic provides exactly
that. Any statistical analysis would be moot.
Does your knowledge of statistics and randomness affect the way you
personally play games?
Yes. It is amazing how often “bad luck” will rear its head. I play fairly
conservatively, because no matter how low I feel the odds of the dice
turning to bite me are, I know they will. I count on “bad luck.”
78
Jeff Tidball
Do you play games the old-fashioned way anymore, on a tabletop, with

physical props and dice?
I have three kids now, so most of the tabletop games I play revolve
round them. I find the spinners in those games every bit as cruel as dice
are. I also have shelves full of games I have programmed or would like
to program. Viktory II is my favorite of the the global-domination genre,
and I am working on getting that on the site as well.
My wife and I occasionally play backgammon on weekend
mornings, on a board I made for her as a birthday gift, with the loser
having to manage breakfast for the family. My oldest child designed
a checkerboard table when he was four years old, so I have a huge
sentimental attachment to that one.
Do you have any dice rituals you use when you play? Do you blow on them,
shake them a certain way, punish dice that roll poorly or praise dice that roll
well?
I know the dice like to be cruel, so I try not to give them the
satisfaction of begging. I used to shake them pretty well each time I
rolled, but I tend to whisk through my list of turns when playing online,
and that habit has pushed its way into my physical games. Now my
throws are generally hitting the board as soon as my opponent’s fingers
have left their pieces. Sometimes I shamefully plead with the dice toward
the end of a close game if making breakfast is on the line. And then I
have to go warm up the skillet.
Is there something magical about physical dice that a computer can’t

capture?
After building and running the site for the last 11 years and trying to
keep the players happy, just about all enchantment with dice is gone for
me. They have been my enemy for so long that it is hard to disassociate
the physical from the computer dice. Most of my interaction with
physical dice now is trying to keep hundreds of them flowing smoothly
through the machine, and they fight me there too.
79
Do you think that other people think their dice, or dice in general, are
magical?
Only in that for every person who is unhappy with the dice, there
ought to be an opponent who thinks they are magical. But I never hear
from the latter group, so their existence is purely theoretical.
You’ve built a machine that rolls millions of dice every day and digitizes the
results. Is that crazy?
Certifiably. But realize that dealing with all the complaints was
driving me insane. Question any game site operator about the dice,
and you will strike a raw nerve. It might have taken a fit of insanity to
conceive and build the machine, but it was also the perfect cure. Having
the Dice-O-Matic has restored my sanity. Did I go overboard? Perhaps.
However I accomplished my goal, learned a lot, and have a pretty cool
machine to show for it.
Given an unlimited budget and plenty of time, what would a Dice-O-Matic

mark III look like?
Given an unlimited budget, the Legos would definitely have to be

brought back in as a major component. They add an undeniable charm
to the whole project. Maybe a room-sized Lego landscape with a couple
thousand dice cascading down like Niagara, enough to register on a
seismometer and warrant special labeling from OSHA. A conveyor to
carry the bulk of the dice back to the top, but also a fleet of Lego trains
with dump cars around the perimeter to help with the load. Something
worthy of setting up at the local kid’s museum every now and again,
exacting smiles at the nonsense of it all.
1 4
80
Jeff Tidball
As you might imagine, the Dice-O-Matic mark II is the kind of

modern marvel one must see in action to fully appreciate. Follow the
link at gameplaywright.net, search for “Dice-O-Matic” on YouTube, or
read Scott’s own, more technical account of the working guts of the
Dice-O-Matic II at GamesByEmail.com/News/DiceOMatic, where the
YouTube video is also embedded.
81
A Glossary for Gamers
Will hindmarch
The idea was to do something like Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s

Dictionary, but focused instead on the shenanigans that surface when
we play with dice. I thought I could fill a book (a little book) with
terms describing the strange ways we think and act around those little
random devils, the ways we personalize and personify our dice. So I did
what I figured glossarists do: I started looking for terms. Specifically,
I was looking out for jargon about dice and what I was calling “dice
magic” — the superstitions and strange thinking we adopt when we toy
with the bones.
The theory was that dice make us crazy. I was looking for specific
examples of dice-induced insanity. Ever blow on a die for luck? Because,
you know, that’s how dice work.
After years of listening and asking, I came to a sad conclusion and a
heartening realization. The conclusion: most people didn’t have terms
for the peculiar habits their dice provoked. The realization: we gamers
share many of the same superficial superstitions.
While I didn’t find enough habits and practices to fill a book, I
did discover a few that seem to be common across game tables and
gaming groups. Here is my attempt to name some of these behaviors
and philosophies. Maybe you’ll recognize some of them.
82
Will Hindmarch
You may already have your own terms for some of the ideas in here,
in which case I ask not only, “Where were you when I was compiling
this list?” but also “What is your jargon?” What peculiar notions do the
dice conjure in your head? What odd behaviors have you undertaken,
as a player and thrower of dice? What are you thinking when you’re
playing with dice?
6 5
action: n. the manner in which a die rolls — the solidity of its tumble,
the pleasure of its rattle, the sound of its impact; a measure of a die’s
quality as rolled. Check out the action on these metal six-siders.
astragalophobia: n. fear of dice, or of a particular type of die. E.g.,
“I won’t play a Rogue because six-siders hate me,” or “I don’t like that
game because eight-siders are mean.” (From the Greek astragaloi for
dice.)
audition: v. test a die out, typically before purchase, to see if
it generates pleasing numbers, has good hand-feel (q.v.), and makes a
satisfying sound. n. an instance of auditioning. Can I open this set to
audition these dice for my new Shadowrunner?
banish: v. to send a die away, especially to some other function. E.g.,
to banish a six-sided die from GURPS play into the Monopoly box. Or:
This thing rolls so bad, I’m banishing it to a roll-under game.
bench: v. temporarily relieve a die from play, especially for the
purposes of refreshing or recharging it. Perhaps, for example, all of that
die’s natural 20s have been used up. Bench the thing and rotate in a new
die until that one’s recovered.
capture: v. take possession of a die that is rolling mysteriously well
(or poorly), on suspicion of cheating. (Whether the player or the die is
the suspected cheat is irrelevant.) E.g., a Dungeon Master might capture
a d20 that rolls three natural 20s in a row on charges that the die is “too
good.” No way that thing rolls that well, give it here.
casting: v. giving a die its own role to play; e.g., giving a specific die
the role of a particular weapon. Some players dread dice associated with
a particular purpose — thus dice meant for goblins cannot be rolled
for gnomes, etc. White Wolf Game Studio dice arguably come pre-
cast in their roles, such that Vampire dice should not be rolled for the
83
antics of werewolves. This d4 is the dagger my Halfling got from the King of
Orksylvania.
chuck: v. throw a die far away, usually because it has failed to perform
satisfactorily. This isn’t simply putting a die in the trash; chucking
requires a good, strong throw. Great chucks involve bodies of water,
impenetrable underbrush, or the yawning night. One more 1 out of you,
stupid die, and I’m going to chuck you.
cold: adj. rolling poorly, especially over a limited time, and for
nebulous or potentially mystical reasons. A die may go cold for no
reason at all or as the result of misuse or disrespect — cold dice are a
common side effect of neglect. Behaviors such as stabling and training
(q.v.) are meant to keep dice from going cold, but individual dice may
have peculiar, individual triggers that cool them off. Cold dice share
certain traits in common with stale dice (q.v.). This d8 went cold as soon
as you touched it, Douglas.
dead: adj. no longer capable of generating sufficient satisfactory rolls;
depleted, spent. A die may be dead from the moment of manufacture
or purchase, but the term is especially apt for dice that were once live or
even hot or lucky (q.v.). Dice seldom come back from the dead. Instead,
they are sometimes retired or executed (q.v.). (See also: the well.) I think this
d10 may be dead.
deploy: v. bring a die out of its stable (q.v.) or dice bag for use. Some
players deploy dice once at the beginning of play, while others deploy
and stable their dice from roll to roll, perhaps as a way to keep them fresh:
Shoot, I need to deploy more six-siders if I’m going to use this daily power.
dressed: adj. (of dice) colored, painted, or made of materials
especially suited for the current game or campaign. That tube of dice is
dressed just right for Ravenloft!
errant: adj. a die that has gone outside the bounds of a fair roll. An
errant result is often also a wasted roll (q.v.), depending on the house’s
(q.v.) definition of a fair roll. It’s errant, but can I keep that roll?
execute: v. ritually destroy or throw away a die, typically for poor
performance. Execution generally involves permanence, as opposed to
exile (q.v.), which may be temporary. I am this close to executing this damned
12-sider.
exercise: v. roll a die between plays or legal rolls, especially as a means
of checking its current freshness (see fresh) or taking its temperature (see
84
Will Hindmarch
cold and hot). Exercise may keep a die in shape or healthily random.
Exercise that thing to get some of the fours out of it.
exile: v. reject or “fire” a die from play, typically for poor performance.
Sometimes the die is merely returned to the stable (q.v.), in the hopes that
it will regain some worth, though sometimes an exiled die is banished,
chucked, or executed (q.v.): I just exiled my last 12-sider.
fair roll: n. the circumstances in which a roll’s validity is recognized.
E.g., at some game tables, a die roll is only valid if the die stays on the
table. Some houses accept any visible dice rolls, regardless of where a
die ends up. Some houses insist that the randomness of a die roll must
be honored, no matter where the die goes, so rollers are sent crawling
under tables and behind the credenza on expeditions to find errant (q.v.)
dice and discover what sacred number they’ve delivered. It went off the
table, but it’s still a fair roll because the floor’s not less random than the table.
faith-based roll: n. a roll in which the caster averts her eyes during
the actual rolling, as if the weight of her gaze will press down on the
die with her fears or nervousness, thereby influencing the outcome.
You know he’s going to make a faith-based roll when he finally faces the Ninja
King.
formation: n. an arrangement of dice in a geometric pattern,
military formation, or other strange array, usually done between rolls
to train, refresh, or simply organize them. Dice so arranged may be said
to be “in formation.” One friend of the author’s went so far as to stand
one six-sider in formation, on its corner, in the pip of another six-sider.
She’s deployed her dice in that diamond formation again, watch out.
fresh: adj. random, especially when randomness can be considered
as a transient quality. (Players may find their dice not yielding a
satisfactorily wide range of results after a period of use or disuse, for
example.) Fresh dice are “more random” than stale dice (q.v.); that is,
they are capable of generating more unpredictable results over time.
Dice may be thought to be freshened through stabling behaviors (q.v.).
That’s the ninth 2 I’ve rolled tonight; I need a fresh die.
hand-feel: n. the quality and pleasure found in holding a particular
die or type of die. Broadly speaking, it may include everything from
weight and texture to the quality of its rattle and the satisfactory clunk
the die makes in actual use. (See also: action.) This die can’t roll for a damn
but it’s got great hand-feel.
85
hot: adj. rolling well, especially for a limited time, and for nebulous
or potentially mystical reasons. Hot dice may stay hot for a number of
rolls or a span of time — perhaps predetermined at the beginning of the
hot streak — or until some unlucky act interferes with their fortunate
run; no one knows for sure. Dice that are “on a roll” are hot. A hot die is
sometimes traded between players, as a means of getting the maximum
number of legal rolls out of it before it “goes cold.” Compare to lucky
(q.v.) dice, which are considered to be luckier in the long term, but can
also enjoy hot streaks. Let me try that die, it looks hot.
house: n. the governing individual or body that adjudicates and
adjudges the rules of play; i.e., the house in “house rules.” It is typically
the Gamemaster or the result of player consensus, but in matters of
determining dice rolls to be legal or illegal, the host (whether a player
or not) sometimes takes on the role. Consider the situation in which
multiple games are going on in a single room, for example. The house
says we don’t chase after errant dice until the end of the night, so we don’t go
crawling under other games’ tables.
live: adj. in active use, capable of generating satisfactory rolls. Any
die seeing regular use in play, or even sitting unused but available in a
stable (q.v.) or dice bag, can be said to be live. This bag is for live dice only.
lucky: adj. rolling well, especially over a longer period of time. Lucky
dice generate pleasing results with greater frequency, either due to some
inherent harmonics with their owner (“They’re only lucky for me”) or
to some mystic favoritism. Compare with hot dice (q.v.), which are lucky
in the short term or when “on a roll.” Lucky dice may be good for a
particular purpose (e.g., rolling high or low) or lucky in general. This is
my lucky d10; it usually rolls a 7 or better.
molecular-settling method: n. a means of training (q.v.) dice whereby
desired numbers are placed face-up so that the die’s molecules settle
onto the opposite face, rendering it heavier and thereby more likely to
land with that face down and the desired face up. Under this school
of thought, live dice (q.v.) are mostly platonic not-quite-solids, with
molecules stirring and settling with every toss of the die, until such
time as the die calcifies and becomes dead (q.v.). Shawn trains all his dice
to peak numbers using the molecular-settling method.
natural: adj. an unmodified number as it appears on the face of a
die. E.g., when a d20 returns a result of 20, said result may be described
86
Will Hindmarch
as “a natural 20.” n. a specific occurrence of a number showing on the

face of a die. Anything but a natural 1 and I stand a good chance of slaying
this dragon!
pendulum, the: n. a pattern of rolled results in which the die
generates a. increasingly higher or lower numbers in sequence, or b.
alternating good and bad results in sequence. E.g., a d20 that rolls
a 20, then a 1, then a 20, then a 1, is exhibiting the pendulum. Also,
sometimes, the imaginary force that affects the die, causing it to exhibit
the pendulum pattern. People, the pendulum is in full effect tonight.
polyhedral delusion: n. a condition in which a player makes tactical
gameplay choices based on which dice will be involved. For example,
never using a great-axe so as to avoid twelve-siders, or playing clerics
because a player “does better” with d8s. (See also: astragalophobia.) She
doesn’t play barbarians because she says d12s hate her.
polyhedral size obsession: n. an extreme, peculiar, or notorious
interest in dice of unusual size. Size obsession may lead players to
purchase, for example, dice that are too big for their usual stable (q.v.) or
too small to read. Have you seen my new set of miniscule laser-etched micro-
Lilliputian polyhedrals?
praise: v. express approval or gratitude toward a die that has behaved
admirably in actual service. Praise may include promotion, verbal
affirmation of a die’s quality, or a temporary vacation from the stresses
of play. (Note that such a vacation is distinct from a removal from play
for punishment — the dice presumably appreciate the difference.) You’re
a good d20, so pretty and loyal!
promote: v. award a die a more prominent position, typically in
recognition for services rendered. E.g., a d20 that rolls a natural 20
three times in a row might be promoted to service as the player’s go-to
die, or cast (q.v.) in the role of the player’s character. After those three crits,
I think I’m promoting this die to be my main roller.
punish: v. inflict or impose a penalty on a die for behavior deemed
not suitably random or personally disloyal. Punishments are typically
temporary (but see exile, etc.). Examples include temporary removal
from play and open mockery. You’re an ugly, impudent little jerk, and you’ll
take your punishment and like it until you decide to roll like a good six-sider
should.
87
refresh: v. restore a die’s action or freshness (q.v.), usually by rolling it

a few times between active plays, but also by blowing on it, whispering
to it, or otherwise reinvigorating the thing. I’m going to give this die a
minute or two to refresh before I roll it again.
retire: v. remove a die from play, perhaps permanently, especially for
distinctive service. Dice are most often retired when they are seemingly
depleted (see the well), when the character or campaign with which
the dice are associated comes to an end, or, if a die has just rolled
phenomenally well, simply out of recognition for exceptional service.
This d20 scored a crit in battle with the Emperor of the Dreaded Crown, just in
time to save us from a TPK — it’ll never roll better than that, so I retired it.
rotating: v. switching from die to die during play, typically to avoid
letting a die go stale (q.v.). I’m rotating these two d20s until one earns my
favor with a crit.
sanctum: n. a hidden or lucky storage place for dice between play
sessions. A sanctum is grander than a dice bag; indeed, dice may be
placed in their sanctum while still in their carrying bag. A sanctum is
typically a place thought to be imbued with luck, a place where dice
can refresh and recharge, where dice are ritualistically placed, time
after time, when habit graduates to ceremony. Examples include the
spot right on top of the Player’s Handbook, the bottom of the proper
backpack, and the freezer. These were only in the sanctum for half the week,
so they may not roll right.
schedule, the: n. a mythical roster of rolls scheduled for a particular
die. According to the philosophy of the schedule, every die has a
fixed volume of returns or a strict order in which it reveals its hidden,
predetermined results. A die roll is thus not a random result but the
revelation of a previously undisclosed value from a list of imminent
and inevitable rolls. The idea is that whatever result the die is going
to generate next is fixed; by rolling a die needlessly — or, say, exercising
it (q.v.) — you might discard unwanted rolls or waste (q.v.) perfectly
wonderful results. The schedule for this die seems to be nothing but 2s.
stable: n. a common storage place for dice during play or between
sessions; a dice bag. Compare with a sanctum (q.v.). Put those d8s back in
the stable until we recharge our encounter powers.
88
Will Hindmarch
stabling: v. returning dice to a stable, especially after every roll or

deployment (see deploy). Stabling dice may cause them to stay fresh or
hot (q.v.). If you keep stabling and deploying your dice, every roll’s going to take
forever, Dave.
stale: adj. not very random, especially when randomness is considered
as a transient quality. Stale dice are “less random” than fresh dice (q.v.);
that is, likely to generate unwanted predictable results over time. A stale
die, for example, might roll the same mediocre number over and over,
or it might return only unwanted results for a length of time; i.e., go
cold (q.v.). A die may go stale as a result of too much use or not enough
use, depending on the thinking of its attendant player. I’m going to roll
this d10 before it goes stale.
test: v. roll a die one or more times prior to a game-significant roll,
to see what sort of results the die gives. Good results may be game-
favored numbers (e.g., rolling high for D&D) or any suitably random-
seeming array of results (affirming that the die has not gone stale [q.v.]).
Whether testing is meant to reveal the luck of the die or the luck of
the player varies with the tester or even with the particular instance of
testing. Compare with exercise (q.v.). Give me a second to test this die before
I roll for real.
themed: adj. colored, decorated, or made of materials especially
suited for the current game or campaign. These dice are themed for
Shadowrun.
training: v. preparing dice to roll favorable numbers, usually by
resting them in one of two stances: a. with the most favorable number
showing (“at attention”), so the die “gets used to” or “in the habit of”
rolling that number, or b. with the least favorable number showing (“at
ease”), so the die “gets tired of” that number and escapes to alternatives
when rolled. See also: molecular-settling method. I’ve been training these
things for two hours, they’d better be ready.
wasted: adj. a die roll generated out of play or out of bounds. Typically
restricted to a perfectly welcome number generated during idle rolling,
e.g., when a natural 20 is rolled during exercise (q.v.) or simple fiddling,
that 20 is wasted. This concept is related to that of the well (q.v.). You just
wasted a perfectly good 19, rolling that thing for no reason.
89
well, the: n. a mythical supply of rolls contained in each die and

accessed through the ritual of rolling the die. According to the philosophy
of the well, a die has only so many instances of each particular number
before the die goes dead (q.v.) — the die can only roll so many 20s before
it runs out, for example. Each roll of the die therefore depletes one result
from the well of results, even if the roll was made between plays. The
well of results may or may not be tied to a schedule (q.v.) of forthcoming
rolls. The concept of the well is related to the idea of wasted rolls (q.v.).
This thing’s well is empty.
whiff: v. roll a useless or unhelpful number, especially one that is
far removed from a useful roll yet not even as interesting as the worst
outcome possible. For example, rolling a 2 on 1d20 in Dungeons &
Dragons. I spent the whole night trying to slay this giant lich, but I whiffed
every time.
90
Wonderbones
Wil Wheaton
I have this dream, that one day I’ll be out walking in a large, flat field that
hasn’t been plowed in so long, there isn’t much more than the suggestion of rows
beneath the bright green grass and moss-covered stones. Just over a low stone
wall, a shallow creek bubbles toward the sea.
There is a single tree in this field, a tree so ancient, one could be forgiven for
letting one’s imagination find the face of an Ent in its trunk. In my dream, as
I cross the field, a bolt of lightning forks out of the sky and hits the tree, which
naturally explodes. I collect a few chunks of heartwood, and using only a tool
made from the jawbone of some long-dead animal, I work those chunks of wood
into a matched set of seven perfectly weighted dice.
I take them with me to a con, quietly enjoying the jealous gazes of my fellow
gamers when they tumble out of my dice bag onto the table. When I roll my first
twenty, the DM says, “That is a critical success,” but I correct him.
“I believe you mean it’s a Natural,” I say, as a light bulb above our heads
explodes into a shimmering shower of sparks.
5 6
While I’m sure that dream seems a little silly to people who think
“dice” begin and end with those little white cubes you use when playing
91
Wonderbones
Monopoly, I bet at least some of you who have dozens or hundreds of

multi-colored, strangely-shaped polyhedrons overflowing from bags and
filling drawers in your homes will understand the desire to not only
craft another set, but a magic set of mystical bones that not only looks
and feels as wondrous as it is but, having been borne of your own sweat
and tears, will never be out to get you.
Now, listen, all desire to make magic dice aside, I’m not a superstitious
guy. I love science and game theory, and I’ve been known to drive my
wife crazy while I work out the optimal play based on counting cards in
a “friendly” game of Sorry! I know that the dice are not really out to get
me... except, of course, for those times when they are.
We have all experienced the times I’m talking about. It’s not when
we need a critical natural success — we expect to miss those rolls, and
are pleasantly surprised when we actually make them. I’m talking about
the times when we just need to roll better than an 8 on a d20, those
times when we have 12 good faces on a 20-sided die — a 60% percent
chance — to succeed, when all the dice on the table seem to subtly
vibrate with joy, knowing that a 60% percent chance of success also
means a 40% percent chance of failure. You know that weird, high-
pitched noise you sometimes hear when you’re about to make one of
those I-should-probably-nail-this-so-why-am-I-so-nervous rolls? That’s all
the dice at the table talking to each other, getting ready to take their
revenge for various slights, starting with all those times we left them in
their bag at the bottom of a stinky backpack in junior high. (Don’t be
too harsh on the dice, though; if you only got to have contact with one
other human in your entire existence — a gamer, no less — who jealously
guarded you and ensured that you never knew the touch of another
soul, you’d probably be a little maladjusted and revenge-minded, too.)
One of my favorite Things in Things We Think About Games is
unsurprisingly about dice, and it goes something like this: don’t waste
a lot of time blowing on your dice or doing other rituals before you roll
them, because it doesn’t really effect the outcome of the roll. Unless,
that is, blowing on your dice or doing other rituals before you roll them
makes the game more fun for you to play.
I played a pretty famous D&D session with Scott Kurtz and the
guys from Penny Arcade — Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik — which
was recorded and released as a podcast. Jerry (Tycho from Penny Arcade)
92
Wil Wheaton
used a d20 that he’d owned since junior high school. The die was so
worn it was practically round, and it required an FBI forensic team to
see the numbers once it stopped rolling across the table.
While facing the Big Bad Boss Guy Who Was Going To Kill Us,
Jerry rolled back-to-back 1s on that d20, blowing his daily power twice.
It was statistically improbable, but there it was: two critical failures in a
row, and it looked like the DM was going to score a TPK.
Jerry was stunned, and Mike (aka Penny Arcade’s Gabe, who at the
time hadn’t played much D&D) told Jerry that he was the worst D&D
player, ever.
Jerry looked across the table at me, and said something about how
he was going to have to not use that d20 any more, and I could tell that
he was more upset by this realization — that the d20 he’d had for his
entire life as a D&D player hadn’t just betrayed him, but was Out To
Get Him — than he was with the fact that two blown rolls mere seconds
apart had put our entire party (and the entire adventure) teetering on
the brink of failure.
Of course we all knew intellectually that he just got phenomenally,
incredibly, unbelievably unlucky... but it was a lot more fun to embrace
the feeling that his beloved d20, pale blue with once-black numbers,
had plotted for 25 years, waiting for that precise moment to unleash its
revenge.
What wasn’t imagined, what was as real as the four of us sitting
around that table together, holding our breath while wondering what
devilry the DM was about to unleash, was how genuinely sad Jerry was
when he put that d20 back into his dice bag.
That sadness, that real, tangible sadness that can be attached to
something as seemingly insignificant as a few ounces of cast resin, is
why I have my dream, and why I wander into every field I can find and
hope for a thunderstorm to appear. Because if I can ever make my own
set of wonderboy dice, I don’t think I’ll keep them for myself. I think
I’ll give them as a gift, to a fellow gamer who I know will take good care
of them.
93
The x Factor
mike Selinker
This is a story about why my life is better than yours. Sorry. I’m sure
I can come up with a story about why your life is better than mine,
like that night the drummer from Iron Maiden had you in a headlock,
though the photo in Kerrang! magazine’s all blurry, and really, you’re
having trouble recalling how he got you kicked out of the Playboy
Mansion anyhow. That was pretty sweet. But this isn’t that story.
This story is about an FBI agent, and things moved from the Midwest
to the Pacific Northwest, and a big blue bag of dice.
2 3
It’s April, 1997. I’m in Renton, Washington, tapping out some no-
doubt-brilliant innovation in game theory. My phone rings. It’s Brian
Lewis, Wizards of the Coast’s chief legal counsel. Though Brian is a
lovely fellow, I don’t always look forward to his calls. When he wants
to see me, someone’s jammed a wrench into the works of the game
industry. Sometimes Brian needs me to remove it, sometimes he needs
me to jam it in tighter.
This time, I’ll hazard that the problem involves Dungeons & Dragons.
Wizards, through the machinations of president Peter Adkison and
94
Mike Selinker
new vice president Ryan Dancey, is pulling off the coup of a lifetime,
buying the venerable TSR, Inc. for the big-business equivalent of a jelly
donut. TSR has produced the D&D roleplaying game for two decades,
but it has fallen upon hard times, born of player-base fragmentation
and fear of innovation. On April Fools Day, Peter came riding in like
a paladin on a charger, promising hope and market supremacy to the
downtrodden of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
However, there’s the small matter of moving the desired elements of
TSR two thousand miles across the country to Wizards’ headquarters
here in Renton. This is a long and cumbersome process, and on this
very day, TSR is still squarely in Lake Geneva, being dusted off and
sorted out by bookkeepers and product managers. In Renton, there are
just a few people who know anything about the behemoth we have just
acquired.
I am one of those few. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, I hung
close to TSR, writing the occasional adventure or magazine article for
D&D. I put myself through college that way. I know the game like the
back of my hand. Truth be told, though, I don’t like it as much as I
used to. The collectible card game is the new hotness, and board games
are rising phoenix-like in Europe. Who has time to roll polyhedral dice
these days?
Brian is of a like mind. But today, he needs me to be a D&D expert.
Doubtless it involves sorting out the royalty payments on a Gord of
Greyhawk novel, or figuring out which Ral Partha miniatures fall under
our copyrights, or some other mind-numbing task.
“What is it, Brian?” I ask, teeth firmly gritted.
“Mike,” he says. “Can you write a scene for The X-Files?”
I’ve never seen the show.
“Absolutely,” I say.
1 1
It’s January, 1993. It’s morning in America, with a bright new presidential
administration heading into office. I am drinking heavily.
I am in a bar in Milwaukee. This is no ordinary bar. This bar is
called the Safe House, and it is a spy-themed bar. You need a password
to get in. There are secret doors and trick mirrors and chairs that rise up
95
The X Factor
through the floor. The bar is subdivided into espionage-themed areas of

the world: there’s a Hong Kong section, and a Moscow tea room, and
an ooh-la-la Paris bistro. I am currently in Berlin, just over the wall from
Checkpoint Charlie.
My friend Tim Beach, himself a designer at the aforementioned
TSR, is celebrating his 30th birthday. We are stacking inverted shot
glasses as high as our foreheads. Out of the corner of my bloodshot eye,
I see a guy I know, and through him, I see a girl.
I remember this girl. We were rolling dice earlier in the day. I was
judging a D&D scenario — something about origami frogs — and she
was there. I don’t remember talking to her, but I do remember noticing
she was at the table. I tend to notice things like that.
The guy is going to score points with this girl, he thinks. Even earlier
in the day, I had whined about a computer disk containing some older
D&D scenarios I wrote on something called a “CP/M machine.” Now,
such things are detritus, dysfunctional and unloved. But the scenarios
are locked in that disk, and nothing I can find can read it.
“Mike,” says the guy. “I am going to make your day.”
“I find that difficult to believe,” I say, flipping over another
shotglass.
“Evon has a CP/M machine.”
So in lieu of introductions, I stand up and kiss the girl on the lips.
Then I offer her the only remaining chair at the table. I don’t know
what happens to the guy.
4 4
It’s May, 1989. Special Agent Fox Mulder is in Baltimore. This is a

Season 5 flashback episode called “Unusual Suspects.” In the episode,
Mulder meets a trio of conspiracy theorists named The Lone Gunmen,
including a long-haired geek named Richard Langly.
Episode writer Vince Gilligan has labored to find the perfect setting
to expound on Langly’s geekiness. This, he decides, is a game of Dungeons
& Dragons. Works for me.
The scene as written involves the character Langly playing the
character Lord Manhammer (solid!) engaged in a gambling game
of some sort, presumably at an inn with a name like the Dancing
96
Mike Selinker
Doppelganger. He is wagering for real money, it seems. No one will

take Lord Manhammer’s wager, until a hapless fellow named Elron the
Druid agrees to match his fifty-dollar bet. Then Langly picks up the dice
and…
Well, what, exactly? This is what the X-Files people want to know.
What would a real D&D player from 1989 say?
I take the script back to my desk, and turn over a few phrases.
“A critical hit!”? Naw, too trite.
“By the power of Greyskull!”? Too cutesy.
A few hours later, I send back my revisions. The X-Files folks are
ecstatic. I’m not. I know what Hollywood is. My words will get churned
and burned into something unrecognizable. And no one will ever
know.
5 2
It’s September, 1980. I’m in Seattle, opening a blue box with a dragon
on the cover. This is the Dungeons & Dragons basic set, the first release
where the game is codified into a mass-market form. It is en route to
selling a million copies, one of them to my mom’s boyfriend, for me.
He thinks I’ll like it.
I do. I get inspired by the adventure strangely numbered B1, “In
Search of the Unknown.” The adventure lets the Dungeon Master
— that’s me, for the first time a master of anything — choose the
monsters and treasure for all the rooms. I trap orcish raiding parties
in rooms behind gelatinous cubes, blissfully unaware of the ecological
consequences of my decisions. From my airplane-chair DM seat, I run
my wide-eyed 13-year-old friends through my creations. I am king of the
world.
I get fascinated by the oddly shaped dice. They’re cheap plastic, and
I have to use a grease pencil to make the numbers legible. The 4-sider
has razor-sharp points. The 20-sider has two sets of 0-9; the tens column
hasn’t been invented yet. Neither has the d10. It’s platonic or bust.
And I notice an odd behavior among my friends. They bring their
own dice, and they call certain ones “lucky.” They blow on them for
good fortune; they conduct elaborate shaking rituals; they ignore
cocked results and rolls that land on the floor. They are mythologizing
97
The X Factor
randomness. They have regressed a thousand years.

I do not do such things. At 13, empowered by the Tell Me Why
series of kiddie-science books, I understand physics and probability.
Dice are valuable because they are random. They are no more likely to
produce a high number than a low number, no matter what has come
before. This I explain. My benighted friends gently comfort me, then go
back to calling the black dice “evil.”
As such, I do not begin the process of hoarding dice in the manner
of my friends. I get a small dice bag with a TSR logo on it, and put the 20
or 30 dice I will ever need inside. This number never increases. Various
dice enter my collection after rolling to my side of the table; various
dice leave my collection after being vacuumed into oblivion. Over the
next 25 years, I retain my original blue-box dice for sentimentality, and
not many more.
Well, the metal ones, of course. They sound scary.
5 5
It’s August, 1995. Evon and I are newly married, holding our wedding
reception in the Safe House, the spy-themed bar in which we shared our
first kiss. Gamer bliss is ours.
We’re back in Chicago, packing up the apartment for a drive across
the country. Attention turns to our separate game collections, now
heading for the fateful amalgamation into one über-collection. We
overlap primarily on the Dungeons & Dragons material. Duplicate runs
of Dragon magazine and Monstrous Compendia get folded in upon each
other, threatening to break the backs of the movers.
It is now, two and a half years into our relationship, that I first notice
her dice bag. It’s made of lustrous blue velvet and tied with glistening
silver cords. It contains dozens of complete sets of ornate dice, some
pink, some glittery, some that change color at the touch. It’s even got
the original grease-penciled 20-siders from the blue box, even though
she would have been nine when that box came out. Evon’s a cute chick
that plays D&D, so guys from coast to coast have gifted her dice from
the heart. The bag is a riot of color, and it makes a satisfying clackity-
clack whenever it moves. It’s a dice bag’s dice bag.
“Neat dice bag,” I say. “Where’d you buy it?”
98
Mike Selinker
“Buy?” she scoffs as only a new wife can. “I made it myself.”

We get to Seattle, and the boxes get unpacked. IKEA brings us
shelves for our game books. Her dice bag gets a place on the top shelf.
Mine gets buried somewhere. I don’t miss it. We’re married now.
What’s hers is mine.
6 6
It’s June, 1997. The X-Files people are calling back. “We’re shooting
here in Vancouver,” the prop lady says. “Langly needs books for his
D&D game. They need to be from 1989. Can you provide those?”
“Absolutely,” I say. “I got you covered.”
1989… 1989… This is a time when things are in flux. In early 1989,
TSR releases the 2nd Edition Player’s Handbook, a landmark tome that
signaled a massive shift in the world of D&D. Gone are the demons,
the devils, the assassins, the naked harpies, the tables on how to mix
poisons. D&D gets scrubbed clean.
This is greeted with alarm by many fans. In the spring of 1989, players
turn up at conventions with buttons reading “Ye Revision Sucketh.” A
crazy hybrid of old and new editions develops, where players use the
sanitized Player’s Handbook while their diehard DMs use the original
Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual from a decade earlier.
Langly, I decide, will be in one of these conflicted games. This
means he needs a brand new 2nd Edition Player’s Handbook from 1989.
We can’t use mine, because mine’s a review copy with a giant hole
punched through the entire book so that it can’t be sold. I search
around Wizards and find, in Peter’s office, a near-mint 2E PHB, with
his name written in the corner of the first page. I butter him up with
tales of how he’s the bestest company president ever, and he parts with
it.
The 1st Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide is a different story. That
needs to be beaten to hell. This I can provide. My 1E DMG’s spine
is so ruined from teenage use, it’s been sewed up with electrical tape.
My 1E Monster Manual isn’t much better. Et voilà. I bundle those with
Peter’s PHB and a DM screen, and call the producers for a Vancouver
address.
“But what about the dice?” the prop lady asks.
99
The X Factor
What about the dice, I wonder. With the FedEx deadline ticking
down, I scour my house for my dice bag. My meager little dice bag. The
kind that no self-respecting D&D player would be seen with on TV.
What am I to do?
“Take mine,” Evon says.
“There’s no guarantee that any of this is coming back,” I say.
“You’ll get it back,” she assures me.
Hollywood. There’s no way she’s getting her handmade dice bag
back. But I send it off anyhow. The producers are once again ecstatic. I
am once again less so.
4 3
It’s August, 2000. I am again in Milwaukee, bestriding the halls of

Gen Con, the largest gaming convention in America. In the rafters I
see the colossal banners of Dungeons & Dragons’ 3rd Edition, the most
promising debut in the history of roleplaying games. It has come far in
the last three years, re-envisioned by three genius game designers named
Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, and Skip Williams.
I hold a sheaf of 100 photocopied chapters in my hands. In each of
these 12-page documents, Monte has written one of the finest pieces of
writing in D&D’s history, Chapter 1 of the new Dungeon Master’s Guide.
It tells prospective DMs how to craft campaigns that sing, just like
Monte’s. I expect the fifty people attending my first two-hour seminar
will like them. I made a few extra just in case people want one for their
friends at home.
This seminar is the preview of the DMG, which comes out next
month. I’m the least senior of the four creative directors on the 3rd
Edition relaunch, helping to mold the work of the best game design
team I’ve ever seen. But mostly I’m getting out of their way. They know
what they’re doing. But hey, I’m one of the better public speakers on
the team, and I’ve been running 50-person seminars at Gen Con for a
long time, so I’m leading the panel.
Then I turn the corner into the seminar room, which I rapidly
discover seats 700, and “stands” maybe 100 more when at capacity. It’s
above that now.
100
Mike Selinker
I turn to one of the younger Wizards staffers and hand him my

corporate AmEx. “Three blocks over on Monument Circle there’s a
Kinko’s. You have 1 hour and 55 minutes to get back here with 800
copies. I will buy you a steak dinner at Morton’s if you make it.”
He gets the steak. Wizards’ accountants don’t mind. D&D is back.
2 4
It’s November, 1997. A horde gathers around my TV to watch the

broadcast debut of “Unusual Suspects.” I remind them once again:
Hollywood. Their hopes should remain firmly in their pockets.
It starts off pretty good. Richard Belzer shows up in the role of
Detective John Much from my favorite show, Homicide: Life on the Street.
Dig Dug makes an appearance. We all explode with laughter when
Mulder pulls out a cell phone the size of a Welsh corgi.
But then the D&D scene arrives.
“Okay ladies, who’s down for fifty?” Langly asks as the camera pans
from long-haired geek to long-haired geek. “Fifty bucks? Anyone? Fifty
bucks? Oh man. My diaper-wearing granny would bet fifty! Come on!
101
The X Factor
There’s no game here.”

A Weird Al-ish geek takes his bet. “All right,” he says. “Fifty.”
“Elron the Druid bets fifty!” Langly proclaims, as the camera pulls
out to show a table of dragon statuettes and — yeah — there’s my D&D
books, and Evon’s dice. “Cash only, Elron! I don’t take no personal
checks from the bank of Middle-earth!”
Okay, so far so good, but here’s the clincher. This is really where
they could screw up the scene. I think of all the possible variations,
none of them good.
But everybody erupts in applause. The climactic line is exactly as I
wrote it. Langly shakes the dice and shouts:
“Come on, natural 20! Daddy needs a new sword of wounding!”
Hollywood. It’s everything I hoped it would be.
2 2
It’s December, 2005. I’ve moved on from Wizards, having helped

relaunch D&D in the thunderous 3rd Edition, breaking every sales
record on the planet and revitalizing roleplaying. I’ve founded Lone
Shark Games with some of my buddies, and I’m enjoying showing
off my early successes. But I’m still hanging with my friends from the
glory days. Right now, we’re in Anaheim, at the Gen Con SoCal game
convention.
Ed Stark, a fellow creative director from that relaunch, calls me over.
“Hey Mike, I want to introduce you to someone,” Ed says. “Dean,
this is Mike Selinker. Mike wrote the line, ‘Daddy needs a new sword
of wounding.’”
Dean Haglund furiously shakes my hand. He’s the actor who played
Langly in that episode and many others. “Mike, I just gotta tell you
something. When I’m signing autographs, that line is the one everybody
asks me to write.”
Dean and I become fast friends. We’re part of the lore, you see. The
truth is out there, and we are it.
102
Mike Selinker
5 6
It’s May, 2009. I’ve downloaded “Unusual Suspects” from iTunes. I’m
going back over these events for the first time in years. And looking
back at them, I realize why my life is better than yours.
Oh, it’s not because I got to write a signature line of the coolest
TV series on the planet. That could have happened to anyone. Think
of all the requirements that made me that guy: The X-Files had to write
it into the mythology. The writer of the episode had to need help with
the scene. Wizards had to buy TSR that very month. All the people who
worked at TSR had to still be in Lake Geneva. And I had to be in the
Wizards office that day. That’s just too much randomness, too lucky a
die roll. It could easily have been you instead.
When we opened the box that came back from the set, Evon’s
dice bag was inside. But she couldn’t have known it would be there. I
married a woman who made her own dice bag, and was willing to lend
it to me to help me out, with no certainty she would ever see it again.
That’s why my life is better than yours.
But hey, at least you got that Playboy Mansion thing.
103
Daryl Hannah’s Dice
Saved My Marriage
Matt forbeck
Once upon a time, way back in early 1992 — about the time of the
dawn of the World Wide Web — I took a job selling dice for Koplow
Games. Jim Koplow’s business was growing, and a lot of that had to do
with how much time he spent at conventions, hand-selling his dice and
building his company’s reputation as the leading producer of quality
dice in America. Success came with its own challenges, though, and
Jim thought that if he could find someone to take over for him on the
convention circuit he could then spend more time back in the office
running the company. All he needed was the right person.
At the recommendation of Will Niebling — one of his sales reps and
a longtime friend of mine — Jim hired me. At the time, I was young and
engaged to a beautiful woman named Ann, whom I was going to marry
that summer. I was making a name for myself as an up-and-coming
game designer, but that wasn’t quite enough to pay my bills. Jim offered
what seemed to a hungry young writer like me an absurd amount of
money to work something around two conventions a month for him,
and I said yes without really understanding what that would mean.
Even at that point, dice and I had been friends for a long time. I’d
grown up playing Farkle, a push-your-luck game that uses six standard
six-sided dice. My great-grandmother Eleanor Pulaski taught it to me as
104
Matt Forbeck
Tysiąc (we mangled the pronunciation as TI-shuns), the Polish word for
a thousand, and the whole family played it for quarters every time we
got together.
Later, I discovered Dungeons & Dragons, the game that introduced
all sorts of funky polyhedral dice to the world. When I first played the
game, though, we couldn’t find any of those dice in my hometown of
Beloit, Wisconsin. We had to close our eyes and pull numbered chits
(tiny bits of cardboard) from a cup instead.
When I finally got my hands on an actual set of polyhedral dice, I
was thrilled. It was like moving up from riding a bike to driving a car.
All the random numbers you wanted at lightning speed, just as long as
you kept those bones on the table.
Jim sold (still sells, actually) more dice than I’d even known existed.
These ran from tiny six-siders that were five millimeters on a side all the
way up to handcrafted, six-inch ceramic dice sold as genuine pieces of
fine art. There were literally thousands of different styles in between.
I started out tagging along with Jim as he ran the shows, watching
him work and learning as I went. The idea was that I’d eventually do the
shows myself, leaving him that much-needed office time he coveted.
Some of the shows, like the New York Toy Fair, were fantastic.
Others, like the Atlanta Gift Show, were horrible disasters. (We were
perched in a new section of the skyscraper in which they held the
convention. I think I saw three buyers the whole weekend.) Rarely did
they fall in between.
Since Ann and I were planning our wedding for that summer, I
called home a lot. Cell phones were bulky and expensive in those days,
and calling from hotels cost even more. Without knowing what I was
doing, I ran up huge bills that sucked up a good chunk of the change I
earned from every show. Always a generous guy, Jim covered me the first
time, but warned me about ever doing it again.
Worse, though, Ann and I missed each other terribly. Only seeing
each other every other week or so wasn’t working for us. Not even half a
year into the job, I was trying to figure out how I could gently back out
of it without ticking Jim off too much.
Then he called me up and fired me.
Ann and I celebrated that night, but I later got to wondering exactly
why Jim had let me go. Honestly, I wasn’t a model employee. While I
105
Daryl Hannah’s Dice Saved My Marriage
loved both dice and traveling, my heart wasn’t in either when I was away
from Ann that much.
Still, there were some specifics. Jim told me the straw that broke
that particular camel’s back was watching me leave an exhibit hall
before everyone else was gone. I’d asked him if we should go. He
gave me a shrug that I took to mean “Sure,” but apparently meant
something like, “Make up your own mind and right or wrong I’ll
watch to see what you do.”
My suspicion, though, is that it all started at the New York Toy
Fair earlier that year. That was the first time I’d ever been to that show,
and I was just stunned. It packed the entire Javits Center, jamming
1.8 million square feet of downtown Manhattan with toy and game
makers peddling their wares to stores from around the world. It was like
stuffing the entire world of family entertainment into a single building
so you could see it all in a day.
Koplow Games had six hundred of those square feet, packed high
with dice of all varieties. I met loads of intriguing people that weekend,
like Frank Miller’s math teacher, who’d come up with a way to teach
math with dice. I had a late-night visit to a gambling equipment store
with a steel, roll-up gate. Inside, the owner showed me how he’d mixed
the paint on particular sides of a set of craps dice with iron filings.
By pressing a switch with his foot, he could activate an electromagnet
built into the craps table that could skew every roll. That put me off
gambling for life.
A couple days into the show, I spotted a woman wearing a big
sweater, black plastic-rimmed glasses, and a black baseball cap with the
letters “XL” embroidered on the front in white thread. Spike Lee’s film
Malcolm X had started production that year, and all sorts of people were
running around with caps like that but with just a single X on the front.
I got the joke instantly and walked over to tell the woman and her sister
how funny I thought it was.
As I chatted with the two ladies, I noticed that the woman in the hat
held her program book against her chest, blocking her badge. Her sister,
though, wasn’t so concerned about her own privacy, and she’d left her
badge exposed. Her last name was Hannah.
106
Matt Forbeck
I looked back at the woman with the hat and realized she was Daryl
Hannah, who’d been in some of my favorite films at the time, including
Roxanne and Blade Runner. “I know who you are,” I said.
She gave me a pained look and kindly asked me to keep quiet about
it. She and her sister wanted to be able to walk around the show like
normal folks and not deal with the hassles of celebrity the whole time.
I, of course, agreed.
Then she asked me for some dice.
At trade shows like the Toy Fair, it seems like everyone’s giving out
something, either as samples or flat-out advertising. We got requests like
this all the time, and Jim was sometimes happy to hand out a few dice
to those who asked nicely. In fact, he and Will Niebling kept a handful
of tiny (those 5 mm) dice in their pockets at all times, just to give out as
“business cards.” They worked too. People always remembered the guys
who gave them those little dice.
So when Daryl Hannah asked me for some dice, I said, “What
would you like?”
She pointed at a tube of silver polyhedrals. That’s right: gamer dice.
A d4, d6, d10, d12, and d20, all coated in a chrome-silver polish and
stacked in a clear plastic tube.
That sounded harmless enough. It wasn’t like she wanted the wildly
expensive art dice. I figured at the worst I’d just pay Jim for the dice out
of my own pocket. I handed them to her with a grin.
“Thanks,” she said. Even under her slapdash disguise, she had a
dazzling smile. Then she and her sister walked off into the show and
out of my life.
After they were safely out of sight, I spun around and turned myself
in. I told Jim and all the other helpers in the booth who I’d just met and
what I’d done. They were all smiles too. Well, except for Jim.
“Which dice did you give her again?” Jim asked.
I pointed to the display of silver dice, now shy a single tube.
“Those are prototypes,” he said. As in “not yet in production” and
“needed for showing to prospective buyers.”
Whoops.
I apologized up and down, and Jim forgave me for it right away.
Still, though, my money’s on that being the first step down the slippery
107
Daryl Hannah’s Dice Saved My Marriage
stairs that led to me losing that job — a job that I didn’t want anyhow
because it was hurting my relationship with my fiancée.
So, here’s to a pretty girl and the dice I let her wheedle out of me.
That momentary lapse of responsibility she inspired may have cost me
a job, but if so, it saved my marriage.
108
Rolling in the aisle
Jess Hartley
Last summer, two of my dearest friends got married in Laguna Beach.

Mid-September, at least in southern California, might just rival the
traditional month of June for perfect wedding weather. The drive
to the wedding site was gorgeous, highlighting the rich tapestry of
natural landscapes, rocky hillsides and glimpses of the ocean, mingling
seamlessly with the immaculately maintained grounds and gardens of
multi-million dollar mansions. The views were gorgeous, no matter
where we looked, and since it was southern California, copious traffic
and frequent slow-downs gave us plenty of chance to enjoy the view,
especially as we entered the city proper.
Except for the sign reading “Wedding Park Here,” the lot was
indistinguishable from many we’d passed on our way into town —
spartan gray concrete bordered on at least two sides by multi-lane traffic
and not a wedding site to be seen from its utilitarian expanses. I could
see the concern in the eyes of the rest of my traveling companions.
Although none of us were actually a part of the wedding party, we were
all spruced up for the ceremony, and crossing multiple lanes of heavy
traffic in wedding regalia isn’t exactly the introduction one expects to
a joyful ceremony.
“Trust me,” I reassured them. “It’s going to be amazing.”
109
Rolling in the Aisle
If I hadn’t had the pleasure of accompanying the happy couple

when they made their arrangements earlier in the year, I would have
been worried myself. But I’d already made the journey, across the river
of speeding cars, up the paved hill, around the curving driveway and to
the beautiful destination that awaited us. I led our little group towards
the wedding site, and the sounds of traffic disappeared almost as soon
as we left the sidewalk. The steep banks and curved path up to the
terrace blocked both the sight and the sound of the busy street, and tall
trees arched up overhead, offering dappled shade from the afternoon
sun. Before we reached the top of the hill, the roar of traffic and the
smell of blacktop were replaced by birdsong and the scent of blossoming
bougainvilleas. I smiled at my companions as we moved to meet up with
the groom and best man. Things had already taken a turn for the best,
and the city miraculously dropping away behind us was just the first of
the surprises the afternoon held in store.
The wedding was a delightful combination of geektastic and
traditional. The site was amazing — a secluded two-tier terrace of eclectic
elegance and coy charm. The lower level of the terrace was set up for the
reception, with formal table settings, highlighted by bowls of tiger-lilies
and flame-colored roses reminiscent of the bride’s striking auburn hair.
Above, in the chapel level, a gazebo twined with blossoming vines and
kiwi branches featured hand-carved mirrors to reflect the color and light
back and forth. Before the ceremony began, the crowd slowly gathered
— small groups entering and mingling with those who’d already arrived.
The gathered guests were as colorful and vibrant as the surroundings.
While both families were very mainstream, the bride and groom (and
the majority of their friends) were avid gamers.
It wasn’t as easy as you might think, however, to pick the friends and
gamers out of the crowd. While a few had defaulted to the stereotypical
“geek” uniform (jeans and t-shirts, in this case with a suit jacket over the
top in honor of the big event), most were resplendent in elegant garb —
appropriate for the afternoon ceremony, but fully as fancy and fine as
that worn by the rest of the non-gamer guests. The beautiful attire and
the gorgeous garden surroundings were only eclipsed by the smiles on
the faces of those gathered.
Just before the wedding, while the bride was donning her elegant
gown, the groom called the couple’s friends together for a pre-nuptial
110
Jess Hartley
chat. He thanked us all for attending (some of us had traveled from

several states away for the ceremony) and handed out dice he’d bought
as wedding favors — elegant black stone-flecked ten-siders with silver
numbers incised into each side. Like the couple themselves, the gift
was unique and meaningful. The couple met at a game, fell in love
over gaming, and had made many of their mutual friends through the
gaming community. I met them both for the first time while we were
all in-character at a LARP, and we’d bonded first as our characters and
then as players and eventually as dear friends. While it might have
seemed a strange gift to outsiders, it was perfect for us, and after a bit
more conversation and some conspiring whispers, the groom and his
best man made their way off to do final preparations, and the rest of us
gathered in the top terrace of the wedding grounds where the ceremony
would be held.
The ceremony was beautiful. Like the couple themselves, it was
both deeply touching and sometimes silly. The groom and his best man
approached the top terrace where the rest of us had gathered with a
matching set of smug smiles, as if they shared some happy secret between
them. There was a bit of jostling, good natured teasing whispered under
their breaths as they took their place beside the man who would officiate
over the ceremony, who was also a dear friend of the bride and groom.
The bridesmaid was stunning, in a dress that complemented the
floral-flames of the bouquet she carried. Later we’d discover that
the dress was her own creation, and the color-matching just a happy
coincidence — she didn’t know anything about the flowers or color
scheme beforehand. Like many other aspects of the ceremony, it was
unexpected but perfect; unplanned but better than chance alone could
account for.
As the bridesmaid joined the men at the head of the aisle and the
music shifted, all eyes turned back towards the stone stairway. The
bride’s ascent was a moment of sweet perfection that held everyone in
thrall — especially her husband-to-be. Always lovely, for the length of her
stately promenade up the steps and down the aisle, she was something
even more. Wrapped in white silk, her shoulders bare and hair swept
into an elegant twist, she was more than just a bride on her way up
the aisle, she was every woman approaching the man she loved, every
girl’s long-awaited dream of bridal bliss, and every man’s lady coming
111
to share his side.

Like everything else about the wedding, the ceremony was purely
“them.” The groom’s vows were beautiful, praising his wife-to-be as the
force that made him more than he could ever be without her. Touched
to tears by his words, the bride countered with her own vows of love.
She had every geek in the audience smiling from ear to ear as she quoted
Eddy Izzard’s famous monologue, claiming that her love for her soon-
to-be spouse tongue tied her so that all she could come up with was
“D’ya like bread? I’ve got legs! Love ya, bye!” Her bridesmaid discretely
handed her something that the crafty pair of ladies had hidden in the
flowers near the altar, and when she delicately bopped her spouse-to-
be on the nose with a bread-roll in the shape of a tiny French loaf,
every geek in the room burst out in joyous laughter. While some of the
gathered family may not have gotten the reference, no one could have
missed the deep and abiding love that the pair had for one another or
the fact that they wholly understood each other, whether anyone else
did or not.
Vows exchanged, the officiant turned to the crowd and spoke his
fateful words. “If anyone here has any reason why these two should not
be joined in holy matrimony, speak now, or forever hold your peace.”
Upon his question, there was a pause, and then the sound of
rolling dice came from every corner of the mid-summer garden where
the ceremony was taking place. There were some confused looks from
both sides of the family, but every gamer there knew instantly what was
happening — the clatter of dice is universal and instantly recognizable.
You see, while the groom’s vows may have been the more traditional
of the pair, he was no less a gamer-geek than his lovely lady. After
handing out his ten-sided wedding favors before the ceremony, he
gathered us near and invited us to wait for the official to ask if anyone
had any reason for the bride and groom not to be wed… and then to
roll our dice and improvise from there. Being gamers, we eagerly rose
to the challenge.
The results and improvised “objections” varied. One person rolled,
looked down and shook their head. “Nope, failed my Persuasion
check,” he said sadly. “I’ve got nothin’.” Another protested with his best
dramatic monologue “in the name of Science!” Another guest claimed
that the officiant and wedding party had won initiative, so she would
112
Jess Hartley
have to protest later.

The gamers in the crowd (and a goodly portion of the families) took
the interruption in stride, especially since the bride and groom had
turned to face the crowd and were grinning from ear to ear. I was sitting
next to an older member of one of the families, however, who was quite
perplexed — and a little perturbed — by the proceedings. In an effort to
help explain, I showed her my die and quietly told her about the role
that gaming had played in the happy couple’s courtship, and the role
that dice play in gaming.
“You know when kids are young, and they play Cops and Robbers
or Cowboys and Indians?” I waited for her hesitant nod before going
on. “It’s kind of like that. But to keep the game from devolving into ‘I
got you’ and ‘No, you didn’t!’ we use rules and pieces of paper where
we mark down how strong or smart or good at shooting a gun our cop
or cowboy is.” (I know, I know, it doesn’t end all the arguments, but for
the sake of a non-gamer, I oversimplified.)
She seemed a bit confused and I realized I hadn’t explained the role
(or roll, if you’ll pardon the pun) of the dice in our games of pretend.
“We want things to be more like real life,” I explained. “It’s not
much of a challenge if the strongest person wins every fight, or the
smartest person always finds the answer to a problem. We use the
dice, added to the ratings for each person’s character, to represent
the chance of even the best athlete having a poor day, or an average
thinker having a sudden moment of brilliant insight. It makes it more
like real life that way...”
She’d never seen anything but the standard six-sided dice before, so I
showed her the pretty ten-sider that the groom had given out, explaining
how the ratings normally went from 1 to 10, with 1 being low and 10
being very good. She even listened patiently while I explained how you
could even get more than a 10, since in the games we played most often,
you could reroll any 10s and add your second roll to the first one.
While she may have not been completely comfortable with my
explanation, in the end she seemed to be okay with going along with
the fun that most of the rest of the crowd was having, and in time the
ceremony proceeded along in its delightfully formal/geeky manner.
But in stopping to talk to that confused matriarch and explain the
symbolism of the dice to her, I found myself thinking about topics
113
that I might have normally not pondered — among them, the role
of dice in games that involve an alternate reality, and why including
their randomization is important when attempting to create a fictional
environment that mimics real life in any way.
Sure, some roleplaying games don’t use any randomizers. No dice,
no cards, nothing to resolve challenges save for a comparison of static
ratings between the parties involved and the universe at large. But that
doesn’t effectively mirror the way things work in real life and most game
systems recognize that.
In most RPGs, as in life, there’s only so much you can do to control
the game. You can build your character well, utilizing all the min-maxing
tricks and rules tweaks available, so that you begin the game from a place
of power. You can play frequently, garnering as many experience points
as possible during the course of the game. You can spend your points
carefully, shoring up any starting weaknesses and strengthening those
statistics on your sheet that you feel will be the most useful in the future.
You can play thoughtfully, using your own personal logic and tactics to
choose the best paths forward for your character and supplementing
on-the-sheet attributes with your own skill. But ultimately, in most
games, there’s a certain amount that’s left to fate. The dice roll and no
matter how big your dice pool, or what kind of bonuses you’ve finagled,
sometimes they reveal failure. Sometimes, despite your skill, the wrench
slips, the wind shifts, you step on a branch, or you blink at just the
wrong moment, and all your preparations are for naught.
Life’s like that.
You can study hard, exercise, eat right, pay your car insurance and
your taxes, go to work every day, treat others in a fair and forthright
way, but there’s no guarantee that things will go as you planned them.
Illness strikes, accidents happen, things break, jobs are lost despite our
best efforts. In fact, every action you take, every choice you make is
affected by outside influences and attributes, either subtly or blatantly.
Nothing we do is wholly a result of our own “character sheet” — our
own quantifiable skills. The often-unknowable outside world always has
its role (or its roll) in the outcome.
In some cases, this is the game equivalent of rolling a 1. Critical
Failure. Fumble. Dramatic Loss. Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies. It sucks,
but it’s a part of life. We don’t get to control everything. We can’t.
114
Jess Hartley
Knowing that is an essential part of growing up, becoming adults,

and it allows us to take responsibility for the things we can control, to
whatever extent we can control them. Acknowledging that bad things
can happen helps us to prepare for the possibility of them happening,
which helps mitigate their effects. Knowing life will contain some bad
rolls, and that they happen to everyone, helps us accept them when they
do happen and get through the hard times. Luckily, in play, as in real
life, the truly epic fail is a rarity. In most cases, even when our well-laid
plans go astray, it’s a matter of slipping and catching ourselves, perhaps
slowed down a bit, perhaps not as effective as we’d like to be, but ready
to go again the next round.
And, it’s not all bad, either. There’s only a slim chance of dramatic
failure (at least in the gaming system I use most often), but the chance
of success is much higher. Many times, those unforeseen factors don’t
spell disaster — they offer opportunity: A test that just happened to
contain the questions you most studied for. A green light when you
really needed one. The cop who’d already pulled the other guy over
as you sped past. The friend who thought of you when that new job
opened up. Things you had no control over, but which still worked out
in your favor. For all that we crave control in our lives, the same outside
forces that sometimes thwart us are often the ones that bring us the
potential to leap beyond our status quo and truly succeed.
And for every roll of the die, there is the slim but ever-present
opportunity to reach the stars. Because you see, my friend, “10s explode.”
That same randomization that can trip us up also means that we have the
chance to achieve more than we ever thought possible, more than our
skills and attributes and tactics could ever combine to create logically.
Sometimes we are struck with moments of sheer genius. Sometimes we
are inspired to masterpieces. Sometimes we receive manna from heaven.
Through no logical efforts of our own, sometimes the things we do or
try inexplicably multiply beyond our wildest dreams, and we get to keep
re-rolling those real-life 10s. We find ourselves landing that dream job.
Writing the perfect song. Nailing that hole-in-one. Being in the right
place to save a life. Meeting our soul-mate.
You can’t orchestrate those kinds of things. You can set up the
groundwork, and improve your odds, but in the end, the dice fall where
they may.
115
No matter what we do, some things just remain out of our control.
But that’s what makes life truly worth living, isn’t it?
I still have my “wedding” die the groom gifted me with that day. In
superstitious gamer fashion, I held onto it throughout the wedding trip
and long beyond. It’s now kept in a corner of my writing desk drawer,
its silver-engraved face turned to a permanent “10.” In part, this is my
own little gamer-charm for the happy couple. It’s a tangible form of my
hope for “explosive” success on their behalf, for them to always have as
much happiness, success, and whatever positive random factors I can
wish for in their lives. Every time I see it, I think of my friends, and send
a little happy thought their direction. I don’t know if I really think or
believe that this will help them out, or have any effect whatsoever, in
truth, but it can’t hurt.
But that little “success” die serves another purpose as well. It
reminds me that the randomness of life — in play or in reality — is part of
what makes it precious. Every effort has a slim chance of unpredictable
failure — but also of exceptional triumph. Each roll of the proverbial
or literal die brings, along with the risk, the possibility of unforeseen
opportunity and a slim, but ever present chance of seemingly impossible
and explosive success.
Those, my friends, are odds I’m willing to take.
116
The Dice They Carried
Russ Pitts
I hadn’t used my dice in years. Wasn’t sure I still had them, even.
I used to carry them in a small, brown leather bag. It was rough, like
coarse suede, and drew closed with simple strings. My father bought it
for me one summer at a gift shop in Albuquerque.
That was 15 years and three states ago. I took the bag home with
me to Texas, and it may have traveled with me to California, but I’m
damn sure it didn’t make it to Massachusetts, where I lived in the fall
of 2003. Then, as I scoured my rented apartment outside of Boston for
the dice I’d been carrying, unused, for so many years, I was fairly certain
they were now tucked into a velvety bag a bottle of whiskey came in.
The suede sack having been discarded long ago. A sign of something,
perhaps.
I was wrong in any case. I must have stashed something else in my
whiskey container. The dice I found stashed in the closet of a guest
room, tucked into a red velvet bag that had once contained an academic
achievement medal. I still have the medal, in a case with all the rest, but
the bag must have, at some point, been reallocated for the purpose of
holding dice. I must have found the dice once before, cradled them,
thought about them and put them into a new bag. I must have dreamt
about using them again, rolling them as I set off on new adventures.
117
It must have been recent, the bag change, but I didn’t remember it.
Maybe I did it in my sleep. Seems to me now I did a lot of things in my
sleep back then, like I lived in my sleep. Once again my thoughts turned
to the ubiquitous whiskey bags. So many of them. All empty.
Dice found, I prepared myself. It had been a long, long time since
I’d played a roleplaying game, and now I was off to play with a group of
people I hadn’t even met. It felt a little bit like the first day of school. I
was nervous, and in spite of the fact I’d been playing since I was ten, I
didn’t know what in the hell to expect. I was, to be completely honest,
a little scared.
I must have used the bathroom ten times before convincing myself
to leave the house. I had a drink to steady my nerves and screw up some
courage — a bravery potion — and even after another it was questionable
whether I’d actually go through with it.
3 4
I discovered the campaign by accident, talking to a coworker. I’d spent

about 15 months slumming it in Boston, pretending to write a novel and
getting nowhere, when the empty ache in my bank account convinced
me it was time to suck it up and get a job. So I applied for a position
as a production manager at an outdoor theater, and that’s where I met
Neil.
Neil was a boisterous, obstinate geek from Maine whose CD
collection consisted mainly of Lord of the Rings soundtracks, Enya-esque
harp and voice orchestrations and Jethro Tull. It wasn’t a stretch to
imagine he played D&D, but we never talked about it. Folks our age
didn’t. It was like being gay in the 1950s. There were secret rituals,
handshakes and signs one undertook to covertly alert one’s fellows of
his preference. The normal folks couldn’t spot the signs; they would
never know. But if they did, it would not be pleasant. We grew up in a
time when normal people didn’t understand roleplaying. Feared it, and
sought to destroy it. Where I grew up, Dungeons & Dragons was banned
by civil ordinance, and playing it was actually a crime. You just didn’t
admit you played, even if you did.
I got to know Neil over the course of the following months, and
when the summer theater closed up, we moved together to a new gig,
118
Russ Pitts
teaching technical theater at a local college. It was only there, after

almost a year, we finally spoke of gaming. And only then, by accident.
He’d asked me to hand him a screwdriver, and I did, explaining off-
handedly that it was my favorite. That it was +2 to awesome.
“Ah-ha!” he shouted. “I knew you played!” He laughed, and then
showed me his dice. They were purple and opalescent. Glittering and
strangely dark. They fascinated me. He had multiple sets, he said. He
bought them like candy. We talked for a long time about dice, about
gaming and about life. Slowly, we became friends.
6 5
Ultimately it wasn’t the whiskey that convinced me to leave the house

and go to Neil’s to play with his friends. It was the dice. The idea of
them sitting idle for another year shamed me. The idea I’d pass up a
chance to do something I loved, and looked forward to, because of
nerves and anxiety. I decided I was better than that, stronger. I picked
up my dice and drove the 15 or so miles to Neil’s house.
Just getting there was a hair-raising experience. I’d been in New
England for over a year, but I still wasn’t used to the way New Englanders
drove their cars. Quickly, aggressively, rubbing fenders like NASCAR
drivers. They didn’t blithely float across lanes, expecting you to get out
of their way, like LA drivers. No, they assumed you wouldn’t get out of
their way, out of spite, and actively took steps to disabuse you of that
notion. Driving in New England requires focus, skill and a skin thicker
than the mounds of snow plowed off the highway. It took me two years
to master it.
By the time I found Neil’s house, my stomach was in knots, my
hands were shaking and I was desperate just to get out of the car.
Unfortunately, getting out of the car was what I was most afraid of.
It was a lose-lose scenario. I double-checked the address, took a deep
breath, clutched my velvet dice bag and opened the car door.
The first thing I noticed were the swords. Perhaps I shouldn’t have
been surprised, but I was. Where I came from, we didn’t roleplay with
swords. Didn’t own swords, even. Texas is gun country. When you grow
up holding a firearm, bladed weapons seem silly.
119
Neil and his game group owned swords. Multiple swords. They
talked about them, held them and wore them. Took them to Renaissance
faires. Yes, they also attended Renaissance faires. I’m pretty sure they
didn’t actually use the swords, perhaps didn’t even know how, but they
liked to pretend. I’m not sure where the line exists between roleplaying
with swords and doing so without, but there was one, and I was on the
other side of it. Call me a roleplaying conservative.
Neil greeted me at the door, wearing his sword — and a full costume.
Yes, they also had costumes. Cole, Neil’s friend, sewed costumes.
Professionally. He was a professional male costume sewer. My head was
on the verge of exploding when I met him. We’d later work together,
he sewing costumes, I building sets, but I never got over the idea that
this wasn’t a thing a man was supposed to do. Like wearing shorts or
carrying a purse. Not a straight man, anyway.
I made my introductions and took a chair at the table. Neil sat
next to his wife, who was dressed like a princess, complete with tiara.
Her dice were pink. Cole’s wife was also there, along with his child.
And they each had a set of dice, although the kid didn’t play. She
just watched cartoons and drank juice. The wife wore a Japanese-style
schoolgirl outfit, complete with striped stockings, and her dice were a
rainbow of colors in myriad sizes, as if she couldn’t decide which she
liked best. Cole wore strange, large, round goggles and a T-shirt printed
with Japanese characters. His dice were jet-black, and he fondled them
as if they were alive. He was the Dungeon Master. He giggled a lot, like
Mozart. The kid seemed the most normal of the bunch.
Cole introduced me to my character, a druid. I’d never played a
druid, but I’d always wanted to, so I was thrilled. The other characters
were tailored to the players’ tastes, I learned. This was, apparently, Cole’s
M.O. Neil always played a large, boisterous fighter. His wife, a magic-
using princess; Cole’s wife, a coquettish thief. Cole played the parts of
all the non-player characters, introducing each with a flourish, creating
strained, squeaky voices for each. He fidgeted constantly, reaching out
and touching people when he talked to them. I started the game sitting
in a jail cell, accompanied only by my animal companion, a stark white,
large-eyed, cat-like character, played by Cole, that could turn invisible at
will and only said one thing: “Miyew?”
120
Russ Pitts
What I remember most of that night is Cole, his goggled face turned
sideways, peering up at me in a way I can only describe as “kittenish”
and saying “Miyew?” his warm, slightly damp palm resting on my arm.
I’d ask a question, he’d answer “Miyew?” I’d make a statement, he’d
answer “Miyew?” I’d swear at him to, no really, just tell me what to do,
and he’d respond “Miyew?” I’d known Cole for less than 20 minutes
before deciding we’d never be friends. He was as alien to me as if he
were actually from Japan, not simply an otaku.
Adding to my confusion were the changes to the game itself. When
I’d last played D&D it was called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. In fact,
some of the battered, plain dice in my little red bag had come from
that original boxed set. I’d read the books on lazy Saturday afternoons,
doodling new dungeons on spare paper and preparing for the next play
session. I studied AD&D the way rocket scientists study calculus and
most kids my age studied porno mags. I knew that game backward and
forward. And then they changed it.
Cole and company were playing something called Version 3.0. I
knew nothing about it. Gone was the THAC0, the foundation of all
combat encounters. Now there were extra races, extra classes and they’d
even screwed with armor class. It was almost too much to bear. But the
rolling of dice was the same, and a 20 was still a 20.
The differences slowly resolved themselves in my mind, with the
game and the people, and I eventually started having fun. My druid
was taciturn, foreign and distrustful. Cole had, in a stroke of genius,
tailored a character to someone he’d never met. I admired him for that,
and threw myself into the character, using my animal familiar to solve
seemingly unsolvable puzzles, and the druid’s abilities to get the party
out of jams they’d have otherwise had to fight their way through.
I don’t remember much about the adventure itself. I’d come into
the game in the middle, and the details of the plot escaped me. But I
remember having fun. I remember, after long absence, allowing myself
to leave myself. To inhabit the persona of another person entirely, in
another time and in another place. Something I’d done repeatedly in
real life, but without the distance and fantasy the game allows. The
key components of making the transition fun. Most of all, I remember
letting go of my inhibitions, my reservations, my cultural bias, and my
121
arrogant assumptions and having fun sharing an adventure with like-

minded people.
Cole and I never became friends, per se, and Neil and I eventually
had a professional falling-out, ending our adventures. But for the few,
brief months we played together, I reveled in the chance to get out of
my own way — out of my own head — and have fun.
As I write this, my dice are sitting on my desk, beside my computer,
still inside the red velvet bag. There are more of them, and I’ve rolled
them in many adventures since, but for now they’re waiting patiently to
be picked up again and rolled. To carry me outside of myself and to new
adventures. That day can’t come soon enough.
122
How Dicelessness
Made Me Love The Dice
Fred Hicks
Pretty much everything that has happened to me, as a game publisher,

happened because I wanted dice in my dicelessness.
Beginning with college, I played a lot — I mean a lot — of the Amber
Diceless RPG. We had several local games of it there, and when that
wasn’t enough for me I went and sought out an online roleplaying
server called AmberMUSH (the MUSH stands for Multi-User Shared
Hallucination, sort of like Zork meets the Internet) where there was
Amber aplenty going on. For the next many years, I soaked in the
stuff. Sure, we bent, folded, and mutilated the setting, tossed around
house rules galore, but all of that was rooted in Eric Wujcik’s startling
proposition to throw the dice out.
Amber taught me a lot about game design. It had its system problems,
sure, but it knew deep in its bones about the importance of building
a community of play and shared fiction (I’ve never since seen a game
encourage quite its level of outside-the-session player contribution) and
the importance of giving plenty of advice and examples. Amber was as
much about its culture as its system, something which has proven out as
various AmberCons continue to this day with a surprisingly malleable
and rich tradition of play.
123
How Dicelessness Made Me Love the Dice
But Amber also allowed certain warts to be prominently on display.

The GM’s level of skill and finesse was absolutely paramount to making
things work well — and there were plenty of points in the system where
things boiled down to “and now the GM makes a judgment call.” When
you play and run the amount of Amber that I did, it gets real clear real
fast what problems exist in that judgment call — even when the best of
intentions are focused on the act.
Consistency was certainly an issue. Did my notions of what Sorcery
or the Logrus or the Pattern could do stay the same from session to
session? Typically not. But then there was the flip-side of consistency
— without the dice, the way I or any other GM might make the call
over time just wasn’t that random. Call it cognitive clustering or simple
predictability, after a while the diceless adjudication stuff failed me in
one crucial way. It didn’t, by itself, intrinsically produce any kind of
feeling of suspense.
So following that malleable tradition of house rules and system
hacks, I committed Amber heresy and reached for the dice.
In this case, they were Fudge dice, those wonderful little cubes of
blanks and plusses and minuses, with their center-weighted numerical
distribution. Here, I had something that could ease the transition
from the diceless brain — a 4dF roll (four Fudge dice rolled and tallied)
had a nice fat cluster in the center, meaning on average you performed
at your expected level of ability, which was a lot like the “just look at
the stat, and that’s how well you do” ethos of Amber. They were tactile
pleasures, and they gave the process of play its own music: the grab,
the pause, the fidget, the clatter. And to us old-hand diceless types,
they had some of that familiar predictability, but also carried the heady
scent of fickle chance that didn’t come with the bias of GM judgment
calls.
My sons and daughters of Random finally had some randomness
to play with.
Proceeding from the what-felt-novel-to-us proposition that dice are
good, I grafted some of the Amber concepts and all of the setting onto a
lightweight chassis built out of parts from the Fudge system, and we were
off to the races. It went pretty well, even though it got cut short by my
fairly precipitous move to California.
124
Fred Hicks
A while later the Next Fudge Amber Game came up in conversation.

More rules hacks were desired. Always it was a tug of war between the
diceless urges and the dice. Maybe a rule that let a player spend some
resource and modify the results of a roll would add some entertaining
spin to the system. Maybe we could go “statless.” And so on.
The result of that conversation, and the chock-full-of-dice Amber
campaign that followed, are what produced the Fate RPG, and from
that, the rest of Evil Hat Productions’ history as a publisher. It all traces
back to playing diceless aplenty — and missing the bones.
I have about 400 of them sitting next to me right now.
125
Gott Wuerfelt Nicht...
But the Devil Does
Jesse Scoble
Love and hate, it has been said, are split by a razor’s edge. I confess to
having such a relationship with dem bones. Some days the dice spilling
from the dice bag are filled with infinite potential as they glimmer under
the kitchen lights. On other days they seem nothing more than cheap
chunks of plastic: impotent, lifeless, and cursed.
Erick Wujcik quite enjoyed the quote, usually attributed to Albert
Einstein: “God does not play dice with the universe.” Wujcik was the
madly brilliant designer behind the Amber: Diceless Roleplaying Game,
and a proponent of “story” over “game.” He was all about interesting
scenarios and empowering the players, and believed — for some games
at least, such as Amber — that dice detracted from player choice and
powerful drama. In Roger Zelazny’s “Chronicles of Amber” novels,
characters were the heroes or villains they made themselves out to be.
It was a world/story/game about choices, and karma, and personal
investment — a world where the second best swordsman would not,
could not beat the best… unless, of course, #2 changed the playing field.
It was a world where nothing happened by chance, so it made sense to
cut the random factor down to nothing. It was a world where choice
ruled rather than fate, and Erick designed the game so that less was
much, much more.
126
Jesse Scoble
And I believe all of this to be true.

I’ve been gaming for half my years, I think; more, probably, if you
want to get all technical about it. I had the Red Box for Dungeons &
Dragons with the really crappy red, or blue, or white, plastic dice that
came with a crayon to fill them in. (Seriously, who came up with that
idea? Was it so expensive to make a real set of dice back then?) And I
vividly remember early trips to the gaming store (Excalibur Hobbies,
in Malden, Mass., known as the Hobby Bunker, today) where they
had clear plastic bins filled with gem-like dice. I am hit with a wave of
nostalgia at Gen Con when I walk by Crystal Caste’s tubs of dice, or hear
Lou Zocchi of GameScience discussing the proper way to manufacture
them. Those dice are full of gaming possibilities — they represent hours
of dungeon delving, and flashing blades, and streaking fireballs. The
rattle of dice on the table, or the rustle of them in a velvet bag, causes
my mind to spin up a hundred scenarios: a campaign based in the icy
North where a noble house must defend against wildlings and giants;
men-in-black hunting vampires and mages; psy-op spies battling through
the Cold War; a Paladin’s Crusade to hunt down and slay a rampaging
dragon; intrepid pulpy investigators sifting through chthonian journals
and traipsing across the world to recover the shrunken head of Ken Hite.
Dice represent all of that and more. I confess I don’t remember
rolling up my first character (is that like admitting I don’t remember
my first blow job?), but I do remember joining the lunchtime gamers
at Glebe Collegiate High School, and how they introduced me to
Champions’ dozens of d6s. I didn’t like it much, because we could never
get through more than a single combat — if that! — during our short
lunch hours. But when one of the key members, Erik Waddell, invited
me to play in his Fantasy Hero game at the Ottawa University club, I
fell in love — something about a cavern of kobolds, my first dry-erase
battlemap, and my Minotaur warrior armed with a brutal battle-axe.
With every handful of dice the kobolds fell like dominos, until we had
to crawl over the bodies to recover the gold.
The first game I ever ran was back in Boston, a disastrous attempt
to play the classic Keep on the Borderlands module for D&D. The players
were more interested in rolling on random treasure charts than
proceeding through the dungeon. Success at the Ottawa U gaming
table gave me the courage to try again. I invited a number of my new
127
Gott Wuerfelt Nicht... But the Devil Does
Canadian friends and had them roll up characters. Even then, I was
starting to acknowledge the power of the dice, and how a bad roll could
skew things. Imagine rolling a character (using 3d6) and getting a stat
of 6 or less. Or three stats under 7. Or no 18s. Early rules even stated
rolling the stats in order, so it was nigh-pointless to decide you wanted
to play a hulking barbarian beforehand, if the dice might give you a 12
Strength, 9 Constitution, and 17 Intelligence. From the beginning we
were using house rules to mitigate their potential damage in chipping
away at our collective story: you can roll 4d6 and keep the best three,
put ‘em where you want ‘em; or roll 3d6 and reroll 1s. That’s how you
create heroes! It amuses me when computer gamers still use the term
“roll up a character” as slang for creating a new character, even if there’s
nothing random about it.
That second attempt at Borderlands was a huge success, and ended in
a climatic battle with the fearsome owlbear that dwelled in the depths.
The owlbear is a frightening abomination — the powerful frame of grizzly
bear mated to the head of a giant owl. The air in its caverns was fetid and
rank, a thick miasma of rotting marrow and coppery blood. It attacked
the party in a mad rush, stunning them with its ear-splitting hoot, and
nearly flaying the wizard with a devastating rake of its claws. Several
rounds of chaotic fighting followed, and it looked like the owlbear
would feast on the wizard’s kidneys with its razor-sharp beak when the
paladin landed a natural 20 and took a huge hunk out of the beast with
his greatsword. The owlbear’s head spun almost all the way around as it
searched out the paladin with its baleful gaze. But before it could strike,
the half-elf thief attempted a sneak attack. Everyone was down to less
than 5 hit points — whoever the monster attacked next would almost
certainly die. If the thief missed, it might draw the owlbear’s rage onto
him. The thief rolled and, BAM, 20, plunging his short sword into the
creature’s lung and silencing it forever.
Wujick once told me a Gen Con story from back in the Milwaukee
days, where he and Gary Gygax were feature GMs running some sort
of “dungeon of death” for a full audience hall. The players would come
up, one by one, and see how long their characters could survive. The
audience of other would-be heroes watched each person try, and while
they began at the same starting point, later players had the knowledge
of watching all the others fail before them. Wujick described with
128
Jesse Scoble
maniacal glee, without a trace of malice, how Gary would ponderously

roll the dice for each trap and saving throw and ability check while
Wujick would crush, maim, dice, slice, decapitate, disembowel, and
defenestrate characters whose players were too slow to describe their
actions. As the event wore on, the balance of players shifted until nearly
the entire room was sitting before Wujcik, laughing with gallows humor
and eagerly waiting for their own memorable demise.
Back in my high school D&D group, we played with an Australian
kid named Emmett that I introduced to gaming. Emmett was very
much a power gamer, and more interested in character power than
story. He was so concerned with having an edge that he became
obsessed with an orange, translucent d20 that another one of the
gang owned. Emmett convinced himself that this d20 was lucky (or
loaded), and he bought it for $20. And he did very well with it for the
next several adventures, rolling 19s and 20s as needed. Was it really
lucky, or loaded, or was it a by-product of an orange die with unpainted
numbers? Since you needed to be about two inches away to read the
blasted thing, once he’d bent down to the table, nose almost touching
the die, to “interpret” the roll, no one could reasonably dispute him.
Regardless of how he got the good results, after a few weeks he started
to feel anxious about the die. No player should have that kind of luck,
he claimed, so he took a hammer to it in the driveway one spring
day. Reduced to a fine orange powder, the magic d20 would roll no
more criticals. Maybe it was his guilt that swung the hammer? I never
asked.
One of my favorite games was a Call of Cthulhu campaign run by a
grad student named Todd. Cthulhu is a dice-heavy game, centered on a
core percentile roll. Todd knew his Lovecraft backwards and forwards.
He was working on a doctorate in medieval studies, steeped himself in
1920s noir motifs, and wore a jean vest emblazoned with a flaming goat
head at the center of a pentacle. His descriptions of the game world were
dry but riddled with arcane detail. His NPCs were academics, tinged
with hollow madness, or femme fatales who had grown up fast on the
arms of predatory men, and his puzzles were cryptic but decipherable if
you were willing to look at them orthogonally. And the group was into
it. We were playing hard hardboiled detective who lit up the darkness
with our cigarettes, romanced our sexy assistants, and butted heads with
129
allied eccentric industrialists — all trying to do the right thing or at least

stop the world from falling into the Abyss.
Todd would never have described himself as a role-vs-roll kind of
guy. He looked funny at the Vampire LARPers trickling in to the edges
of the club on Friday nights. He was a gamer, dammit, and this was a
game — not improv, not a “shared story” — but he took tremendous care
in crafting his world and characters. It encouraged us to try harder, to
live and breathe the Lovecraftian atmosphere. Yet no matter how clever
a bit of dialogue we came up with, or how elaborate our plans, if those
dice missed by one percent, BANG!, the sound of failure would resound
loudly through the lonely halls of Ottawa U. In one memorable session,
we interrogated the hell out of a captured dark priest, but despite the
roleplaying and the leverage we had on this guy, our strongman blew
his Persuade roll by 3% and we thus failed to learn the ritual needed to
stop the Black Church’s demon summoning. The GM had to scramble
to deal with the consequences, which can be a fine response when it
is borne from interesting player/character choices, but frustrating and
jangling when imposed by a random dice roll.
Dice problems crops up across myriad game systems when players
whose characters are supposedly experts in their chosen field (be it a
SWAT sniper, a cybernetics surgeon, or a master thief) have a reasonable-
to-high chance of failing “difficult” tasks that would actually be second
nature to them. While an average Joe would be hard pressed to take out
a target from one hundred meters, a trained sniper should always make
this shot, barring unforeseen circumstances. He’s not going to miss the
one, two, or three times the dice allow. Imagine if your dentist or airline
pilot had to “make a roll” every time they did their job!
Stories about dice are fun to tell, but it’s not uncommon for the
dice to get in the way of the story. Situations like these drew me to
Amber, and for a number of years any game I ran — whether it was Fading
Suns, or Mage, or BESM — was dice-lite if not diceless. I was much more
interested in personal character arcs, and I stole the ideas for Character
Quizzes and Player Contributions out of Amber, applying them even
to D&D to great effect. The Character Quiz is a tool to get players to
think about their characters before the campaign starts, answering
any number of questions from the trifling to the profound, while the
Contributions encourage players to add to the rich tapestry of the game
130
Jesse Scoble
by keeping a character diary, or drawing pictures (Trumps, in Amber)

for the artistically inclined, or creating a thematic playlist, or anything
that adds to the game experience. Normally the player is rewarded with
extra experience points or some other small, tangible reward for each
Contribution.
The best games I’ve played had no dice. I discovered Amber shortly
after the RPG was published, and while I ran my first campaign badly,
like some up-jumped, supercharged D&D campaign, I quickly grew into
its more mature, nuanced form of storytelling. In Amber, you are playing
a prince or princess of the One True Realm — essentially you are a
demigod who far surpasses any mere mortal, and you have the ability to
not only bend probabilities, but to walk through an infinite spectrum
of alternate worlds, or shadows, and find whatever you most desire. The
Amber game is a simple point-based system, with four stats: Strength
(raw physical ability), Psyche (mental ability and willpower), Endurance
(stamina, health, and regeneration), and Warfare (tactical and strategic
ability in all arenas); and several reality-bending powers. It is simple, but
surprisingly deep as players figure out how to manipulate themselves,
their enemies, their rivals, and ultimately the universe itself.
Amber can be a tough game to play, and terribly difficult to run if
you are inexperienced. And while a bad GM can ruin any game, a bad
Amber GM can lead to a torturous experience. Diceless games tend to
be minimalistic by design: the players don’t get a laundry list of skills,
stats, and attributes to help map out the characters, and one can get lost
without those aids and signposts detailing what can and can’t be done.
The player often becomes more important than the character, and what
the player knows becomes the character’s resource rather than what’s
written on the character sheet. For example, playing a street samurai in
Shadowrun, or a water dancer in A Song of Ice and Fire, the player knows
his or her character is a badass, and can probably thump anyone of
roughly equal or lesser power. But what if your character is number
two or three in Warfare? What the hell does that mean? What’s more,
if the campaign shifts from a fantasy landscape to a modern setting, as
Amber is wont to do, players comfortable with knightly tropes may have
no idea how to describe leading a small, paramilitary strike team into
a south-Asian jungle to overtake a booby-trapped, guerilla stronghold.
It shouldn’t matter because the character supposedly has a greater
131
depth of knowledge than any player can conceivably have, but it often
does, as players fall back on their own immediate know-how, rather
than the centuries of experience built into the character. By Amber’s
rules, if my character has a higher Warfare than Edwin’s, in a straight-
up fight I should win in a sword fight, a chess match, or having my
kidnappers take down his SWAT team. But Edwin has read a lot more
Special Forces books than I have, so his sophisticated descriptions of
the flashbangs, tear gas, and Heckler and Koch 9mm MP5 submachine
guns might influence the GM into letting him win the encounter.
Stronger players tend to dominate the spotlight and commandeer more
airtime, supremely knowledgeable players can bully weak GMs.
Some of my best friends who love diceless board games hate the idea
of diceless roleplaying — they feel too much pressure to be an excellent
actor, an expert on trivia, and lightning quick on their feet. To be fair
and brutally honest, those are the elements that can elevate a roleplaying
game into an art form.
My friend and fellow Torontonian, Robin Laws, has spent a lot of
time thinking about these issues, in particular how rules systems that rely
on dice often don’t work for investigative games. If a dice roll is critical
to advance the plot, and it is blown, the game often leads to dead ends
and needless frustration. His Gumshoe rules address this — although the
game uses dice for certain tasks, the heart of an investigative story is
finding clues and information, and his core mechanic ensures players
will get all the clues they need. They may not always act on them in the
correct way, nor are they guaranteed success on their ancillary roles, but
the game won’t grind to a halt because of a lack of information.
Diceless systems are hard to teach, except by example, and I suspect
my first Amber players still bear the scars. It’s hard to grasp running
them when problem resolution is described with anecdotes rather than
hard rules. There’s little support for the player, and even less for the
GM. Without dice mechanics, there are far fewer crunchy bits to flavor
the game with: no +1 swords or minor Blessings or minor bumps to
skills. As GM you often end up pitting your smarts against the players,
and you can’t simply raise the difficultly level of a task or give yourself
a +10 bonus to enhance the villains in the encounter. If a player tries
something unconventional, or pushes the envelope — and strong players
will do those things every day of the week — there’s little guidance and
132
Jesse Scoble
no “you have a 1-in-20 chance, so roll” Hail Mary to fall back on. It
works or it doesn’t, and it’s up to you. If it doesn’t, you damn well
better be able to back it up. And if it does, pray you know what happens
next, or be able to fake it real good.
At the Austin Game Developers Conference 2009, Greg Costikyan
gave a talk entitled “Randomness: Blight or Bane?” It’s worth reading
[See page 44. —Editor], because Costikyan is something of a legend
in the industry, and I suspect it’s a problem he’s spent a lot of time
contemplating. He discusses how the sense of fiero (the feeling of scoring
a terrific goal / overcoming a tough obstacle) is lessened or nullified if
there is no way to master the game. If we lose despite our superior
efforts, because luck was for the weaker player (or the enemy orc, or the
perception roll), we’ll think less of the game.
Costikyan points out serious, hardcore gamers tend to prefer
games where skill trumps randomness. Games like chess and go on
the historical (mental) side, and Counter-Strike or Call of Duty 4: Modern
Warfare on the modern (twitch/skill) side are all about dominating your
opponent through your ability. But in truth there is no way to model
all of the possible randomness in the world: a freak blackout, a brutal
hangover, an undiscovered rules exploit, or a cheating enemy can all
potentially trump a player’s greater skill.
However, diceless gaming can free you from the trappings of the
game, and let you more fully engage in the story. Erik, in addition to
being a fine GM, is one of the best players I’ve ever known. He has played:
a brutal Viking warrior on a holy crusade to conquer the Forgotten
Realms, an orphaned half-orc thief who acted as Jiminy Cricket to a
selfish paladin, and the ignoble Prince William of Amber.
William was a dashing schemer; although he was happy to help his
cousins (the other player characters) against the “Universe-Threatening
Plot” (aka the Demon Army), he was driven by a desire for personal
glory rather than by any Samaritan values.
Prince Caine, an NPC from the novels, is most often seen as the
sinister prince, the most cutthroat of the bunch, willing to do whatever it
takes to ensure the safety of the realm. Caine was beginning a romantic
dalliance with Lady Evelyn, from the rival Courts of Chaos. At the New
Year’s formal banquet, Caine is a no-show, and Lady Evelyn has been
stood up with no explanation. An upstart baron, Lord Talisker, insults
133
Lady Evelyn, describing her awkwardness at the palace like a dog playing
the piano: “the dog isn’t any good, but it’s a wonder that she can do
it at all.” Evelyn turns bright red in embarrassment, but has no one to
defend her honor. In steps the gallant Prince William, who calls the
baron out as the bastard offspring of a well-known cuckhold. The baron
draws his sword, but William soundly thrashes him, shredding his pride
and his fancy shirt. Lady Evelyn is very grateful, and William chats her
up all night… and out of her clothes. At first light, he has to take care
of a duty for the king, so he leaves her with a sweet kiss and a promise
to see her again soon. He heads out, but first stops at the holdfast of
Baron Talisker… and praises him for last night’s performance. Caine,
meanwhile, had spent the last three days freezing his balls off at the end
of time learning about the Demon Army, and returns to learn what he
had missed.
What started as a one-night stand and a way to score points off
Caine has started to gain substance. But William suppresses his feelings
of honor and duty whenever a new opportunity presents itself. Some
time later, while running one of the king’s errands, William meets
a young, supremely confident and sexy courtesan. She first acts as
William’s guide to the backwater, seaside holding, and then offers to be
his bedwarmer. He spends a wild night on the beach. Scratched, bitten,
and drained, William leaves her to return to Amber, where he discovers
an elaborate dinner laid out and left to grow ice cold, candles guttered,
and a small present next to his place at the table. He opens the box
to see a handsome ring of heavy gold. And he finds Eveyln has cried
herself to sleep after waiting for him to return all night long. Of course,
he only learned later than Caine had arranged for him to travel to the
backwater, and had paid the courtesan to show him every hospitality.
The feud intensifies.
The king orders a hurt and fuming William to scout out the Demon
Army. Driven by his anger and frustration, William gets in way over his
head. He attempts to pick off a lone outrider, and ends up being chased
by the horsemen of hell. Rather than taking an easy escape route, he tries
an even more foolish stunt, and ends up trapped between the Demon
Army and the Abyss. Standing on the edge of the Abyss, he challenges
the captain of the Demon Army, but he’s outclassed on every level, and
when he tries to grab his Trump cards — which create magical gateways
134
Jesse Scoble
across the realms — the captain knocks them out of his hand into the
Abyss. The captain raises his sword for a killing blow, and William leaps
into the Abyss, straining to reach a single Trump card, any card, fingers
fumbling and they finally touch one and he mentally screams HELP!
I’m going to die! Please, HELP! And he is saved. By the hand of Caine.
This kind of experience is hard to capture with dice. It’s not
impossible, but if William had to roll to set up his agent, and then roll to
seduce Evelyn, and at every stage it tends to cut into the story. Similarly,
when confronted with an enemy like the demon captain most players
will hold out for that 1-in-20 chance of success, rather than accept the
possibility that they may have no chance to overcome the encounter
head-on. Of course, I could have made Erik roll for William to grab a
card in the Abyss, but if he failed, what then? Letting him suggest ways
to accomplish his goals or triumph over obstacles was often much more
satisfying to everyone at the table.
Ultimately, I agree with Costikyan when he claims that randomness
is needed in many games to break symmetry (or at least to negate an
optimal winning strategy), and that it creates an essence of fidelity or
verisimilitude as it represents the craziness of the world around us.
It also ensures a more level playing field, and that the master won’t
always beat the student. But he also points out that, “If a game contains
even a small element of strategy, then as the number of random tests
approaches infinity, the outcome of the game is more and more likely
to be dictated by strategy than by chance.”
There are definitely cases where getting the perfect roll gives us a
sense that the universe is working with us for a change, and that we are
favored by the gods. In the end, I hate the dice more often than not,
and try to limit their damage where I can. On the other hand, they are
so pretty, and it feels so good to call a roll and nail it.
135
The Die of the People
The Die of the people:

A six-Sided Manifesto
Jason L Blair
Here, do this: go to the board-game aisle of your local Star*Mart,

Bullseye, or Toys “B” Me and grab a box off the shelf. Check the
component list. It’s there on the back, usually in the corner under the
ad copy. Go through all the boxes, in fact. Find the games that use dice
and put them all in a stack. Don’t worry if the helpful retail associate
gives you a strange look. If they ask if you need anything, get them to
help you. It could be a company event!
Okay, all done? Awesome. Take a look at that stack of dice-using
games and you’ll see something very interesting. The majority — not
all, but most — use the same type of die. A very familiar die. A die I
usually and not at all strangely have in my pocket. The good old six-
sided die.
This simple numerically empowered cube has changed the fates of
more people than any other die in the history of the world. Those who
throw them hold their breath as if the die decides whether they’ll get to
draw another one. This cube speaks to us at such a primal level that it
is synonymous with the word “dice.” It is the die used as the universal
symbol of gaming. It’s the die of America’s entertainment capital. The
die of your youth.
It is the die of the people.
136
Jason L Blair
And it’s about time it took its place as the rightful king of all
Christendom. Or dicedom, at the very least.
When I think of dice, I do so from a design perspective, which is
my default perspective for most games. It takes me a concerted effort to
shift to a more casual perspective. So it goes.
For me, there are six reasons I hold the six-sided die above all others.
When designing games, I take these factors into consideration.
What are those factors? Roll a die and find out.
You rolled a 1! You get: History
Let’s start at the beginning. The very beginning. Turn the dial on the
way-back machine all the way to the left because the humble six-sided die
is one ancient randomizer. Back in 2007, while excavating in Southeast
Iran’s “Burnt City,” archaeologists discovered 5,000-year-old doubling
cubes as part of an archaic backgammon set. And what are doubling
cubes? Oddly numbered six-sided dice.
Of course, the history of the six-sided die is not limited to Iran.
Evidence of its use can be found throughout Asia. In fact, it appears on
the Buddha’s lists of games he wouldn’t play. He also refused to play
that game where one person traces invisible numbers in the air and
another person tries to guess what they are. Man, that Buddha. What
a buzzkill.
Outside Asia, the six-sided die appears throughout the world: in
England, Germany, even countries you hear people talk about that
don’t exist anymore and you spend half an hour trying to remember
if Prussia became Poland or Turkey and wonder why someone would
name an empire after a piece of furniture. I could write an entire other
essay on the history of the six-sided die but let’s sum it all up here: As
far as history tells us, of all the dice still in common use, it’s the oldest
and most prevalent die.
I’ve been playing games from as far back as I can remember. In my
own history, the six-sided die predates all other types by a good decade.
As a nascent roleplayer, stepping from the safe zone of game boards
and Free Parking into the dangerous world of character sheets and skill
checks, I fumbled through all these unfamiliar die types. With time,
137
they all became trusted friends but none managed to unseat the six-
sided die from its privileged perch.
When I transitioned from hobbyist to designer and publisher, I
faced the same question everyone else does: How will I express the rules
of my game? This question isn’t about writing the rulebook, it’s about
the system, the mechanics. Games are built on premises and ideas and,
though it may seem otherwise, there are multiple ways to express each.
Designing a game can be like standing in a wind tunnel full of dollar
bills. You have sixty seconds to grab as many as you can but a fistful
of ones isn’t worth nearly as much as a single Benjamin. That’s game
design. When I designed Little Fears, my first published game, I started
with a blank slate. I could have used cards, chips, coins, peach pits,
colored sticks, or whatever I liked. Of course, I chose dice. The next
question was a matter of how many and what types to use and how they
would behave.
The obvious choice was the die I had grown up with, the one I knew
best. As I continued to design, I stuck with the six-sided die but, until
recently, I had no idea of its long, illustrious history beyond my own
tabletop adventures. But I knew the other things that were informed by
that history.
You rolled a 2! You get: Availability
Still standing in the game aisle? Walk down to the area with the playing
cards and the poker chips. Look for packs of Crazy Eights and Old Maid,
you can’t miss them. Check the hooks near those games and see what
type of dice they have in stock. You’ll probably find a pack of good old
six-siders dangling there.
Chances are very good they don’t have any four-siders, ten-siders, or
twenty-siders in stock (outside those few packaged with specific games).
When making a game, when selling a game, you either must supply the
customer with everything they need or utilize components they have
easy access to or already have on hand.
Availability should never be overlooked when making a game. I
wouldn’t design a game that only used tri-colored pig knuckles or one
in which players stack cement blocks. Components are a barrier of entry
toward game adoption. Ignore this at your own peril.
138
Jason L Blair
You rolled a 3! You get: Universality
Expanding on what was said above, the universality of the six-sided die,
its pervasiveness means that your game is not restricted to availability in
a single geographical location. Folks around the world have familiarity
with and access to a six-sided die even if they don’t for any other die
type. Sure, the pips may be different sizes and the 1 and 4 may be
a different color than you’re used to but the six-sided die, in all its
wonderful permutations, is universal.
You rolled a 4! You get: Legibility
Six-sided dice are easy to read. Those of a standard size have flat, square
faces with large numerals or clearly marked pips. When victory or defeat
rests on a single throw of these babies, you better be able to read the
result. That’s why you don’t play craps with dodecahedrons. Well, that
and what would you call two 12s? Double boxcars? Engine and caboose?
Train wreck? This is the kind of catastrophic thinking that could lead
generations of bar gamblers to switch to guessing how many gumballs
are in a gigantic glass jar. Not exactly the makings of a legendary back
alley money-soak.
You rolled a 5! You get: Probability
I’m just a lowly game designer, not a mathematician, so probability,

to me, comes into play subjectively (the subject being the demands of
the system). When it comes to designing a game, six-sided dice can be
trusted for nice, clean, and predictable behavior. When you’re designing
a game that needs to scale — to accommodate multiple levels of power
within a game — you don’t want to have to fiddle with all these little bits
in order to not imbalance a game. Well, I don’t anyway. I have other
things to do.
With six-sided dice, you have a pretty simple spread. You’re getting a
number from 1 to 6. With a single die, you’re talking about a probability
of 1:6 for any single number to come up. With two dice, the probability
becomes 1:36 for a specific combination of numbers to come up in
139
a certain sequence. (Less if the order doesn’t matter, in which case a

result of 4, 5 is essentially the same as 5, 4.)
Compare that to how a ten-sided die scales. A single die gives a 1:10
chance for a single result. Two ten-sided dice give you 1:100. Three give
1:1000. You read that right. Rolling three ten-sided dice means you must
allow for a thousand different die results. You know how many different
results you must account for with three six-sided dice? 216. Nothing
scary about that number. It’s friendly. Like a happy little area code just
waiting for you to call. Can’t you hear it? “Call me,” it says, screwing up
its courage like a shy boy writing a note to the cutest, most popular girl in
eighth grade. “Call me.” Don’t leave that brave little boy hanging on the
line. It takes a lot of courage to write that note. And it hurts, it hurts so
bad when all you get in return is “Who are you again?” That kind of sting
doesn’t fade with time, my friends. Grown men also cry.
The flipside to this is the four-sided die. An obnoxious caltrop
whose spread is almost too small with 1:4 odds. “A twenty-five percent
chance!” you say. “You can’t get much cleaner and intuitive than that.”
This is true when dropping a single die. The problem with the four-
sider is that it scales like a turtle jogs, which is to say like a fish breathes
air, which is to say like a whale plays badminton: poorly. Two four-
siders can result in 16 different combinations. So if you’re rolling to
determine someone’s shoe size, I suppose you’re set.
As I said above, this only matters if the sequence of the results
matter so that 2, 3, 4 will render a different result than 4, 3, 2. If not,
then there’s hardly any scale at all.
Contrast this with two six-sided dice where adding them together
gives a result from 2 to 12 in sum, cut up 36 different ways.
Of course, all those other dice can be drafted to serve specific
purposes, such as figuring the damage done by a weapon or randomizing
the result from failing a poison save, but when it comes down to
picking one die to lead the pack, a universal soldier of reliable but not
overwhelming randomization, you know where my loyalties lie.
You rolled a 6! You get: Familiarity
Like most folks I know, I discovered dice through board games. For me,
it was the usual suspects: Clue, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Yahtzee, and
140
Jason L Blair
the like. Prior to being introduced to roleplaying games in my teens, I

defined games the same as most folks: through a board, some cards, and
six-sided dice. Truth is, that’s exactly how most people still define games
(once it’s clear we’re not speaking of video games). This factoid could
be hand-waved away as interesting-but-what’s-it-gotta-do-with-me trivia
but that association is possibly the greatest hump any game designer
must summit to get a non-gamer to play his game. You hand the average
person an eight-sided die and they’ll think you made it in shop class.
Frankly, they don’t know what to do with it.
Think back to the component lists on the back of those board game
boxes. Remember what you saw there? Boards, tokens, cards, six-sided
dice. Nothing weird or funky there. Now think about what you might
need to play a miniatures game: terrain, measuring tape, figurines,
primer spray, assorted paints and brushes, sealant, squad sheets, pencils,
a standard tube of polyhedral dice.
The moment the average person reads measuring tape, they’re off
to the hardware store never to return.
“Oh I don’t need them,” you say. “I’m designing for the core
audience.”
Industries that are slow to adapt are slow to be adopted. They’re
just circling the drain, praying for a clog to keep them afloat and delay
their inevitable demise. You want more folks to play games? Then you
better well give them a way in. Sure, to you and me, the game store
makes sense. Card games over there, board games over there, racks of
miniatures, shelves of roleplaying games, slim packs of cards in shiny
foil wraps behind the counter. You get it; I get it. The average person,
they don’t get it. And why should they? I watch Nova but that doesn’t
mean I understand more than 20% of it. And they dumb it down for folks
like me.
Familiarity with components is the key to making the foreboding
task of learning new games less scary. You hand a person a stack of six
different-shaped dice and a sheet with spaces for strange calculations,
he’ll likely excuse himself to use the bathroom. At another store. In
another city.
Whenever I run games, whether I’m playtesting a new design,
demoing a new release, or revisiting a classic, the six-sided die always
elicits a comforted response from players. Sure, not everyone’s favorite
141
die is the six-sider, but I’ve never once had a negative reaction. No one
has ever said, “Oh man, really? Six-siders?” (Unfortunately, I cannot say
the same for eight- and twelve-sided dice.) Yes, it’s anecdotal. Roll with
it. (Heh.)
The point is that the six-sided die is not scary. It provides nostalgic
comfort for longtime gamers and removes the hurdle of unfamiliarity
for newbies. Plus, if you squint, it looks like a tiny gift box. Oh, who
knows what wonder lies inside? (It’s probably thermosetting plastic. You
won’t like it.)
Also, the six-sided die just warms your heart. You know this to be
true.
In Sum
The six-sided die is not the only die in the universe. I know this. You
know this. There are four-sided, eight-sided, ten-sided, twelve-sided,
twenty-sided, thirty-four-sided, even the near-spherical hundred-sided
Zocchihedron, for the love of all things holy! And those aren’t all! It’s
madness! But amongst all these dice and the exotic possibilities they
offer, do not lose the simple, elegant, accessible, and comforting six-
sided die. It’s far more than a simple randomizer. It’s a link to the past,
the key to the future, and the beautifully boxy heart of the gaming
universe.
It is the die of the people.
142
Totally Metal:
It All Comes Down to a Roll
Jeff Tidball
This guy, Donnie, intimidated my mother. The dramatic thing to write

would be “This guy, Donnie, scared the hell out of my mom,” but this
guy, Donnie, had come over to play roleplaying games in the basement,
not to snort coke off a combat knife or ride a motorcycle through the
screen door. In point of fact, he had parked his motorcycle in an orderly
fashion. It was probably the simple fact of the motorcycle and the black
leather and the boots and the long hair that made my mom wonder.
This was the first time I had met Donnie. We had been introduced,
and were all starting this new campaign, by way of Paul.
Paul was classic science fiction: computer programmer by occupation,
earnest about science fiction and The Lord of the Rings, and with a laugh
as distinctive as they come, audible throughout the house and probably
outside, too.
I had met Paul through the more-or-less crazy publisher of a gaming
fanzine called Silver Griffin. I had met that dude at a bus stop late one
night after the local university games convention had wrapped up.
(“A magazine, you say? Yes, sir, I’m completely fucking dying to
write game material and help you work on your gaming magazine.”)
I’m not sure how Paul had hooked up with him, but in any case,
Paul was the other third of the Silver Griffin Editorial Committee. I
143
Totally Metal
hope that I no longer have, but fear that I do still possess, the article I
wrote that was published (by which I mean, “published”) in the sterling
pages of Silver Griffin.
In any case, I was 13, Paul and Donnie were in some part of their
20s, and we had convened in my parents’ basement to start a new
Rolemaster campaign. It was Donnie’s first stab at being a gamemaster,
and my first encounter with Rolemaster.
Donnie had an easy incredulity. He’d say, “Really?,” and stretch it
out, raising his voice at the end, along with his eyebrows.
“Reeeaally?”
And you’d confirm it — or you wouldn’t — and he’d be on to the
next bit of business without giving it a great deal of apparent additional
thought.
I remember the rainbow of pens he used to record his campaign
notes. Different colors of ink for the names of NPCs, for their stats,
for things they might do… you know the drill because you probably did
it yourself back in the day. Donnie’s pens were not a matched set, but
rather, I have to imagine, scavenged from the pen cups of a thousand
desks from Lino Lakes, Minnesota to the nation of Panama.
I’m not sure whether it gave my mom any comfort, but Donnie
taught the confirmation class at the church he attended. Or, in any
case, that was how our gaming group lore had it.
But here’s the important thing I remember about Donnie: At the
bottom of it all and at the end of the day, Donnie was a guy who’d try
anything once, like cutting rods of solid aluminum into polyhedral dice
on his brother’s industrial metalworking machinery. But more on that
later.
In the basement, we created characters and the game began. Our
PCs didn’t know each other, and the frontier keep where we all found
ourselves — for reasons that I’m pretty sure were never proposed nor
missed — was under siege. And by “under siege,” I mean that the siege
ended as the campaign began and we were survivors, running for our
lives.
(You players in my erstwhile Los Angeles The Lord of the Rings
campaign may remember a similar campaign-starting scene; the conceit,
you can now see, was borrowed.)
Enter the Rolemaster game system. About which, let’s be clear: 13-year-
144
Jeff Tidball
old me found Rolemaster — how to put this? — totally fucking awesome.

But let’s also be clear on this point: Rolemaster is still something of an
RPG gold standard for me today, although perhaps not for the reasons
you think. But more on that later.
If you haven’t been part of the roleplaying scene since the beginning
of time, you’re forgiven for not knowing much about Rolemaster, or
“Chartmaster,” as it was traditionally known among those with the
business to traditionally know such things. Rolemaster was known for
its combat charts, which were relatively complicated, but gloriously so.
In addition to allowing you to slice your offensive and defensive effort
for a given combat round as finely as you’d care to cut them, it allowed
for combat results like this: “Blow to foe’s abdomen destroys a variety
of organs. The poor fool expires after 6 rounds of inactivity.” This is a
direct quote from the crushing critical hit table on page 14 of the fourth
edition of Arms Law & Claw Law. And that’s just one of about 950
completely different critical hit results found in the bog-standard, basic
version of the game rules we played by. Expansions — not to mention the
table of fumble results — added additional lunacy in the same vein.
You can see how a game with roughly a million charts might come to
revolve around dice, and the results of rolling them. There was euphoria
and celebration for the good rolls, and there was doom, gloom, and
sometimes outright horror at the bad ones.
And there was plenty of rolling, because we were playing before
the advent of RPG technology like a special class of rules for dealing
with mooks. Your bog-standard line-orc made the same set of decisions
and die rolls as the general who led him into battle, not to mention
the player character you’d twinked to Númenor and back. Not that we
minded. The decisions and the die-rolling — and the results, of course
— were the fun.
Our roleplaying experience was essentially tactical. The dice were
the mediators between our plans and our experience. Had World of
Warcraft existed in those days, we probably would have played that
instead. Except that...
(In a book about dice, you’re expecting me to say that there was
something about the dice themselves that would have compelled us to
play Rolemaster instead of an online RPG. Sorry to disappoint.)
145
Totally Metal
Here’s a critical hit chart and a weapon chart from the fourth edition of Rolemaster.
You add a percentile roll to your weapon skill (and a whole bunch of other modifiers),
then reference the column on the weapon chart that corresponds to your target’s armor.
The result tells you how much damage you inflict, and whether you’re entitled to roll
for a critical hit. Each critical hit chart — there are charts for slashing damage, crushing
damage, piercing damage, burning damage, and so on — has five levels of severity, “A”
through “E.” Higher rolls for each type of critical hit are better, save that for reasons
probably lost to history, the “66” result is always badass.
146
Jeff Tidball
Arms Law, the book that was one-third of the three-legged Rolemaster stool (the
others being Spell Law and Character Law), amount to an entire book of these charts.
Paul’s superpower was the uncanny ability to open his copy of Arms Law to exactly the
page he wanted, no matter what. You can see where that would come in handy.
147
Totally Metal
…except that there was a joy of creativity mixed into the tactical
game we were playing that I hadn’t experienced on a computer — and
still haven’t — outside of a word processor where 26 letters can make
anything. I have a sense that Donnie loved the creativity that using
those colored pens let him exercise. I know for a fact that there was joy
for me in creating characters for that campaign, and the campaigns that
followed with the same group, in a way that character creation for most
tabletop RPGs doesn’t give me even now. They say you can never go
back home; I guess they’re right.
One of the reasons I loved Rolemaster as a creative player was the way
the character creation rules were flexible. Its largely skill-based system
was a clear counterpoint to D&D’s extreme class rigidity, especially in
the days before Third Edition, d20, and all that. Although Rolemaster
did have character classes, each one essentially amounted to a menu of
skill costs. Each character, at each level, received a sum of skill points
to spend. What your class told you was what each given skill would cost
you for a single advance. Your rogue found it cheaper to buy sneaky
skills than fighty skills, but both were possible. Your cleric could buy
outdoorsy skills, but not as cheaply as your buddy’s ranger. Your fighter
could learn some spells, but the cost was astronomical. If you had an
idea — any idea at all — about the kind of character you wanted, it was
my experience that Rolemaster would let you build it — in stark contrast
to most of the other RPGs I knew of in those days.
This is the reason Rolemaster is still a gold-standard among RPGs
for me, even though I probably haven’t played it for a decade. It never
negated. It always permitted. (This is how one winds up playing a holy
hobbit thief. More on that in a sec.) It may even be the reason I chafe at
D&D character creation even today. I might be perfectly happy playing
a fighter just like he comes off the rack, but psychological studies show
that humans find it excruciating close off options, and my experience
with Rolemaster taught me the joy in having those options even when I
didn’t take advantage of them.
There’s a school of game design and GMing that venerates the
phrase “Yes, but…” (or, at least, the impulse behind “Yes, but…”) as a
theoretical focal point for group storytelling. The idea is that few — or no
— proposals put forward by any player should be negated outright, that
the most interesting things about a given proposal are the consequences
148
Jeff Tidball
and complications that arise from it.

In Rolemaster, if you want to play a rogue with spells, or a fighter
who can fast-talk, or a wizard who can laugh with amusement as he’s
run through with a broadsword, then “Yes!” you can do it! “but…,”
here’s what you’ll give up in other options.
So your cleric can learn to backstab, with the consequence that he’s
not going to be as good with his spells as his buddy from the monastery
who didn’t spend a lot of skill points learning Ambush. The first cleric
is a whole lot more interesting to me than the one that came off the
assembly line just like all the others, and was shipped in bulk to every
gaming group from Blackmoor to Greyhawk like so many Ford Tauruses
painted an inoffensive sky-silver and parked on every car dealer’s sales
lot from sea to shining sea.
But all that creativity — both potential and realized — aside, we
played a tactical game, and we usually made our choices tactically. Just
one example: I played a halfling rogue at one point in this campaign
of Donnie’s. It’s possible this was the character I created on that first
day we played; I honestly can’t remember. At one point, our heroes
encountered a band of religious refugees with badass combat powers,
and my disreputable character joined their religious order for the sole
purpose of getting some of said badass powers for his own bad self.
The character’s name has long since been forgotten by all parties, but
look up any of those players today and I’ll bet none will respond with
a blank look if you ask them what they remember about the infamous
Holy Hobbit.
But even given a game where the players make most or all decisions
on the tactical merits alone, why on earth would would religious refugees
— let alone the gamemaster — allow a sneak-thief into their order? Here’s
why: Because it all comes down to a roll.
That was Donnie’s mantra of good gamemastering. “It all comes
down to a roll.”
In real life, strange things happen. Things too strange for fiction.
Donnie’s way of simulating that strangeness was to let you roll for
anything. “I tried my best to create the world as a whole and let the players
wander in it,” he told me in a recent email. “Many times opportunities
would be missed, or the party would take an unexpected turn, but I
tried very hard not to ‘steer…’”
149
Totally Metal
Can we find branches straight enough to make arrows here? Will

this looted armor fit me? Can my character be a high elf? Do these
bandits know my brother-in-law? It all came down to a roll.
Rolemaster was an enabler of this axiom, with its rules for open-ended
die results. If your raw percentile die result is 96–100, you get to roll
the dice again and add the second roll to the first result to figure the
total. The follow-up rolls are also open-ended, so there’s no limit to how
high you can roll. To pair the potential for doom with the potential for
triumph, the inverse is also true. Rolling 01–05 sends you in the other
direction, subtracting follow-on rolls from your initial result, with no
lower bound. Rolemaster has no limits to how spectacular success can be,
and how horrific failure. You know, just like life.
So for Donnie, the answer to any question — like “Will these weird
pilgrims bless my guy with their awesome powers?” — came down to a
roll. And in that particular case, the roll went really well.
The way we checked for random encounters was similar. The basic
method was that the gamemaster made an open-ended roll, and so did a
representative of the player group. The difference between the two rolls
indicted the improbability of the encounter. For rolls that were pretty
close together there was no encounter, or a highly probable one. A
blacksmith in town. A boar in the woods. For rolls where the difference
was broad it was dragons, armies, or Gandalf. For open-ended rolls in
both directions, maybe it was all three. After likelihood was addressed,
a second pair of rolls suggested where the encounter fell on the friendly-
neutral-hostile continuum.
The GM kept his rolls secret, so this was an environment where,
for the players, any roll that deviated too far from 50 — including any
open-ended result in either direction — was cause for alarm. You didn’t
know what was coming until it happened, of course, but the sense
of participation, and your explicit knowledge of exactly half of the
equation, gave the players just the right kind of dramatic anticipation,
the same way a good soundtrack can presage the action that’s coming
while denying the specifics.
But the fact that anything could happen — that it all came down to
a roll — also gave the story a sense of realism. Sometimes, in real life,
you’re standing in the teller line next to a bank robber. The chance is
small, but it’s still a chance. In a game, the GM is an asshole if he plants
150
Jeff Tidball
you next to a bank robber for no good reason. But an impersonal roll of
the dice was a good enough reason for us. This is like the “simulationist”
play agenda, the reductio ad absurdum of simulationism being to make
the game as much like real life as possible.
(We did have one small, narrativist sop, the house-ruled “free re-
roll.” Once per game session, each player character was entitled to a
single re-roll of any critical hit against him. The smart player reserved
his re-roll for use against a blow that would otherwise kill him.)
For a guy whose mantra was “It all comes down to a roll,” it shouldn’t
have surprised us when Donnie showed up to gaming one weekend
— many years after that first session — with a set of solid aluminum
dice that he had handmade on his brother’s industrial metalworking
machinery. This was long before the days of Crystal Caste, when you
could actually buy metal — or gemstone, or troll spleen for all I know —
polyhedrals at the big summer conventions.
I remember those dice, and the event of their unveiling, as pretty
spectacular. I was on the high school newspaper; this guy had made dice
out of metal.
When I met up with Donnie recently, for the first time in lots of
years, he gave me those three dice. I told him I’d mail them back to him
after I got done taking pictures of them, and he told me that if I did
that, he’d mail them back to me, as many times as it took. He works
for the post office these days; he’d win that war. Those metal dice bring
my whole gaming adolescence full circle. I can’t think of anything from
those days that I’d rather own.
Looking at the dice again, I realized that I had forgotten this part,
probably because we didn’t use it for Rolemaster: He had made a twenty-
sider, too. He told me that it took him and his brother about two weeks
to get all of the angles right, and that they did it mostly by trial and
error, producing all kind of weirdly elongated dice with strange, leaning
dimensions.
How would Donnie’s metal dice fare in the side-by-side dice-on-
graph paper photo that Gamescience flogged all those years? Here’s the
answer: Who. The hell. Cares.
Look at the photos. The ten-siders are ten-siders. The twenty-sider
is a twenty-sider. All three made by the hands of the guy who ran the
campaign. That’s totally badass. That’s totally metal.
151
Totally Metal
Is making your own dice making your own luck? (There’s a Gen
Con booth concept in there. You run with it. That’s Gameplaywright
Press’s gift to you.) In a game where it all comes down to a roll, is
making your own luck making your own everything?
On the day that Donnie brought his new metal dice to gaming, I
remember a serious discussion of making and selling solid-aluminum
dice in bulk. Again with the simulationism, but this time it was “sim
game company.” I wonder what would have happened if Donnie had
gone through with that. Seems like an unlikely thing to do, but crazier
products have been developed in garages and taken the world by storm.
And in a world where it all comes down to a roll, maybe he’d be a dice
magnate today, the potentate of a strange and wonderful compound
outside Duluth where everyone has a motorcycle and Rolemaster is
gaming’s lingua franca.
Could this be that world?
Does it all come down to a roll?
Strange and random things happen every day, that’s for sure.
I had testicular cancer in high school. Why me? No reason.
I survived said cancer. (Obviously.) Why me? No reason.
152
Jeff Tidball
Both of my kids were born healthy, by the preposterous good luck of

some great cosmic lottery. Why did I, and they, win that lottery? There’s
no reason.
The Bones editor Will Hindmarch and I had a phone conversation
recently in which Will observed that people who’ve had breakout success
in their creative careers rarely talk with particularly deep insight about
how and why they broke out. When asked for advice by the aspiring,
they propose the relatively obvious steps: be disciplined about your work,
it’s not what you know it’s who you know, and so on. But those things
don’t guarantee success any more than wearing clean underwear.
In 2000, I left the gaming business behind to go to film school
in Los Angeles. I managed to get into what’s more or less the best
film school in the country, wrote some good material, graduated, got
a manager and an agent, wrote some more good material, wound up
back in the game business to pay the bills (cue the Godfather joke), kept
153
Totally Metal
writing good material, but the fact of kids and the expense of living in
California forced me to devote more and more time to paying work,
and saw our family move back to Minneapolis so the kids could grow
up near their grandparents. I don’t regret any of that.
But at literally any time in the six years I lived in LA some production
company could have snapped up one of a half-dozen feature scripts I
wrote in that time period. And once you’ve gotten screenwriting work,
it’s that much easier to get it again. Why did other people wedge their
feet into Hollywood’s door where I didn’t? Here’s what my therapist led
me to believe when my wife and I were trying hard to decide whether
or not to move back to Minnesota: There’s simply no reason. The dice
came up one way for those people, and another way for me.
It’s not quite that simple, of course, because some writing is good,
and some writing is bad, and the difference matters. But also, sometimes,
good writing languishes and bad writing wins Oscars. It took me a long
time to be cool with that. Which is to say that sometimes, I’m still not
cool with that.
But for certain values of everything, it all comes down to a roll.
That’s Donnie’s, and Rolemaster’s, lesson for us. It all comes down to
a roll, and while you can make the dice, you still have to roll them just
like everyone else. Perhaps for life, the truism is better expressed as
something like, “No guarantees, man.”
For a long time, we played Rolemaster with a guy I’ll call Ron.
We were pretty high-level by this point, and Ron’s half-elf healer was
essentially indestructible. In Rolemaster, healing magic works by the
healer transferring other characters’ wounds onto himself, and then self-
healing, so this was a character who had survived a whole adventuring
party’s worth of ought-to-have-been-fatal wounds for something like 20
levels of play.
One Sunday afternoon, it’s the middle of the night, the party is
on the road, and an encounter check comes up with something like a
600-point difference between the GM’s and players’ rolls. The follow-
on roll comes up unfriendly. Ron’s healer is on watch, and critically
succeeds at his Perception check. Assuming his own immortality, he
heads out to check on the hot spot his infravision picked up on a nearby
hill. The dragon eats him whole.
154
Jeff Tidball
Ron argues that his character would regenerate once the dragon
gets done digesting him. Paul, running this particular campaign, rules
that a dragon’s guts don’t leave anything to regenerate. Ron insists that
we play out the digestion, round by round. The dragon’s stomach, it
turns out, does more damage than Ron’s healer has spell points.
Ron storms out of the place, quits the game, and to my knowledge,
none of us ever heard from him again.
This idea that the dice fall are gonna fall but we decide what to think
is attractive to me because it means that life is a creative experience, not
in the sense that we can create for ourselves any destiny that we want,
but in the sense that out of the events that life hands us, we create our
own meaning by deciding what to think, and how to feel, and what
to do. If the axiom is “It all comes down to a roll,” the theorem well-
adjusted people have to derive is “…but I interpret the results.”
The art of life, maybe, is the art of augury.
As the years rolled on (ha! See what I did there?) I made lots of
friends through that Rolemaster game, and introduced lots of existing
friends into it. Donnie introduced a friend of his who was a girl into the
game, at some point she became his girlfriend, and now they’ve been
married for something like 15 years, and have three kids. Ditto Paul’s
friend who was a girl, all the way through to their something like 17
years of marriage and two kids. The Rolemaster I played with those guys
forged so many of my opinions on games, gaming, and game design
that it would be a futile task to try to trace them all. Lucky for me that
I happened to be standing at the same bus stop as Silver Griffin Man
thirty years ago after UCon in 1988, right?
Yeah, maybe. But what I think I’ll choose to believe instead is that
I’d have created an equally satisfying life and career out of whatever
die roll had came down out of the great cosmic dice boot that night.
Otherwise, I’m pretty sure I’d go crazy.
155
The Unrollable
Pat Harrigan
I’ve been playing Call of Cthulhu for 25 years and I still haven’t worked
out what the dice are for. I hold two conflicting positions about them,
and I can’t tell from moment to moment which I believe.
Position 1
Dice are there to be ignored.

Or at best, they are an illusion of agency for the players. Which
is not to say that the players don’t have agency — but the dice are not
where it is located.
Witness the behavior of my player John. When John comes over to
play Call of Cthulhu, he makes a point of asking whether I’ve found his
white ten-sider. He does this every week. John lost his ten-sider about
a decade ago; he claims it was at my apartment, but I have no memory
of this. I’ve lived in this apartment a long time, and I’ve cleaned every
hidden nook of it. There is no white ten-sider lurking under a couch
or behind a radiator, just as there is no teapot orbiting between the
Earth and Mars. Still he asks for it every week. Wherever this die is,
and whether it ever existed, it has long since passed though belief and
parody to become simple ritual.
156
Pat Harrigan
It’s not surprising that the die was lost, if it was. John has an eccentric
method of rolling. He holds a die between fingers and thumb, then flips
his wrist backward while applying downward torque with his thumb.
This launches the die a half-foot into the air and, ideally, back onto the
table. But in practice this technique often results in the die flying over
John’s shoulder and out of the room. Even when it works correctly, the
high velocity and unpredictable angle of impact sometimes bounces the
die off the table surface and onto the floor, or into another player’s
face. Each of John’s die rolls is fraught with tension.
What John doesn’t know is that the results of any particular roll of
his are likely to be as meaningless as the elaborate ritual structure he
brings to the act of rolling. The PCs are not helpless. They are, after
all, self-created in a way, and exist as free moral agents. As GM, I don’t
tell them to turn left instead of right, although I might tempt them or
encourage them to do one thing or another. I allow them to travel to
Germany when they should be going to Egypt. Their agency is present
in the decisions the players make, which are in turn enacted by the PCs
and responded to by the GM. Dice just get in the way.
Take clue-gathering, for instance. In Gumshoe and Trail of Cthulhu,
Robin Laws and Ken Hite built systems wherein the players are
guaranteed to find the necessary information to keep the story going.
In Trail of Cthulhu, this was explicitly to correct a tendency in Call of
Cthulhu’s Basic Roleplaying System, in which players can easily mosey on
past vital clues and wind up wandering around in the hinterlands of the
scenario. But I seldom have that problem, because whenever my players
are close to a vital clue, I make sure they get it. In fact I routinely cheat
in favor of my players. If the PCs break into the Penhew Foundation
and knock out the guard, and if they search the correct office, or the
correct storeroom, they will find the secret room, no matter what the
result of their Spot Hidden rolls. To get away with this, I usually just
ask my players to roll the dice, without telling them what the rolls are
for. Behind my screen, I can safely accept or deny the results as I wish,
keeping the story flowing how I like it.
In combat, where players are more certain of what their rolls are
for, this isn’t always possible. But still, I get to roll for the monsters
and the cultists, behind my screen, and I roll damage to the players,
and so we might find, just possibly, that PCs don’t die quite as often as
157
The Unrollable
you might think, even given the notorious lethality of the game system.
They die, of course, but not from a failed Climb roll while scaling a
mountain, or from a cultist’s dagger in a minor encounter. They die
from foolishly attacking Nyarlathotep’s avatar in his hidden pyramid
chamber, or sticking around too long at the Mountain of the Black
Wind, among the ten thousand cultists. In other words, they die as the
result of roleplaying choices, not as the result of dice.
Rolling dice gives players comfort. They expect that the numbers
rolled will have meaning, indicating success or failure, when applied
to an unchanging body of preexisting laws. But in my universe, they
often serve only a ritual function. John’s white ten-sider makes as much
difference right now, probabilistically located somewhere between the
couch and Mars, as it would if he rolled it as part of his Swim check.
In the theology of roleplaying, this is gamemaster occasionalism.
The laws of the universe work because I choose that they work or don’t
work: a cultist’s dagger might hit on a roll of 46 on d100 one round but
miss on a 30 the next. Behind the impenetrable screen, the physical
laws are developed anew at every moment, and miracles are common.
A GM should never admit to this. If the players ever knew, they
would rightly wonder how much any of their actions really matter. They
might wonder, in this narratively controlled universe, where the game
went. But I do this out of love. The alternative is an uncaring cosmos in
which a PC is just as likely to break his neck falling out of a tree as he is
to be devoured by a dimensional shambler.
You might find this offensive. You might tell me that cosmic
indifference is what Lovecraft’s fiction is all about. But Lovecraft didn’t
write stories about people falling out of trees. No Call of Cthulhu player
can legitimately complain if his character dies. Like the rest of us, they
are built to die. But they might well complain that they crashed and
broke their spine while driving to blow up the big cultist meeting. And
they would be right to complain, because that would totally suck. These
are genre stories, not Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Nouveau Jeu de Rôle. In a
roleplaying universe, as in all genre universes, characters die to serve a
narrative function.
Of course, I can’t escape the feeling that all of this hand-waving is
necessary only to correct a flaw in the original game rules. Or maybe that
some part of me wants to be playing in a different universe altogether.
158
Pat Harrigan
These existential concerns are why I can’t bring myself to dispense with
dice altogether, and they lead inevitably to position 2.
Position 2
Dice are tools for narrative improvisation.

Looked at in this way, I love dice because I know I am a terrible
gamemaster. When I plan out my game sessions, I expect that things
will happen in a certain way. I realize that players are unpredictable, but
I generally know at least the direction they will take. I have a week or
more to plan in between sessions, and even once at the table my players
are anything but speedy. Left to their own devices, they will scheme
and plan for hours, trying to maximize their chances of survival. (Yet
discouragingly all of these plans still seem to boil down to: “Let’s all
start shooting at the same time.”)
So even over the course of an evening I’m privileged to hear what
they’re planning to do well before they do it. This allows me plenty of
time to plan out the consequences. For a weak improviser like myself,
who might otherwise have to dream up new events on the spot, this is
a luxury.
My process reminds me of the Ted Sturgeon story I saw adapted
on The New Twilight Zone, in which we learn that the future is built,
physically built, piece by piece and day by day, by teams of workmen.
So, tomorrow is pretty well assembled, the framework for next week
is in place, but next Christmas is currently just a single evergreen in
a big white void. As my players move forward, I construct the story
around them, giving the illusion that everything was there the whole
time, waiting for their arrival.
And that’s the danger. Between my plans and the strictures of genre
conventions and dramatic structure, what was once a space of limitless
possibility shrinks down and down until it can become something like
a trap. Instead of playing a game, I’m hearing a story that I’ve already
heard a hundred times before. It’s all right for the players, of course,
as it’s new to them, but for the poor GM it’s kind of a drag. In this
sense, the randomizing effect of the dice provides me with a helpful
improvisational device.
159
The Unrollable
Here’s an example from a recent session of Chaosium’s Masks of

Nyarlathotep campaign. The PCs have tracked down the evil Doctor
Huston to his lair in the underground City of the Great Race. Having
listened to my players’ plans, I know that they will assault Huston’s base
with lightning guns. Knowing the number and strength of the cultists
inside, as well as Huston’s magical abilities, I can predict the most likely
outcomes. I’m aware, too, of certain random factors: a certain percentage
chance of the noise attracting a flying polyp to the scene, stray lightning
blasts hitting the barrels of gasoline surrounding the base, and suchlike.
I may not know how the dice will roll (and, per position 1, I may ignore
them anyway if I think it necessary), but whatever the result, I have a
strong idea of the consequences. I am aware, pace Secretary Rumsfeld,
of the “known unknowns.”
What I am not able to plan for are the narrative events emerging
out of player choice and dice. So for example, now that the cultists
are dead, the polyp driven away with lightning blasts, and the building
on fire, I was not prepared for careless PC Lucinda Martindale to get
separated from the others and wander dangerously near to Huston’s
upstairs window. Once there, I could not predict that Lucinda would
fail her Power roll vs. Huston’s Dominate spell and begin to march
up to the third floor to deliver herself as a hostage to him. Still less
could I predict that her uncle Douglas Martindale would notice this
(dice), chase after Lucinda (agency), and, seeing no other way to stop
her, knock her unconscious (agency! dice!). This naturally allowed the
evil doctor to Dominate Douglas, who carried Lucinda to Huston —
who now had two hostages, one unconscious and one under his mental
control. So instead of safely incinerating Huston alive in his base, the
PCs now had to try to rescue two of their own from a burning building
and a malignant sorcerer.
This sad scenario was partly the result of player agency and partly
the result of narrative choices on the part of the GM (I knew Huston’s
powers and had planned his responses to likely player actions), but it
was at least as much the result of a series of emergent narrative events
brought about by dice. If I had chosen to secretly ignore die results in
this instance, the story would have been far less interesting.
160
Pat Harrigan
Imposition
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that the sign of a true intelligence is the
ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s mind at the same time.
On the other hand, for Orwell this was “doublethink,” the supreme
sign of intellectual dishonesty. So because I have not yet integrated my
two positions I may not be truly intelligent, or I might not yet be falsely
intelligent, or something.
Maybe no integration is necessary, and the above positions simply
describe different spheres of the roleplaying experience. Maybe position
1 describes a desire to more firmly control the story element of an RPG,
and position 2 arises from respect for the RPG’s game element. As a
method of navigating between the two, maybe we could isolate some
rules: say, Ignore dice results in moments of low drama and Accept dice results
in moments of high drama. As dogma, this sounds suitably ex cathedra.
But I’m not here to tell you what to do in your games. Strictly
speaking, in fact, I’m not here at all. I’m not sitting at the table with
you, and these pages you’re reading are not a GM’s screen that you can
look behind, or knock over if you’re sufficiently irritated. These pages
are authored and done, and you can’t talk to me or ask me to further
describe the room or the tome or the obelisk. In fact there may not be
any Pat Harrigan at all, and that name might be just a pseudonym for
Will Hindmarch. Who’s to say? Who can confirm that the man behind
words or the screen ever existed?
But players, unlike readers, need suffer no such existential nausea.
The gamemaster exists in a different ontological space than I do as a
writer. To the player characters, he is more than just a rumor. Unlike the
universe-at-large, an RPG universe is created, is intelligently designed,
and is teleological. The gamemaster, as the ruling demiurge, has a triple
responsibility: to the players, to the story, and to the game. And when
we act as gamemasters, we choose how to impose our will on the world.
If we are playing games with the player characters, then we are like
Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth — cruel and indifferent to outcome. If we are
telling stories with them, we are like Lovecraft — cruelly aesthetic. Either
and both are possible, for within our vast principality we are supreme.
All laws, physical and artistic, derive from our design. We are finite but
unbounded.
161
The Unrollable
Superposition
Except… there is still a hint of worry. Is there something else back here
with us, behind the screen? Does there remain some primal challenge to
our thrones? What are these small, insignificant things, these dice, and
why do they disturb us so, with their vertiginous surplus of meaning?
The positions I hold toward them might not be so easily reconciled;
maybe our own position is less than completely secure. If we ignore
these dice in favor of maximum freedom of story, we then constrain
ourselves by the necessities of plot. But to submit to them frees us to
improvise the world. These paradoxes deform the boundaries of our
will.
They exist to disturb us, these dice. They appear as the facets of a
higher-dimensional mystery, an unfolding tesserae theologica. The dice
decide for us but remain undecidable. They move us but are themselves
unmoved. They are the secret revelation lying outside our usual
theologies. They slip beneath couches and crawl behind radiators. They
grind within our muscles and rattle around in our skulls. We kill with
them, clackingly. We drop them from trees and fling them into space.
They are an obscure power, this rolling chaos, these dice — ten-sided,
eight-sided, or shining trapezohedron.
162
Who Am I To Say No?
Paul Tevis
Roy won’t touch my dice. Neither will Christina or Ted.

It wasn’t always this way. For years I had run roleplaying games
with no particular stigma attached to my dice. There was no sense that
the gamemaster’s dice bag was somehow inviolate, at least no more so
than another person’s. (I’m sure I can’t be the only person who’s heard
the admonition “Never touch another man’s dice bag.”) But my dice
themselves? Harmless.
Somehow, slowly, over time, that all changed. My dice first became
things to be shunned, then later, to be feared. They became capable of
things I wasn’t.
And I think this is how it happened.
Roy, Christina, Ted, and I have been playing together for almost four
years now. We’re part of a group with a longer history than that, with a
membership that changed as some people moved away and others were
brought in. For the last few years though, it’s been the four of us, almost
every week, playing roleplaying games in my living room. I’ve fallen into
the role of GM For Life, and that suits me well enough.
163
Who Am I To Say No?
We started playing together in a year-and-a-half-long campaign I ran,

set in post-Roman Britain. From the outset, I knew that the game would
end at the Battle of Baden Hill. Every move I made in the game was
directed towards that goal. The failure of the player characters’ efforts
to put their candidate on the throne of Britannia, their betrayal by their
most powerful ally — both of these furthered the story I wanted to see
unfold. I knew where I was headed and that’s where we went.
After that game, though, I questioned the approach I’d taken. I had
said that I wanted to involve the players more, that I wanted their actions
to drive the game. Everything I had done undermined that. They were
playing my story, and I wasn’t giving them room to collaborate with
me.
About the same time, I’d been reading Keith Johnstone’s Impro and
Impro for Storytellers, and his accounts of how improvised scenes can
create compelling stories fascinated me. It drove me to track down an
improv company in my area and start taking classes. I had a knack for
it, and within weeks I was performing with the company. Those first
few months were a revelation. My scene partners taught me the power
of “Yes, and” — not just accepting what I gave them, but building on it.
When I did the same, it was magical. I remember vividly a scene where
I was convinced my girlfriend was a vampire, something that couldn’t
have happened if I wasn’t ready to say to “Yes, and” to whatever my
partner did. I learned that I loved to work with people to create scenes
and stories that didn’t fully belong to any of us. Improv taught me how
to listen and how to collaborate.
It wasn’t long before these ideas started creeping into my roleplaying.
The first game it happened in was Primetime Adventures, a roleplaying
game that uses the structure of a television series to help the group tell
its stories. We created a series called “Terroir,” about a family of magical
winemakers in the Santa Ynez Valley. (Think Six Feet Under meets Tim
Powers with a dash of Sideways.) An important feature of Primetime
Adventures is that the players get to ask for scenes. This rotates around
the table, with each player in turn giving the Producer (as the GM is
called) a brief description of what the scene is about and where it takes
place. My job as the Producer was to take this input and then frame
around it. This was radically different from my prior experience as GM,
but it fit right in with the things I was learning in improv. I stopped
164
Paul Tevis
coming to the game with a strong idea of what would happen that night,
and we had an amazing time. To this day, “Terroir” holds a special place
in our memories as the best game we’ve ever played together.
Eager to replicate that success, we sought out more RPGs that
gave directorial power to the players. One we tried not long after was
The Mountain Witch, a game about ronin with dark pasts climbing
Mount Fuji to kill a witch that lives at the top. The players are given
explicit authority to introduce elements that relate to the Dark Secret
card they draw at the beginning of play. With this and other games,
we transitioned from our original GM-and-players arrangement to a
more collaborative style. We could feel the change happening, and we
liked it.
During that game of The Mountain Witch, my dice began to change
too.
II
I’d never been picky about my dice before. My collection had accreted
around the dice that came in my Red Box D&D set and a tube of
translucent purple polyhedrons that I’d bought on a trip to Des Moines
in 1989. (In an odd twist of fate, my family moved to Des Moines in
1993, and the same game store where I’d bought those lavender gems
became my introduction to Magic: The Gathering. But I digress.) I had a
motley assortment of dice spread across three or four pouches.
As long as I’m on the subject: While I’d never been fussy about
dice, I have insisted that my dice bags look good. My first was a black
velvet pouch that originally contained a watch my mother gave me for
my confirmation. Something about that texture must appeal to me, as
all of my bags since then have felt similarly.
Around the same time that we started our shift in play style, however,
I started paying more attention to the dice I was using for each game. For
the first time, I found myself thinking about what the aesthetics of the
game implied about what the dice should look like. For The Mountain
Witch, for example, I used a set of black-and-red dice with pips, which
I would set out on the table on top of the black velvet bag they came
in. Something about the severity of the dice and the formality of the
presentation seemed to reinforce the mood of the game.
165
Who Am I To Say No?
There were other changes when it came to dice. I stopped using a

GM’s screen, and I made all of my rolls out in the open. Because I no
longer needed a “safe place” to roll, I stopped using end tables for my
materials and moved closer to the coffee table everyone else was around.
I rolled there, and when I wasn’t using them I left my dice sitting out.
All of these behaviors culminated in our game of My Life with
Master. I found the ugliest four-sided dice that I could, as our grotesque
tale of Gothic horror demanded no less. All of my rolls were in the
open. I even made one of the players roll my dice for me — a trick I owe
to Michael S. Miller’s excellent “Manifesto on Mastery.”
It wasn’t just the dice that had changed by this point, however.
When I first played My Life with Master in 2005, it opened up an entirely
new style of gaming to me. Now it was hard for me to run. The explicit
job of the Master is to oppose the players, but it ran counter to my now
well-developed tendency to say yes to what they wanted. My problems
were an indication of how much our style had changed as a result of my
exposure to improv. What I didn’t realize then was how the dice were
about to usurp the role of the opposition from me.
III
I’d had my eye on Burning Empires since our post-Roman Britain game
had finished up. It addressed the critical problem I’d had with that
campaign: there wasn’t a mechanical way to decide who won the war.
I’d wanted to give the players the ability to determine their fate, but in
the end I was the one who had to decide if they beat the Saxons or not.
Burning Empires offered a system for resolving exactly that sort of thing,
though in this case it was deciding whether or not the alien invasion of
the player characters’ home world would succeed. It was based on the
Burning Wheel system, a set of mechanics I’d fallen in love with when I’d
used them to run the post-Roman Britain game, so giving it a try was an
easy decision to make.
For this game, I used the same set of red-and-black d6s from The
Mountain Witch. I’d originally gotten them from Your Move Games,
a game company and retail store in Somerville, MA,, so the “ones”
side of the die was replaced with their logo, the outline of a sinuous
dragon. In Burning Empires, the primary threat is the Vaylen, a race of
166
Paul Tevis
parasitic, mind-controlling worms, which the logo vaguely resembled.

The connection between the dice and the players’ enemy went deeper
than that, though. The game uses a dice pool system, and when you
roll, you count ones, twos, and threes as failures and fours, fives, and
sixes as successes. The book refers to failures as “worms,” the same
nickname applied to the Vaylen themselves. During one of our first
sessions, Roy rolled particularly badly. As he looked down at the threes,
twos, and the serpentine ones, he shook his fist and shouted, “Worms!”
We all laughed, and as we continued to play through the campaign we
all started to yell at “bad rolls” that way.
The dice weren’t necessarily on my side, however. In Burning
Empires, the GM is bound by many of the same rules as the players —
if I wanted to give my army commander a suit of power armor, I had
to spend points or make a Resource roll just like the players did. Just
like the players, I had a limited number of die rolls I could make each
session, so I couldn’t just keep making rolls until I got what I wanted.
At the end of each session, the players and I would both marshal dice
for the Infection roll, to determine which side was more successful in
advancing its position. When one side won, it was going to be on the
basis of how they created schemes, executed them, and rolled well. As
I had done before, I left my dice out on the table and I rolled them in
the open. But now the stakes were much higher. When I rolled the dice,
it really meant something for the players. There were no tricks I could
pull behind the screen. If I wanted something, I had to roll for it. And
that’s when my dice, already associated with the Vaylen, took on a life
of their own.
I don’t remember Roy’s exact words when I offered him my dice to
roll. He’d forgotten his dice bag in his car that night, so when it came
time for him to make an important roll, he was without dice of his own.
Ted had told him that he could borrow some, but as Ted was digging
through his bag, I casually suggested Roy roll my dice to speed things
up. Roy reacted like I’d just offered to beat up his mother. My dice were
not to be trusted.
As the game went on, it became clear that not only did people not
want to roll my dice, they didn’t want to touch them. When I would set
the dice out at the beginning of the session, everyone avoided putting
167
Who Am I To Say No?
their things (and especially their own dice) anywhere near them. I started
to have fun with it. I’d wave the dice menacingly toward the players when
their enemies plotted against them. Anytime someone didn’t have their
dice close at hand when they needed to roll, I’d smile slyly and tell them
they could use mine. No one ever accepted. Ted hissed at me once, “I’m
not rolling your worm dice.” And in a sense, that’s what the dice had
become: a physical manifestation of their fictional opponents.
Why was that? Why were the Vaylen associated so strongly with my
dice, but not with me? I think it’s because of the role the dice played in
thwarting the players’ plans. I still played in the collaborative fashion
to which we’d become accustomed. Christina, Roy, and Ted would
suggest things, and I would either say yes or roll the dice. As I said yes
more, I transferred the responsibility for antagonism to the dice. As
I made the dice more prominent, they latched onto this idea, if only
subconsciously.
I was the one who said yes. The dice were the ones who said no.
IV
Since the end of our Burning Empires campaign, two things have
happened that have reinforced my belief in the role the dice now play
in our games.
The first is that the habit of shouting “worms!” at bad rolls has
continued. Even though we’ve left the Vaylen behind, the sense that the
dice are to blame for our setbacks stays with us.
The other is that we discovered how important it can be to have the
dice to blame. We recently played a game of Annalise, a game about a
vampire and its potential victims. In this GM-less game, you establish
what the possible outcomes of a scene are by rolling dice. Each of the
players in turn has a chance to influence the result spending resources
either to bump the six-sided dice one direction or the other, or to re-roll
one of the dice. Ted and I took opposite approaches to the system: He
would almost always choose to roll, while I would almost always choose
to bump. We had some trouble with the game, mostly due to people
getting frustrated for reasons I didn’t fully understand.
168
Paul Tevis
Later, though, Ted was able to figure out what it was that bothered
him about the tactic I’d used. He said, “I’d rather have the dice tell me
no than a friend say no.”
It all clicked. We’d immersed ourselves in a sense of collaborative
story creation, and with it we’d adopted the mantra of “Say yes or roll
the dice.” I hadn’t realized the social consequences of that idea. It
wasn’t me as a person who had the ability to deny another player’s
contributions. I had to engage the mechanics to do so. The notion
that someone could choose to say no without resorting to the vagaries
of chance, as had been the case when we started playing, had not only
become foreign to us, it became somehow transgressive. I wasn’t the
dice, so who was I to say no?
169
1d20 Places I Found My Dice
Jared Sorensen
It’s a fundamental law of the universe: if you own some dice, then
you’ve lost some dice. When your hobby revolves around taking little
bits of plastic and throwing them with great passion, those little bits
of plastic are going to disappear. A d20 skids off the battle mat. Those
candy-like percentiles go missing after your GM brings his six-year-old to
visit. You move to a new apartment. You do the laundry. It’s Thursday.
Shit happens.
Einstein said God doesn’t roll dice with the universe, but even He
has probably lost a few six-siders after some light vacuuming.
And so, I present to you twenty places I’ve lost (and found) my
dice. If you find yourself in a situation where some of your dice have
wandered off, consult the list below and see if it doesn’t jog your
memory. Or even better: roll 1d20 and check the result.
170
Jared Sorensen
1d20 Result
1. In my dice bag. Seriously, there are a lot of dice in there. And

you know how when you’re not looking for something you can
find it every time? And when you are looking for something it’s
never there? Yeah? Well that’s my dice bag.
2. Aaron’s nose. Aaron was an old high school pal of mine, and
a fellow gamer. He would stuff my six-siders into his left nostril
and expel them with great force across the room. He did this
because he thought it was funny. I noted that he never used his
own dice.
3. On the floor. I know, you looked. You spent a good fifteen

minutes combing the floor and didn’t turn up jack. But I’m
telling you, it’s right there. Next to the table leg. No, the other
one. Hot tip: don’t buy dice based on cool colors or swirly
patterns. Buy dice that aren’t going to disappear into the carpet.
Those camouflage d10s aren’t looking like such a deal now, are
they?
4. My “friend’s” dice bag. Oh, sure. He says it’s an honest mistake.

That guy’s a dick. You know he’s been eying your 25mm speckled,
metallic-flake, limited-edition d20 since you rolled three crits in
a row. That was sweet.
5. At the bottom of my knapsack. You’re going to have to empty

it out first if you intend to retrieve it. I’ve been there. If you
still can’t find it, check the smaller compartments. It’s in there
somewhere.
6. My dog’s poop. Back when I was married, I had two pugs,

Magnus and Opal. Being pugs, they would eat anything and
everything. They were like bottomless pits. Semi-gelatinous not-
quite-cubes that roamed my house consuming everything in
their path. I guess I dropped a six-sider during a game one night
and never found it. Oh, but Magnus found it. And about a day
171
or two later, I found my die. To answer your unasked question:

he rolled a 6.
7. In my pocket. I’m going to assume you picked them off the

floor (see #4) and put them in your pocket so you wouldn’t lose
them. Oh, irony. Either that or you’re such a geek you actually
walk around with dice in your pockets. Hey, I’m just saying. I
had a “halfling slinger” mini in my pocket for a week without
noticing it.
8. I don’t know. You know you had a full set of translucent purple
polyhedrals and now they’re gone.
9. Airport security. You had to explain why you were hauling four
hundred multi-colored bits of multi-faceted plastic aboard a
Boeing 747 and failed your Fast Talk roll. They took your Dr.
Pepper too.
10. Buried. You took that twenty-sider that couldn’t (no, wouldn’t)
roll above a 4 and buried it in your backyard. It’s probably still
there. Give it another few years to mull things over, then dig it
up and give it a few rolls. See if it’s learned its lesson.
11. Mrs. Neville’s desk drawer. My 10th-grade biology teacher

confiscated them from me after she caught me rolling up some
Marvel Super Heroes characters during a lecture on osmosis or
something. I’m a little foggy on photosynthesis, but I know that
Beast and Doctor Doom both have Remarkable Strength.
12. The trash. Have you ever thrown out any dice? Barring a few
unfortunate incidents (see items #2 and #6) I’m pretty loyal to
my dice. Remember those crappy ones that you had to fill in with
crayons in order to see the numbers? I hated those things. But I
still kept them. I might even still have them... somewhere.
172
Jared Sorensen
13. My brother’s Monopoly set. Because he lost his dice, too, and
although he’s not into Dungeons & Dragons or Paranoia or
Vampire or whatever, he is into Monopoly and the little creep
thought you wouldn’t notice if he “borrowed” 2d6. But those
were from your West End Games edition of Star Wars and man,
that’s some heavy sentimental value right there. Monopoly sucks,
anyway. Sure, the car and the dog are cool, but how do you
roleplay a thimble? A hat? An iron?
14. My friend’s dice bag, part II. You were at a convention and he
didn’t want to leave the table to buy new dice from the dealer’s
hall so what does he do? “Dude, can I borrow some dice?” And
did he return them? No. Dick move!
15. Car dashboard. It was a hot day and you didn’t park in the
shade. They’re not completely ruined — it’s not like they melted
into a puddle of polycarbonate — but the dice are warped just
enough so that they don’t roll right anymore.
16. My iPhone. You thought it was going to be cool to download

a dice-rolling app. “Yeah, I’ll impress the shit out of my friends
when they see this.” And they were impressed, for like, a minute
and a half. And then the awful reality set it: you can’t complain
that a die is “cocked” when it rolls badly. Hoisted on your own
petard.
17. Over there. You threw them hard. All you needed was an 8 or
higher on your attack roll to save the day. Now you’re dead. The
cleric’s still dead. The thief? He got everyone into this mess by
failing his damn Stealth roll. Everyone’s dead. TPK. Where are
your dice? Over there, somewhere.
18. The game store, maybe? You had them in your hand when you
paid for them at the cash register. You saw the guy put them into
a bag. You have the bag. You have the receipt. Where are the
dice? Is there a hole in the bag? Is someone out to get me? What
is going on? “I’m going to check the floor one more time.”
173
19. Mom got rid of them. She thought you outgrew all that kid
stuff and threw it out, or sold it in a yard sale after you moved
out of the house. Same thing happened to your Endless Quest
books. Man! Rose Estes, am I right?
20. They’re right here. See? They were there all the time. Now roll
initiative. Let’s play!
174
Make A Wish:
Dice and Divination in Gaming
Monica Valentinelli
My relationship with my dice is a little unusual. Even though I am

pretty grounded, I’m still a touch superstitious when I roll the dice. The
intellectual side of me knows that dice have a history that is steeped
in superstition and magic and that the results of a roll can be tied to
a statistical probability. However, the superstitious side of me believes
that my actions might somehow affect the outcome of my die roll, even
though that has no basis in reality.
The word cleromancy refers to a form of divination that uses dice to
predict the future; this art might have evolved from one of the oldest
forms of divination known as ashagalomancy. In ashagalomancy, a caster
throws small pieces of bone with markings on them instead of dice,
but the effect is similar. Since ancient times, cleromancy has been
used to divine the fortunes of the curious in every part of the world.
Sometimes, the dice used had astrological or symbolic etchings on each
facet. Other times, dice were simply numbered from one to six. When
the dice were rolled, each result (or set of results) held a significant
meaning that encompassed several of life’s more common milestones:
love and marriage, luck and money, birth and death.
One of my first experiences with cleromancy was through a toy
manufactured by Mattel: the Magic 8-Ball. Inside that large, plastic ball
175
Make A Wish
with the see-through bottom is a multi-sided die with twenty messages

on it. Simply ask a direct yes-or-no question, shake the oracle, and find
your answer. When I was younger, the Magic 8-Ball was all the rage,
especially at sleepover parties. We would turn to the ball to answer
questions like “Does he like me?” or “Will I marry someone I know?”
Oddly enough, we always seemed to keep shaking that ball if it didn’t
give us the answers we wanted to hear. Set aside the statistical probability
of rolling a twenty-sided die for a moment and put yourself in the tennis
shoes of a teenage girl who’s experiencing her first crush. Even though
we knew that the ball wasn’t really magic, the answers it displayed fed
our need to know the future because they were vague and indirect.
Pretty powerful for a simple toy, isn’t it? Several forms of divination are
structured to provide vague answers rather than definitive ones. The
less direct an answer is, the easier it is for a querent to rationalize that
their oracle is correct. It’s also a good way to ensure that a querent
comes back for more.
Because divination is often associated with magic, it is often
employed in tabletop roleplaying games that draw on the horror and
fantasy genres. Divination can either manifest as a physical skill, a magic
power or ritual, or a psychic ability. For example, in certain editions of
Wizard of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons, some characters could use
divination magic to seek out a piece of advice. Players had to roll to see
how successful their spell was, and the effect could range from vague
to specific. Players in Artesia, by Archaia Studio Press, can employ a
reading ritual which offers their characters insight into the past, present
or future of another character. In Aletheia, by Abstract Nova Press,
which is a game I contributed to, characters have psychic abilities like
postcognition and precognition. Even though these examples of games are
all different, the act of divination is pretty much the same. In any
game that employs the use of divination, the act occurs on both the
player level and on the character level. The character utilizes a ritual or
a psychic power to find the answer they need in the story; the player
rolls the dice to see how successful the character’s divination is. As a
result, the player takes on the roll of an ancient caster, divining the fate
of the querent — the character. Here, the interpreter is the gamemaster
(or oracular storyteller) who bases his answer on the player’s success
with dice.
176
Monica Valentinelli
Of course, divination can take a more subtle form in games. In

White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade, the Tremere have a special
ability called Thaumaturgy. The word thaumaturgy roughly translates to
“miracle work.” In order to see if the Tremere’s blood magic “worked,”
players had to roll the dice to “divine” whether or not their vampires
were successfully able to conduct magic. While Thaumaturgy isn’t a
form of divination, the process players must go through to activate
their blood magic is, and it isn’t always successful. Several magic rituals,
psychic powers, and skills work this way in RPGs. However, just like
in real life, divination is never designed to be an automatic “win.”
Answers are usually cloudy and vague, requiring careful interpretation.
Of course, this is one of the reasons why rolling the dice is so popular
— players believe that the results can be very straightforward depending
upon the type of question they may ask and how well they roll, even if
that’s not really what happens in game.
Whether players specifically set out to use divination or not, the
act of rolling the dice in any game often results in its own form of
cleromancy. Players consult their dice to find out how their character
will act or what knowledge they will gain. In dire circumstances, the word
“success” has a different meaning than in other, less intense moments.
Depending upon the game, one simple roll of the dice can often mean
the difference between a character’s life or death. In other cases, rolling
the dice has more immediate consequences. To scale a wall a player
will roll a die and their character will wind up leaping over it with ease.
When faced with a fire-breathing dragon, a player may either be the
hero or the victim, all depending upon a simple roll of the die.
In many games, rituals tend to arise out of the player’s need for
success. The next time you’re at a casino, take a look around. We’ve all
seen how people blow on their dice or snap their fingers for luck during
their roll at the craps table. At a casino, players risk a lot of money for a
roll of the die in order to win, so it’s pretty common to see people blow
on their dice or even kiss them for luck. In RPGs, dice rituals are often
much more involved, even though players don’t have any money on the
line, because they are taking a different kind of risk to ensure that their
character’s deeds are successful.
My experience with these rituals has led me to believe that time
is a major factor that determines what a player does with their dice.
177
Make A Wish
In a roleplaying game, players invest more time creating characters

and playing the game, so the results of the rolls take on a significant
importance even if there isn’t a more tangible reward involved like
money. RPG players tend to have their own set of dice, which has led
to a lot of players developing superstitions regarding the color and size
of the dice they use to roll. If they roll poorly, the dice are jinxed. If
they roll well, the dice are lucky. Since players can’t keep re-rolling for
the same thing over and over again until they get the results they want,
they often look for ways to ensure that they will roll well on the first
try. Often, that means they’ll select dice that mean something more to
them than a tool for mathematical probability.
Some players select each die in their collection individually; others
obtain matching sets and keep them in a particular dice bag. One player
I knew kept a special box for his dice and whispered to them before
rolling them on the table. Another player believed that each set of dice
had their own personality, and that if they didn’t do well it’s because
they were unhappy or misbehaving. In my experiences, there has been
no shortage of rituals when it comes to rolling the bones. Players,
including myself, don’t want their characters to die, lose their sanity,
or get turned into zombies, so it’s only natural to develop superstitions
about the dice.
While these rituals make sense to me, I sometimes wonder why
there are so many different kinds of things that we do with our dice just
to make sure we’re rolling well.
At conventions, one of my favorite RPGs to run is a horror game
called Obsidian: The Age of Judgement. In this post-apocalyptic game, it’s
not uncommon to have a traitor (or two) adventuring in the same party.
Players know the stakes: the game can have a high body count and the
ultimate prize for a cultist is nothing less than a soul. In one game I
ran, a few of the players started to stand up and dance around with
their dice to ensure their characters wouldn’t get eaten by a demon. In
another, a player rolled their dice without looking because they didn’t
want to see whether or not they succeeded.
As a player, I have a reputation for failing my rolls. From having my
soul damaged by a ghost in Supernatural to turning into a zombie within
ten minutes of playing All Flesh Must Be Eaten, I put my characters
through the wringer. Because my results are so terrible, I find myself
178
Monica Valentinelli
attaching more emphasis on what my character does in-game than on

character creation or my dice. (Often, I’m the player that asks for more
guns... for good reason.) The funny thing about my inability to roll well
is that other players have offered to buy me new dice or help me come
up with my own ritual because they believe I’ll end up with “luckier”
dice. (This is especially true in group situations where I have to “help”
the rest of the group.) One time, I caved in and rolled another player’s
dice — and still rolled badly. From then on, I was forbidden to even
come near their dice.
Regardless of what game you’re playing, the element of chance
is an important part of game design. Luck is one of the reasons why
people are drawn to gaming in the first place, because the roll of the
dice shapes the stories we tell by shedding light on the things we don’t
know. Sometimes, that unknown element takes on the form of player
commentary through a narrative or a chance mechanic in the game.
Other times, calculated probability through a series of tables or charts
defines what outcome a player can receive. Intellectually, many people
understand that gaming has, at its core, a mathematical structure with a
specific set of possible outcomes. Even though I’m one of those people, I
can’t help but cringe anytime I have to roll the dice in a crucial situation.
No matter what I do, whether it’s blowing on my dice or “breaking in”
a brand new set, I roll pretty poorly. Sometimes, even I have to wonder
whether or not I’m giving my dice a bit of bad luck.
As a game designer, however, the results of the rolls take on a
different meaning for me. Instead of being focused on an individual
do-or-die result, game designers often take on the role of the “divine” by
determining how potential outcomes work in the game. The designer
of the Magic 8-Ball selected a twenty-sided die to float inside, because it
needed to accommodate a number of answers that ranged from positive
to negative. In this “game,” there are a finite number of probabilities that
will show how often you might get a particular response. Roleplaying
games are often designed with a mathematical probability in mind to
help create a sense of balance in the game so that players aren’t always
succeeding nor are they always failing. They can either have a pretty simple
system, like the Unisystem from Eden Studios, or be more “crunchy”
like GURPS from Steve Jackson Games.
179
Make A Wish
You might often hear game designers talk about the “chance for
success” when they’re creating or adapting game mechanics. Game
designers determine how often a player’s roll might succeed, similar to
how a mathematician would predict your chances of winning the lottery.
In many games, there’s often an element introduced that provides
players with the ability to re-roll their dice. The more frequently a player
rolls their dice, the more often they can “read” the results. At darker
moments in games where there is more at stake, players want to roll the
dice to “divine” what will happen next to their characters.
Frequent dice rolls can become pretty addicting, especially when a
character’s next move can shape the entire direction of play. Without
that element of chance, the player may feel trapped or unable to move
while their character sits on the sidelines. In all the games I’ve run and
played in, the most heated moments end up being the ones where the
dice are flying and the decisions are made quickly. At those moments,
all bets are off and the rituals mean very little because, win or lose, the
dice are clearly in charge.
Whether cleromancy is intentionally integrated into the design of
a game or not, the concept is still present in most games that use dice
to determine success or failure — if the designer or the gamemaster
doesn’t put it there, the players will. In my experiences, players often
hope to roll the dice to see whether or not they “succeed,” even if a
gamemaster declares that a roll of the die isn’t necessary. The more fun
they’re having, the more a player wants to roll to see what happens to
their character. That emotion is often what drives people to divination
in the first place. A jealous lover may want to know whether or not
she’s been cheated on. A mother may want to know if her child will
grow up to be rich. A frightened groom may want to know whether or
not he’s marrying the right woman or if he should have taken a new job
overseas. Players want the ability to shape the future of their characters,
but they often want to do it in a way that has an element of chance
because it’s more entertaining to them.
Even though I understand how games are constructed, I still
unconsciously make a wish before I roll the dice to help affect my
results and shape my character’s future. Sure, that wish may be a bit
superstitious, but that’s part of my “ritual” when I’m rolling my dice. I
know that the art of cleromancy is both a passive and an active form of
180
Monica Valentinelli
divination in many different types of games, but that doesn’t stop me

from hoping I can affect the outcome of a die roll. After all, a character’s
fate isn’t really up to the GM, it’s determined by what the dice reveal.
So the next time you roll those bones, stop for a moment and
think about what you’re doing. You’re not unlike the Roman soldier
who threw dice in ancient times or the fortune-teller who helps a jilted
lover find the answers she’s looking for. For whenever you roll the dice
and make a wish, you’re participating in an ancient art form known as
divination.
181
Damage Dice: The Die Is Cast
Chuck Wendig
It’s hard to remember now what he did to deserve it. It’s been, what,
15 years?
The player — who shall remain unnamed, so let’s just call him “Math
Hue” — was the first to draw ire from the gods, to bring fate crashing
down upon his own head.
Was he roughhousing again? Did he say something inappropriate,
something that demanded judgment from the Powers That Be? Or was
it simply that he committed to the dastardly blasphemy of speaking over
the gods, whispering and giggling when the voice of destiny sought to
command the room?
The truth of the transgression has since been lost to time. Men grow
older and forget their sins. Gods, too, have short memories, consumed
as they are by divine politics, celestial squabbles, and the bedding of
mortals.
Ah, but while the exact nature of this contravention of godly
law remains indecipherable behind the gauzy mists of time, the
punishment... the punishment remains forever known. Crystal clear,
like the pealing of a bell. A moment in time. A reprimand still used by
the gods even today.
182
Chuck Wendig
Like Zeus’ thunderbolt — a blue flash, a blurry shape, a dim thwack!

Followed by the transgressor’s cry and subsequent whimper. This is the
lick of fate’s lash. This is the skull-thumping kiss of divine retribution.
This is the searing god-thrown lightning bolt by which—
Well. All right. It was a twenty-sided die. A blue, crystalline d20, as
a matter of fact.
Hey, listen, all drama aside, those suckers have some heft. Pick one
up. Test it in your hand and roll it betwixt thumb and fingers. While
nobody here is encouraging violence, were you to be a mean-ol’-poo-
poo-pants GM, you might whip one at a player and score a direct hit in
the dead center of the forehead. It’ll make a satisfying pop. It’d leave a
red mark, like a scarlet 20 branded upon the face in reverse; a reminder
of sin.
We always had one from that point forward. When the
aforementioned player known as “Math Hue” enraged the gods — by
which we mean, annoyed the GM — he earned a d20 pitched at his
skull.
Thing is, the d20 flew true only that one time. Only one time was
needed, you see.
A digression: when the author of this essay was a child, he thought
to put a cat in a dryer. Calm down, the dryer wasn’t on. He wasn’t trying
to cook the cat. He was trying to give the cat a warm and happy place.
After all, the drying cycle had just completed. The clothes within formed
a toasty bed, surely priceless to any pet. The author — five years old at the
time — opted to place the cat in the dryer, close the door, and walk away
as if nothing had happened. When questioned about this particular
incident, the question came out of a father’s angry mouth and beneath
his furrowed brow, so the author assumed that putting the cat in the
dryer was decidedly a very bad thing and then explained in the most
innocent of tone: “No, I did not put the cat in the dryer.” Of course,
the father could smell lies the way giants could smell Englishmen, and
so that earned the author a spanking with a wooden paint stirrer. The
author never suffered another spanking again. Why? Because that paint
stirrer sat forever on the counter, always within sight, always within
reach. It was equal parts future warning and reminder of the past.
That’s how we rocked the blue d20.
183
Damage Dice
Even when we moved onto games that no longer demanded the

d20, that lone die remained. It sat near the GM’s right hand. Didn’t
matter who the GM was that week. That individual ascended to the
heavens and had the power of divine retribution in easy reach — he
merely needed to pick up the d20 and hold it aloft. A jagged bolt of
lightning in Zeus’ white-knuckled grip.
Warning and reminder.
The little rats stopped squeaking. The birds lined up on their
branches. Order was granted to chaos.
That die was a weapon. Fate’s lash. Destiny’s truncheon. Whatever
you want to call it.
Little did we know, we were tapping into a greater truth.
2 3
It is perhaps appropriate that the first dice and the first weapons
were both made of bone.
Bone weapons — well, that’s a bit obvious. What did they dig up
at Stonehenge? Arrowheads, spear-tips, and crude axe-heads, all carved
from bone. The Maori used smooth, flat whalebone “paddles” (sounds
nice, but will crush your skull) called patu paraoa. The Aztecs tipped
their atlatl darts with bone. Heck, go back further, and you might find
Neanderthals bludgeoning one another with bones both human and
animal (just before dancing around the black stone monolith that
would surely uplift the species).
The earliest dice were bone, too. The anklebones of sheep, known
as astragaloi, thrown in games of chance all over the ancient world —
from Rome to Greece to Egypt. The bones are concave on one side,
convex on the other, giving a binary element to chance. Homer spoke
of them in both The Iliad and The Odyssey. Sophocles wrote of this game,
too, to Palamedes. The game was known as knucklebones (yes, using
anklebones) — the player might catch the dice on the back of a hand, or
empty them upon the ground from a rattled cup.
What’s the connection? What’s the bridge between these two
things?
Dice are just another type of weapon.
184
Chuck Wendig
3 4
“Why do you keep rolling those dice behind the screen?” I asked.
The GM — not a friend, but the operator of a convention game at a
nearby university — just giggled.
Not a comforting sign.
Our characters — vampires, if I remember correctly, mine a pre-
generated subterranean freak known as “Sewer Billy” — continued on
with their nightclub cavorting and seductive blood-drinking and angst-
having.
The GM continued to roll more dice behind his screen. The
clattering tumble of ten-siders.
He cursed softly under his breath.
“Did something bad happen?” someone at the table asked.
“No,” he said, disappointed.
“Okay, seriously,” I asked, “why are you rolling all those dice
again?”
He frowned. “I’m trying to see if I can make something happen to
you guys.”
“Won’t bad things happen naturally? We’re vampires.” Frankly, give
the group ten minutes unsupervised, and our monsters would probably
have killed a cop. Or three. (In-game, obviously, lest you think our troupe
comprised a gaggle of cop killers.) It was par for the course at that age
that cops would perish in our roleplaying sessions; some subconscious
assault made against the fetters of authority, perhaps.
“It has to be random,” the GM said, flipping through the book in
what appeared to be a desperate search for some kind of encounter
table. His scowl darkened, deepened. Was he looking for an excuse to
send monstrous hobos after us? Mind flayers? Cyborgs? What?
He rolled more dice. The sound of a hammer falling on a revolver’s
empty chambers. Clickity-tumble.
Then:
His face lit up.
“Success,” he said, indicating triumph by some metric that remains
unseen. He rubbed his hands together. “The upper balcony of the
nightclub collapses on you.”
185
Damage Dice
5 1
When the Romans played the game of bones, they would throw four
at a time, with four different outcomes available on each anklebone die
(I, II, III, IV). The worst throw was four ones: I, I, I, I. Think of this
as a critical failure, a botch, an unrecoverable loss. This throw was the
Canes, or Canicula. The Dog Star.
Homer, in The Iliad, said:
Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky

On summer nights, star of stars,
Orion’s Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity.
The Romans believed in dies canicula, the Dog Days of Summer —

blasted, hot days where dogs would pant and froth and perish (it’s how
they caught rabies, they believed), days where men were punished by the
gods with all that wretched heat.
Pick up the dice, throw the bones.
Throw poorly and draw the ire of the gods.
6 1
The player — let’s call him “Schmeg” — failed to show up again for
game day.
Third Sunday in a row (we played on Sundays, as it was our holy
day) that he failed to join us, actually. It was becoming a habit. A bad
habit. One to be discouraged.
“Fine,” the GM, who may or may not have been the author of this
essay, said. The absence of the player felt like rejection. It stung the
pride. It tasted of bitter ashes. The GM concocted a scheme, a tiny
moment of revenge. He told the others, those who bothered to show:
“Schmeg’s character” — a magic-user — “is asleep in the other room, and
his slumbering mind conjures up nightmarish, mischievous demons
that bite and claw at his dream-trapped body.” Everybody agreed with
this, for they had been slighted, too, by his lack of presence. Chastised,
186
Chuck Wendig
they opted for castigation, driven by the dice, tumbling as they did from
the hand of fickle fate.
As if to demonstrate his callous, callow power as GM-slash-god, the
GM threw a handful of not-too-many dice so that all could witness the
outcome and be assured that no sneaky fiat was in play.
The dice were... terrible. Terrible in the trust sense of word: “Exciting
terror, or great fear.”
Worse, they were exploding dice — successes became re-rolls which
became successes which became re-rolls.
What was at first the warm glow of burgeoning schadenfreude became
a slowly creeping horror. Glib, self-assured smiles gave way to looks of
shock.
For a while, nobody knew what to say.
This was a very bad throw of the dice. The bones were tossed and
showed no mercy. In spirit, it was I, I, I, I: Orion’s Dog had bitten, and
bitten hard.
Finally, the GM, who still may or may not have been the author of
this essay, spoke with proclamation:
“The dice are cast. The demons tear him to ribbons, and then bury
his corpse in the flowerbed outside.”
Later, when Schmeg finally decided to rejoin the game and show up
on the Sunday next, necromancy would piece his magic-user character
back together from his grave beneath the marigolds.
But his bodily rejoining would not come without scars. Such were
the whims of the dice.
2 2
In the Bible, the casting of lots could conjure a king or kill a thief.
In the Books of Samuel they use the casting of lots to select King
Saul.
In the Book of Joshua, however, God demands that the casting of
lots be used to uncover a thief. The thief, Achan, stole treasure from
the city of Jericho. The Israelites throw lots — the random tossing of
bones, like the tossing of dice, known as cleromancy — to find the thief’s
identity. When they find Achan, he confesses. And then they stone him
to death. (Did he really confess? Or is that a fictional conceit to soften
187
Damage Dice
the guilt of allowing random lots to determine life or death?)

In the Mahabarata, King Yudhisthira plays a game of dice to
determine ownership of the kingdom of Hastinapur. All those people,
their fates hinging on the outcome of a game of chance.
In Greece, men threw dice as a social game at the symposia — a man
could lose his fortune there, or be shamed by the game and find his
social status crushed like a bug under a callused heel.
Consider, too, the Pythia — the Oracle of Delphi. The oracular
prophetesses were thought to channel the voice of the gods, such as
Zeus or Poseidon, in order to divine the fates of those who sought
such insight. But why, then, was the temple at Delphi also one of the
largest storehouses of gold? Why did gifting the prophetess with gold
improve one’s chances at receiving a favorable fortune rather than a
terrible curse? While the chosen prophetess did not herself throw dice,
men did cast lots to determine who could visit with her, and in what
order. But even there they could improve their place in line by offer a
handful of gold and an animal sacrifice. Appease the prophetess, and
she would let fate be a favor, not a weapon turned against you.
Random chance. Dice, lots, bones. On their whims wait the
fortunes and misfortunes of men and empires. Lives literally hang in
the balance.
Is this so different from the games we play?
3 6
Consider: to the player, the dice are a game of chance.

To the character in a game — whether it’s a knight slaying a dragon
or that little pewter terrier trotting around the Monopoly board — the
dice are an oracular prophecy, a pivot point where one direction is life
and fortune, and the other direction is misery or death.
By calling for the casting of dice, it’s like a game of Russian roulette.
Spin the cylinder. Wave the barrel from player to player. Pull the trigger.
A dry click, and everybody’s safe. A bang, and someone goes.
Calling for more and more rolls of the dice and the chance for that
hammer to fall on a loaded chamber rises.
Probability gains tooth and claw that lengthen with every toss of
the dice.
188
Chuck Wendig
For all involved, dice are a kind of weapon.
1 1
We retired the d20 without fanfare.

So too did we stop sharpening our dice so as to use them as weapons
against both player and character. No more rolls to meaninglessly prod
fate, like the poking of a sleeping bear. No more revenge rolls, no rolls
to punish or play god. Fate’s lash is hung back upon its hook. Destiny’s
truncheon must be kept sequestered at the hip.
Time, as it were, to grow up. To let the backward 20 emblazoned
upon Math Hue’s forehead heal.
And yet, it’s still all too easy to see how in the games we play dice
are still suited to weapons — abstract weapons, intangible weapons, but
weapons just the same. The call for a roll is a chance to win, or a chance
to die. The players make rolls for their characters often for the chance to
do harm to those characters’ fictional foes: fire cast against a rampaging
goblin throng, a stitch of bullets against an incoming werewolf, a rail gun
against a lumbering robot. With each clatter of the dice on the table,
it’s hard not to hear the sound of sword steel, fire belching, and hissing
lasers, and beneath that, the distant rattle of old knucklebones.
Or maybe just the thwack of a twenty-sider pelting some poor sod
in the forehead.
189
Fortune’s Tyranny
Ray Fawkes
We imagined ourselves to be puppeteers maintaining a more or less

divine relationship with our characters. Directing their actions and
responses. Possessing them, manipulating their notional bodies with
our minds.
Game sessions were raucous affairs for our crew. There was a lot of
chatter at the table, a lot of laughter and banter, snacking, and assorted
tomfoolery during all but the most serious dramatic scenes. But more
often than not, when the table went still and silent, it wasn’t because
one of us had seized the stage — not really. It was because someone had
laid down a hopeful fiat, and we wanted to see what the dice had to say
about it.
We thought that “I draw my gun and fire off a snap shot” meant,
really, “this guy that I have brought into play draws his gun and fires
without bothering to aim.”
But that’s not true. It meant, “By the grace of these dice, fictional
guy, you will fire without aiming — see if you can’t knock your enemy out
of the story and win me some bragging rights.” Because we all submitted
to an intermediary, one that was so integrated with play that we often
failed to consider it. Our proper deference went by the wayside — until,
of course, the fiat was declared. Then, like a puppet monarch, we’d
190
Ray Fawkes
turn to the real power for permission: we’d raise a hand and prepare to
throw the dice. Humility and understanding rushed in. “Please,” some
of us would whisper to our closed fist, or “C’mon.” We depended on
the dice entirely — to see if our ambitions for our characters could be
realized and, if so, how well, and to what effect.
And the dice had a lot to say. So much so, that we would often
assign a particular rolling set to particular characters, and use it for no
other. The dice became, in a sense, a part of those characters existing
outside of their world. We associated patterns of behavior to them in
bouts of superstition, and adjusted the personalities of our characters
to match. My roguish biker, prone to near-suicidal behavior in action
scenes, became quiet and careful when on foot. Why? Because despite
the ratings on his character sheet that said otherwise, I often failed
rolls in social challenges. I had the stats to persuade a bank guard to
give me his pistol (and his underpants, probably), but I wouldn’t even
ask a passerby for the time of day after a couple of spectacularly awful
rolls. The dice established the reality, not the numbers. “This guy has
what it takes to charm people, but he just can’t make it happen.”
Say what you like about the odds, about randomness and parity
of probability. It just seemed that if I had my character jump a chasm
on his bike so that he could land it right on a sniper’s face, he’d
succeed. If I had him casually attempt to negotiate a better rate on a
box of ammo, he’d fail catastrophically and end up running for his life.
Those particular smoke-grey dice, “his” dice, were not co-operative in
quiet moments. So it seemed, anyway. Thus, then, the peculiar ripple
backwards: because fortune dictated repeated social failure, I altered
the character’s behavior. This meta-feature of the dice became an organ
of the character, denying his urge to speak and encouraging his urge to
take physical risks instead.
I wasn’t the only one. Chris, a long-time member of our crew, had
a brash bounty hunter in play. His character was loud and quarrelsome,
and he thrived on infamy. His dice, blood red, reflected and extended his
bravado, seemingly rewarding him for violent risk-taking and punishing
him for cautious strategy. And it was Chris who first acknowledged the
fundamental link between the character and the dice assigned to him.
One night, during a particularly intense session, Chris directed his
grizzled bounty hunter into a one-on-one confrontation with a hated
191
Fortune’s Tyranny
nemesis. The rest of us were lost in the background, fending off a threat,
while he charged heedlessly after the foe, firing wild, screaming curses,
and batting lesser enemies aside — the usual. And, as usual, his mad
progress seemed blessed. The dice kept turning up favorably for him, at
first pleasantly so, then amazingly, then ludicrously. As the climax of the
confrontation approached, the rest of us began to laugh, incredulous.
The character was pounding through serious obstacles with such wild
abandon, and with such astounding success, that we rose, one by one,
from our chairs, astonished.
And then the final confrontation. Threats and accusations were
exchanged. Weapons drawn. Opportunities for cover ignored. The
two charged directly at one another, emptying clips and filling the air
between them with hot lead. Exactly the attack methodology that served
Chris perfectly.
At that critical moment, the climax of the battle, and, arguably
the purpose of Chris’ character’s existence, the dice failed him. Once,
twice, and again. And again. And again. They withdrew their support.
The link between Chris’ declarations and his character’s ability was
disrupted, and his enraged hunter fell to the ground, badly wounded,
his foe free to dispatch him — or make a gloating escape.
In the world of our game, the trauma to this character must have
been monumental. His personal philosophy — indeed, what appeared
to be, for all intents and purposes, his divine calling — had failed him.
He had been trained by fortune, and fortune had punished him for
conforming to its demand. I imagine the light of hope flickering and
fading in his hunter’s eyes.
Chris stood up and threw his crimson dice into a messy corner of
the room, losing them in a pile of take-out boxes and old magazines.
He never searched for them. His character was, then and forever, an
amputee, missing the part of himself that hovered ever above and
around him, translating will into actuality.
He chose to create a new character. The hunter was relegated to
secondary status in our game world, remaining a broken man. While he
was a hobbling example for the rest of us, a wise-talking new mechanic
joined our midst. Where the hunter was crippled and cynical, the
young grease-monkey was an optimist and a charmer, full of heart.
192
Ray Fawkes
The hunter’s fortune was lost. The mechanic had a brand-new set of
off-white, marbled dice that suggested, gently and consistently, that he
might be a hell of a jury-rigger but he wasn’t exactly destined to be a
front-line guy. And Chris, he was fine with that.

193
The Double-bladed Axe
james lowder
You can hear the dice rolling on every page.

For literary critics, those nine words are the ultimate dismissal, a
diktat that banishes a work from the hosts of respectable publishing
and sends it, scorn-wrapped and unmourned, to the purgatory of mere
transcription. They don’t just brand a book as failed fiction. They
disqualify it in essential ways from being considered fiction at all.
The echo of dicefall in a story reveals the untoward influence of a
roleplaying game, and there are few more egregious betrayals of authorial
responsibility, at least in the minds of middlebrow literati, than allowing
game mechanics to taint one’s characters or plot or prose. Real writers
employ their imaginations. The best, most worthwhile stories emerge
from a creator’s head fully formed, like Athena springing from Zeus’s
brow. Only the most desperate sort of hack permits an RPG’s rigidly
codified magic and combat system, its mongrelized mythology and
campaign setting, to influence his or her storytelling.
There are plenty of reasons to slam game-related fiction, from
the awful contracts publishers attach to such projects to the creative
interference the game’s owners can impose on the writing process. It’s
not unusual for the companies behind licensed fiction to view novels
and stories primarily as a marketing tool. Or to see them as convenient
194
James Lowder
vehicles to move the intellectual property in a direction that increases its

suitability for additional licenses. Their goal is not so much showcasing
good stories as it is creating works that maximize the opportunities for
action figures or T-shirts or feature films. Those sorts of distractions
don’t occur with every game-related fiction project, but when they do,
they increase the chances for a work to be bland or simply bad.
To some critics, though, any connection between a piece of fiction
and a game is, in itself, proof of its inferiority. It doesn’t matter how
equitable the contract or how much creative control the author was
given; the link to the game is poisonous. Typically, such critics can’t
even bring themselves to call game-tied books novels at all, preferring
instead the terms sharecrop or novelization — that is, a work that may
resemble a novel, but which is something else. They view these things
as frontline agents in the Invasion of the Shelf-Space Snatchers, part of
a campaign to supplant the genuine articles at the local bookstore with
facsimiles of fiction. The cacophony of clattering dice in their pages is
one of the imposters’ most insidious weapons, deafening readers and
writers alike to the sweet sounds of authentic prose.
There’s no question that being forced to adhere to a game’s rules
can hobble a story. I saw this firsthand as an editor in TSR’s book
department, working on such lines as the Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun,
and Ravenloft. The first big project handed to me as a neophyte editor
was the Avatar Trilogy, three books intended to provide a narrative
gloss to the changes imposed upon the Forgotten Realms by Dungeons
& Dragons transitioning from the first edition rules to the second. Some
of those rules changes were easy enough to assimilate into the novels,
while others proved disastrous to the narrative’s coherence. The sudden
demise of the assassins stands as a prime example of the latter.
To satisfy the reactionaries and panic-mongers who’d been howling
since 1980 about the supposed links between D&D and the occult, TSR
eliminated demons and devils from the game in the second edition —
or, to be precise, rebranded the hellspawn tanar’ri and baatezu, names
calculated to baffle even the most ardent, Satan-seeking fundamentalist
and make the product more presentable to the mass market. Assassins
were given the heave-ho, too, stricken from the list of potential classes a
player could select when creating a character. The second Avatar novel,
Tantras, was supposed to integrate that marketing/design decision
195
The Double-Bladed Axe
into the storyline, one of many plot points that were classified by
management as “essential” even before the authors and I had been
assigned the books.
There were, no doubt, ways in which this epic event could have
been made compelling, but we didn’t stumble across any of them as
we rushed to meet the tight deadlines. We were fortunate just to get
Tantras published on schedule. The original author, ground down by
all the game-related demands on the story, departed the project rather
late in the process, and the replacement writer had very little time to
cobble together a draft, let alone craft an elegant solution to the assassin
problem. Other parts of Tantras came together pretty well. The assassin
subplot, with its awkward deus ex machina extermination — one god
literally wiping out the followers of another — wasn’t one of them.
We discussed other options, but none of them worked in the context
of the shared world. TSR didn’t want to actually eliminate all assassins,
to have any Realms character that had ever killed anyone for money
abruptly drop dead on the page. To start with, that would have wiped
out some very popular villains, including Artemis Entreri, archnemesis
of R.A. Salvatore’s now-iconic wandering drow hero Drizzt Do’Urden.
And then there was the problem of determining motivation. If a
character was paid for a murder, but would have killed simply for the
perverse enjoyment, is he or she technically an assassin? Such musings
could lead the Realms metaplot in some interesting directions, but the
implications on the setting as a whole were far beyond what anyone
wanted Avatar to address. So only certain assassins were killed, the
victims of divine fiat, and everyone hurried on, hoping that the readers
would not be too offended by the inelegant shape into which the fiction
had been twisted by the demands of the game.
That the rattle of the dice on the page wouldn’t be too loud.
There are lots of other instances of game material awkwardly
integrated into stories or novels. None of the myriad game-tied fiction
lines are free of their own embarrassing examples. It’s difficult to avoid
such problems, given the way in which the books are contracted and
created. Tantras stands out for me because I experienced the project going
off the rails from a seat right up front in the engine. The debacle shaped
my own perception of licensed fiction. It helped me to understand
why someone would dismiss such books completely, why they might
196
James Lowder
conclude that any link to a game undermines good storytelling, just as

highbrow critics such as Edmund Wilson dismiss all genre works, from
Chesterton’s Father Brown detective tales to Tolkien’s fantasy classic
The Lord of the Rings, as nothing less than junk fiction because of their
genres’ conventions and supposed limitations.
To actually hear the thunderclap of dicefall in a game-tied story is to
hear the sound of a killing stroke, an axe blow against creativity. It means
the game’s setting or mechanics have prevented a writer from freely
pursuing an original artistic vision, and any such impediment — whether
it’s genre conventions, unreasonable deadlines, or the artificial margins
of a game’s rules — is a danger to the creation of worthwhile fiction.
That’s not to say, though, that a causal relationship exists between any
of those things and a failed work of art. A short deadline may force one
writer to cut corners, to fall back upon clichés and tired conventions,
while that same pressure may inspire another to stop fiddling endlessly
and pointlessly with his text. Hewing too closely to a genre’s tropes can
render a story tediously predictable, but actively engaging or subverting
those same conventions can lead to something wholly original. Writers
such as Michael Moorcock, Jonathan Carroll, and Ursula K. Le Guin
excel at this sort of narrative judo, wherein the strength of the readers’
expectations are turned back on them.
With roleplaying games, the extensive rules and copious
background material can easily stunt a novel. The official sources often
detail everything from what fantasy races can pursue which careers to
minutiae such as a spell’s range or who can wear a certain type of armor.
This leaves the writer with a limited quantity of sand in the creative
sandbox from which to construct anything original. That’s not to say
that games offer nothing of value. In fact, the way in which most RPGs
utilize resolution mechanics — resolving combat and other questions of
skill with some randomizing factor — can considerably expand a fiction
writer’s toolkit
Before anyone breaks out the notes from the Friday-night gaming
group’s most recent campaign to begin a blow-by-blow chronicle, keep
in mind that roleplaying sessions are not, in themselves, fiction. A work
of fiction requires careful shaping, a conscious crafting of character,
incident, and description, all in support of a theme or mood. Gaming
sessions are about communally discovering a narrative, following the
197
story where the gamemaster and the players and the dice send it. The
unpredictability of it all makes playing an RPG adventure quite unlike
crafting fiction, a process in which the author has the final say, with
no fear of the percentiles announcing a critical fumble just as the
square-jawed space ranger stands poised to defeat the scheming galactic
emperor. Yet that potential for the unexpected within a game, the
capriciousness of the dice and the other players’ input, can provide a
writer with new perspectives and inspire the creation of more inventive
and thoughtful works.
One of the first superhero characters I created as a gamer, some
thirty or so years ago, was an oddball Villains and Vigilantes crime-fighter
who went by the uninspired name Shade. His initial oddness wasn’t
the result of any conscious decisions I’d made, but rather the way in
which the game allotted powers. The Fates, in the guise of two ten-
sided dice and our GM’s modified V&V random superpowers tables,
granted him the peculiar combination of non-corporealness, over which
he had limited control, and a magical rope that obeyed his will rather
better than his often-ghostly body. Shade wasn’t powerful enough to
go toe-to-toe with the bruisers or swift enough to keep pace with the
speedsters. His rope was magical only in that it was animate and he
could command it. Otherwise it was a mundane length of hemp that
could not be replaced if some villain torched it with a fireball or simply
snapped it in two.
The dice had given Shade an unlikely set of powers, ones I never
would have combined on my own. I spent a fair bit of time trying
to concoct a yarn that would explain them. I never could settle on a
satisfying origin, but that became something of a hook for the character.
When asked about the rope, he simply made something up, usually
contradicting the earlier versions of his backstory. The dice hadn’t
given him this personality, but the weird powers they’d assigned Shade
inspired me to develop him as an individual.
That development continued in the few adventures he undertook
to keep New Civic safe from evildoers, but not in ways I would have
predicted. Bad guy after bad guy pummeled his more powerful teammates
into unconsciousness, but couldn’t quite knock him out, thanks to the
high defensive value of non-corporealness in V&V and the vagaries
of the dice. Sadly, he couldn’t really do much to retaliate against foes
198
James Lowder
mighty enough to mash his cohorts, and poor Shade was repeatedly
left to watch the villains strut off after trouncing the neophyte hero
team. He always tried, and failed, to gain enough control of his ghostly
form to solidify and get in a shot or two. He even attempted to trip the
fleeing villains up with his rope. Time and time again, the luck of the
dice refused him his moment of glory.
After the end of his sixth or seventh adventure, most of which had
unfolded in the same painful fashion, Shade left his battered teammates
and trailed the triumphant villain into an alley. The blackguard, some
murderous armored hulk, was going to get away, just like last time, to
continue sowing bloodshed and mayhem. The dice frowned on Shade’s
usual attempts to stop the bad guy, and my friends were already packing
up for the night when it struck me: this hapless sap of a character
had been humiliated so often that he would try something at least a
bit crazy to save the day. As with Shade’s powers, the outcome of the
cumulative dice rolls of a half-dozen sessions had brought the character
to a crossroads I wouldn’t have envisioned. And the situation invited
me to get inside the character’s head, to figure out, as every writer needs
to do with a successful creation, just how he’d react to this unforeseen
crisis.
It ended badly. Shade’s control over his own form was spotty, but
he could grab the rope and make it non-corporeal. When he let it go,
it became solid again. Even when it was inside an object. Or another
person.
The dice once again foiled Shade’s dreams of glory. Thanks to yet
another botched roll, the rope trick didn’t just incapacitate the armored
hulk, it killed him. Our GM banished Shade as a player character. The
failed hero disappeared into the mean streets of New Civic, his magic
rope trailing behind him like some bloodstained and weirdly obedient
pet snake.
Shade’s misadventures made it into print after a fashion. My short
story “Fanboy” chronicles a would-be hero who tries, but fails to become
a respected crime-fighter. The more originally named Kid Apocalypse
benefits from better powers than Shade’s, ones doled out without
the use of percentiles and a chart, but his crisis of confidence and his
unlucky streak have their origins in those decades-old V&V sessions.
Some of the quirks and personalities of the story’s superheroes were
199
forged on my friends’ kitchen tables, their invention accompanied by

the sound of rolling dice.
When a fellow writer read “Fanboy,” he noted that the central plot
twist and unhappy ending took him completely by surprise, but that,
upon looking at the story again, he realized that Kid Apocalypse was
heading toward the conclusion from the very first paragraph. That’s
when I knew that the work had succeeded, at least, as a transmutation
of the fragments and ideas from my gaming experiences into the very
different stuff of fiction.
My time playing RPGs has given me a stockpile of characters, scenes,
and even a plot or two, a cache from which I’ve drawn many times when
drafting a story or novel. The uses are never direct transcriptions. My
experiences on Tantras and too many similar tie-in projects remain ever-
relevant reminders of the ways in which an enforced or slavish adherence
to a game can deform a work of fiction. And yet, all those hours I spent
contending with the chaotic outcome of dice rolls and integrating them
with the more orderly plans I had for my characters have helped me to
embrace the unexpected in my writing. They’ve broadened my horizons
as a storyteller.
The shorthand version of Athena’s birth, so often cited as a
metaphor for the most artistically desirable creative process, has the
goddess of wisdom and craft leaping from Zeus’s brow. It’s a wonderful
image, the creation springing from its creator’s head fully formed and
free from any crippling bonds. The more complete version of the story
is somewhat less tidy. Athena only emerges after the father of the gods,
suffering from a heavens-shaking headache, orders Hephaestus or
Prometheus to cleave his skull with a double-headed Minoan axe.
The myth’s extended version paints a much more accurate, and
suitably gruesome, portrait of the creative process. There will be at
least a symbolic shedding of blood, no small amount of sweat and
pain and toil required to bring a work of art into existence. How an
artist accomplishes that birth, the tools he or she uses to free the new
creation, are unimportant — so long as they remain hidden. For those
who come to enjoy the work, the thud of the axe must remain unheard,
the carnage from the blow unseen. In the end, the failure of those books
dismissed for the thunder of dicefall on every page is not the result of
their connection to a game. Their failing is an inability to conceal the
200
James Lowder
clatter of their birth, a noise certain to distract readers from the only
sound they really want to hear: the music of the words on the page.
201
Monkey in my Bag
Kenneth Hite
You know what the difference is between dice and heroin? You can
stop buying heroin. I’d kicked the habit, honest to God, kicked it cold
turkey, hadn’t bought dice for ten long years, unless you count a couple of
souvenir dice at the Luxor in Vegas, or the novelty “weather generating”
dice I got from somewhere, or the weird green crystal shaped dice I
picked up from Crystal Caste, or the seven-sided die I bought from Lou
Zocchi, because hey, some time you might need to generate a number
from one to seven and not have the patience to roll a d8 and skip the
eight. Other than that, nothing.
So like I said, I hadn’t bought dice in ten years, when I decided to
build a dice set for Paul Czege’s game Bacchanal. (Bacchanal, by the way,
is a brilliant storytelling game that you really don’t want your mom to
find you playing. You think the time you got in trouble because your
mom thought that you thought you were a vampire was bad? This
would be a million times worse.) Rather than pick through my dice bag,
though, I decided it would just be more convenient to buy a new set.
And thus do lies we tell ourselves destroy us.
I went to the Chessex booth at Gen Con SoCal thinking myself
immune. Just one hit, I said. Just one little spike. I knew I needed a
202
Kenneth Hite
boat-load of “wine-colored” dice (don’t ask), so I bought some pale

purple and pale yellow d6 sets (blush and Riesling, I suppose) until I
stumbled upon a beautiful set of Burgundy dice. It had a wine color
right in the name! And it was next to, I swear to Strahd, the Best
Ravenloft Die Ever. So I had to buy it, too. I don’t play Ravenloft.
I don’t plan to play Ravenloft; none of my friends are likely to play
Ravenloft in the near future. But it was so murky, swirly gray, with
bright red Hammer Films lettering. (Chessex Velvet Black-and-Red
d20. Tell your friends.) But, you know, I’m not an idiot. I bought
another die colored like the Pacific Ocean, all gold and azure and
kelp green, so it and the Ravenloft die together could be Call of Cthulhu
dice. Although I had to buy the Ravenloft die again in d10 to make a
proper percentile set. And so on. By the time I’d come out the other
side of the Chessex booth, I might as well have snorted a line of coke
longer than a complete GURPS bookshelf — I was that jazzed, and that
bankrupt.
So what is it about those little polygonal devils? Perhaps it’s the
connection between dice and sin — I can’t have been the only gamer
whose collection of Crown Royal “dice bags” was sometimes bigger than
my collection of dice, after all. His political enemies criticized Mark
Antony for “dicing” with Cleopatra — and if that’s all he was doing, he
deserved the criticism. King Louis IX of France banned dice outright as
sinful in 1254. (He obviously saw a game of Bacchanal being played. Or
maybe he was an Amber RPG fanatic.) Yes, from Dante to Guys and Dolls,
you can read all kinds of stern moral lectures about the evils of dicing,
and the way a gambling addiction can drain your pocketbook. But for
my money, what there is left of it after the Chessex booth gets finished
with me, the bigger addiction is the addiction to the dice themselves.
Poker dice, astrological dice, random-direction dice, Dragon Dice, glow-
in-the-dark spooky dice, giant dice, tiny dice, every shape, shade and size
— dice don’t have to be wine-colored to get me drunk on them.
My first dice were the percentile dice that came with TSR’s old game
of wantonly machine-gunning people, Top Secret. They were made of pink
and white polyfill, or perhaps sugar cookie dough, with black lettering
apparently applied by drunken chimpanzees. (Perhaps the chimpanzees
had gotten into the Crown Royal.) After approximately one and a half
203
Monkey In My Bag
game sessions, they became perfectly spherical. By contrast, a Roman

glass d20 from the 2nd century AD still kept most of its edges until it
was sold for $17,925 at an auction at Christie’s in 2003. The guy who
bought it was robbed. For that kind of money, he could have gotten not
just the Best Ravenloft Die Ever, but at least two sets of Bacchanal dice.
Even the way I buy them.
204
A World Without Dice
Keith Baker
There was only one light in the pawn shop, and the scattered trinkets cast
strange shadows over the dusty floor. The shopkeeper smirked as Kosta shuffled
towards the counter.
“I knew you’d be back,” the old man said. “Do you have the money?”
Kosta carefully spread the coins on the counter. “Fifteen levas.” He’d starved
himself to save it, living on bread and water for the week to get the extra money.
But that was a minor inconvenience to get the treasure in the glass case.
The shopkeeper studied the coins. “I’m afraid I’ve changed my mind. This
lovely toy has twenty sides. And it seems to me that twenty sides should be worth
twenty levas.”
“Fifteen is all I have,” Kosta stammered. “You told me fifteen.”
“And now I’m telling you twenty.”
Kosta stared at the object sealed behind glass. The twenty-sided die was old,
the sharp corners rounded away through use. Where had it come from? What
traveler had left it behind? He was going to be playing with his friends tonight,
and he’d dreamed of having a die of his very own to roll. But it seemed that
dream would have to wait.
“I’ll be back,” he said, scooping up the coins.
4 3
205
Poor Kosta doesn’t exist. But his story isn’t as implausible as you
might think.
When I acquired my first set of Dungeons & Dragons as a child, it came
with dice. The plastic was soft and easily worn, but I had everything
I needed to play. And within a few years, dice became an industry.
Games stores offered a wide range of polyhedrons, and conventions
had vast buffets to choose from. By the time I was fifteen, I owned
dozens of dice. Round dice, metal dice, dice that glowed in the dark.
Dice for different characters, dice for different games, dice I knew I’d
never actually use but just liked to have around.
Now I know that I took those dice for granted. I never realized just
how lucky I was to live in a land where dice were so freely available. As
I purchased my thirty-sided and hundred-sided dice, I never realized
that there were gamers out there who couldn’t even get a basic twenty-
sider.
Then I went to Bulgaria.
Dungeons & Dragons spread quickly to many countries in Europe,
but Bulgaria wasn’t one of them. Ten years ago, there were no hobby
stores. It was only through pure chance that a Bulgarian would stumble
across a roleplaying game. This is what happened to Damyann. While
at University in the city of Sofia, he joined a community of J.R.R.
Tolkein fans. He met the woman who’d translated The Chronicles of
Narnia into Bulgarian, and the two became fast friends. In time, seeing
his love for fantasy, she gave Damyann a remarkable treasure: Dungeons
& Dragons. It was the Basic edition produced in 1983, a boxed set that
included a rulebook for players and one for the Dungeon Master, a
single adventure, and a set of polyhedral dice.
Damyann was entranced. And yet, it wasn’t so easy to make use of
this wonder. In the US, there has long been a social stigma attached to
roleplaying games. Damyann faced a different problem. No one had
heard of the game… and it was difficult to get anyone to understand it.
Speaking of these early days, Damyann said, “In Bulgaria people would
rather deal with space aliens than roleplaying games. They’ve never seen
either of them… but at least they’ve heard of the aliens.”
It took time for Damyann to find players, but he persevered. He
met another Bulgarian who’d acquired D&D books while traveling in
South Africa, and they worked to introduce the game to others. As
206
Keith Baker
the pool of recruits grew, the most enthusiastic players would actually
go out on weekends and proselytize on the streets of Sofia. Excuse me,
sir, have you heard of roleplaying games? The handful of players became
dozens, enough to support multiple gaming groups.
Now there were players… but this exposed a new problem. There
were no hobby stores in Bulgaria, not even in the capital city of Sofia.
Damyann had his basic boxed set… but his disciples weren’t so lucky. An
early adopter named Boian told me, “People were using photocopied
books, and even copies of the copies… I remember regarding the original
books as some kind of holy relics.”
Paper can be copied, but high-impact plastic is another matter.
These roleplaying pioneers had their rules... but what use is it to know
that a wizard can do 3d4 damage with his magic missiles when you have
no four-sided dice to roll?
“Groups that played D&D often had exactly one set of dice for the
whole group,” Boian told me. “Each of those sets had a story… maybe
not a particularly interesting one, but a story nonetheless. One man
brought his back from South Africa. My set came from a coworker who’d
played RPGs in Germany during his youth. People borrowed dice all
the time, they also used all kinds of chipped dice they will nowadays just
throw away. Some sets were so worn out that they looked like something
handmade by Neanderthals.”
At least one set was handmade, as a gamemaster convinced a dentist
to produce a set using his drills and dental enamel. Some people folded
dice out of paper. Others found ways to use the more freely available
six-sided dice in lieu of the stranger polyhedrals. Some gamers created
entirely new systems that could be used with the tools that they could
find. But there was always a magic to the true dice — to playing the
original game the way it was supposed to be played. And so there was
always a hunger for dice. Mail order was prohibitively expense and
often unreliable, especially in smaller towns; Damyann himself had dice
stolen from a mail-order package. He managed to acquire a stockpile of
dice by making arrangements with travelers, who would bring him dice
whenever they passed through a town with a game store. At one point
he fell on hard times, and had to sell some of his dice to other gamers to
get enough money to cover his rent. Dice were so rare that he was able
to get almost $10 for a single die.
207
I heard this story from a gamer named Stefan, who acquired his first
two dice from this fire sale. Stefan told me how people used to gather
in the parks on the weekends to game… and to trade dice. By this point
there were enough dice in the community that individual players might
have a few dice of their own, as opposed to the single set for the group.
Nonetheless, the idea of having a full set was beyond most gamers. And
so it was a question of which dice you most wanted. Your barbarian just
acquired a wonderful great-axe, and you’d love to have a twelve-sided
die of your very own to roll that damage. What will it take to make that
trade? Kosta has a lovely gem d12, and he’s just started playing a wizard…
are you willing to give up your two d4s for that ruby twelve-sider?
By 2002, the growing player base and the expanding power of the
internet allowed Stefan, Damyann, and others to arrange for a mass order
from Chessex, airlifting vital supplies to the hungry gamers of Bulgaria.
A few years later, the first hobby store opened in Sofia, soon followed
by another. These shops are primarily driven by collectible card games
and miniatures combat, but dice are finally available in Bulgaria Still,
Damyann told me that even today it’s difficult for new gamers to find
what they need to play. There might be game stores in Sofia, but that
means little to the new gamer in a smaller town. In such places, RPGs
are still stranger than invaders from Mars. Ordering by mail requires
internet access and a credit card; beyond the vast cost of postage, the
package might take two months to arrive, and that’s assuming it doesn’t
get lost along the way. In such places, gamers still lean on one another,
begging friends that are traveling to Sofia or to another country to make
a little time to find some precious polyhedrons.
In time my journey came to an end. I spent the my final afternoon
wandering around the city with Stefan, seeing the places where gaming
had taken root in the city. Walking through the park where Stefan’s
friends had once traded dice, I saw more stray dogs than I did people. A
bronze bust of a Slavic freedom fighter glared at the empty gazebo where
Stefan had played his early games. The hobby might still be a mystery
to the general populace, but the gamers of Sofia can buy their dice in
stores, and they no longer needed this place. As the day came to a close,
Stefan produced a weathered cloth bag and pulled out a twenty-sided
die. It was one of the dice he’d bought from Damyann, one of the first
two dice he’d ever owned. He wanted me to have it, as a memento of
208
Keith Baker
my travels and the game that we’d played together. In exchange, I gave
him a die of my own, a twelve-sided marked with symbols from the
world I’d created. His gift was a simple thing — a translucent grey d20,
worn at the edges. As a child, I’d surely have passed it by for something
more colorful or exotic. But there was a time when this it was one of
the only twenty-siders in the country… when this little gem die was a
true treasure.
209
About the Authors
Keith Baker began his career as a MMORPG designer, but after

seeing two promising projects canceled after years of work, he left the
video game industry for the lucrative world of freelance RPG design.
Surprisingly enough, this paid off when Wizards of the Coast picked his
Eberron Campaign Setting in their 2002 Fantasy Setting Search. Feeling
that computer games, roleplaying games, and novels weren’t enough,
Baker created Gloom, a card game in which players use transparent cards
to tell humorous and morbid tales. His most recent novel is The Son of
Khyber, the second book of the Thorn of Breland series.
Jason L Blair has been a poet, fiction writer, game designer,
scriptwriter, comic book author, graphic designer, book publisher,
and amusement park ride operator. Maybe someday he’ll be successful
at one of those things. Until then, he hopes to keep failing upward.
You can keep tabs on him at JasonLBlair.com. (Bumper cars, if you’re
curious.)
Greg Costikyan has designed more than 30 commercially published
board, roleplaying, computer, online, mobile, and social network games,
five of them Origins Awards winners, is an inductee into the Adventure
Gaming Hall of Fame, and was awarded the Maverick Award by the
International Game Developers Association for “tireless promotion of
210
About the Authors
independent games.” His articles on game design from a theoretical

standpoint have been widely published in game studies books, and are
used in game studies programs across the globe. He almost always has
dice in his pockets.
Ray Fawkes is a fine artist and writer of graphic novels, prose fiction,
and games. His work ranges in style from introspective, dreamscape
horror to bombastic slapstick. Ray is a two-time Shuster Award nominee
in the Outstanding Canadian Writer category, and has contributed to
over a dozen books in White Wolf’s World of Darkness game line.
Matt Forbeck has worked full-time on games and fiction since
1989. He has designed collectible card games, roleplaying games,
miniatures games, board games, and toys, and has written short fiction,
comic books, novels, nonfiction, magazine articles, and computer game
scripts and stories for companies including Angry Robot, ArenaNet, Del
Rey, Adams Media, Simon & Schuster, Atari, Boom! Studios, Ubisoft,
Wizards of the Coast, Games Workshop, WizKids, Mattel, IDW, Image
Comics, and Playmates Toys. See www.forbeck.com for more details.
Patrick Harrigan is a Minneapolis-based writer and editor. He
is the co-editor of the MIT Press volumes Third Person: Authoring and
Exploring Vast Narratives (2009), Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in
Games and Playable Media (2007), and First Person: New Media as Story,
Performance, and Game (2004), all with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and The
Art of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos (2006), with Brian Wood. He is a
contributor to Gameplaywright’s Things We Think About Games (2008)
and has written a novel, Lost Clusters (2005).
Jess Hartley is a novelist and freelance writer, editor, and game
developer. She lives in Arizona, with her family and a menagerie of other
interesting creatures, where she participates in a plethora of strange
and curious pastimes that often make her neighbors and acquaintances
scratch their heads in confusion. More information about Jess can be
found through her website at www.jesshartley.com, and questions or
inquiries can be addressed to [email protected].
Fred Hicks runs Evil Hat Productions (www.evilhat.com), and
does layout and art direction for Hero Games as well as a few other
companies. He doesn’t sleep much.
Will Hindmarch is a writer and designer whose work has appeared
in Atlanta Magazine, The Escapist, Geek Monthly, and McSweeney’s Internet
211
About the Authors
Tendency, among others. He has worked with such publishers as Relic

Entertainment, Turbine, and Area/Code Games, in addition to hobby-
industry stalwarts like Fantasy Flight Games, Atlas Games, and White
Wolf Publishing, where he developed the Vampire: The Requiem game
line. Use his dice if you like, that doesn’t bother him.
Kenneth Hite has written, co-written, or designed over 70 books
and games. He seems to do his best work for games that only use six-
sided dice: Trail of Cthulhu, the original-series Star Trek RPG, and GURPS
Infinite Worlds, for example. Even The Day After Ragnarok is available in
a d6-only HERO version. His books Cthulhu 101 and Tour De Lovecraft:
The Tales use no dice whatsoever. He lives in Chicago, which is an
eleven-round dice game in which players attempt to roll the number of
the round (plus one) on two dice — score 2 points for rolling a 2 on turn
one, 3 points for rolling a 3 on turn two, and so forth up to 12 points
for rolling boxcars on turn eleven. High score wins.
USA Today called John Kovalic a “hot pick.” His creations
include the multi-award-winning comic Dork Tower, as well as Dr.
Blink: Superhero Shrink, Snapdragons, and many other features. His
work has appeared everywhere from the New York Times and Rolling
Stone to Dragon magazine. John has illustrated more than 100 games
and supplements, and is also responsible for toys such as My Little
Cthulhu and Mythos Buddies. John was inducted into the Academy
of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Hall of Fame in July 2003, the
first cartoonist to receive such an honor. John is co-founder and co-
owner of Out of the Box Games, and has illustrated more than 2,500
cards for the Munchkin game, which must be some kind of record
somewhere...
James Lowder has worked extensively on both sides of the editorial
blotter. His credits include such bestselling, widely translated dark
fantasy novels Prince of Lies and Knight of the Black Rose, short fiction
for such anthologies as Shadows Over Baker Street and The Repentant, and
comic book scripts for DC, Devil’s Due, and Moonstone. As an editor,
Lowder has directed book lines or series for both large and small houses,
and has helmed more than a dozen critically acclaimed anthologies,
including Hobby Games: The 100 Best and Curse of the Full Moon. He’s
received five Origins Awards and an ENnie Award, and been a finalist
for the International Horror Guild Award and the Stoker Award.
212
About the Authors
Russ Pitts is a twenty-year veteran of the entertainment industry who

has worked extensively in television, theater, film, and on the internet.
Russ is the founder of the Insomnia Theater Company, was previously
the Head Writer and Producer of the live technology television variety
series, “The Screen Savers” on TechTV, and is currently the Editor-in-
Chief of the video game lifestyle and entertainment site, The Escapist
at www.escapistmagazine.com. Russ has been playing games since the
early 1980s and still owns a set of dice that came with his first D&D
boxed set.
Jesse Scoble is a writer, story editor, and game designer. He’s won
awards,worked on two RPG adaptations of George Martin’s A Song of
Ice & Fire, created a superhero world, and contributed to more than two
dozen game books for many of the coolest companies. Since 2005 he’s
moved into digital games and worked on City of Heroes (NCsoft), and
on projects for EA, Red Storm, and Crowtrees Studio. He is currently a
“sr. writer” at Ganz, the makers of Webkinz. He lives in Toronto, with a
lovely girl who does not game, and an amazing daughter who started on
Rock Band: Beatles at age one. He is writing a western horror script and
urban fables in his spare time. Online he lives at www.jscoble.com
Mike Selinker was one of the creative directors on Dungeons &
Dragons’ 3rd Edition, but you already knew that. He also helped relaunch
Axis & Allies and the Avalon Hill game line, and directed such lines as
the Harry Potter TCG and the Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game. His
game designs include Pirates of the Spanish Main, Key Largo, Unspeakable
Words, Harrow, Stonehenge, Risk Godstorm, Top Ten, Warstone, and many
other games. His puzzles have appeared in the New York Times, Games
Magazine, Dragon, the Chicago Tribune, and Wired, for which he is a
contributing editor. His company Lone Shark Games also creates giant
puzzle events and alternate reality games on the internet and at events
like Gen Con, PAX, and w00tstock. He’s a little less rambling than his
essay suggests, but only a little.
Jared A. Sorensen is a game designer living in New York City. His
published games include Parsely, InSpectres, and Lacuna Part I: The Creation
of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City. In his role as a computer game
designer, he’s done everything from scripting porcine vocalizations in
Petz 3 to designing tombs and crypts for Dungeons & Dragons Online.
Find out more about his work at memento-mori.com.
213
About the Authors
Paul Tevis is a software engineer, project manager, gamer,

improviser, wine lover, and podcaster emeritus. An expatriate Iowan,
he now lives in Santa Barbara, California, with his wife and their three
cats (who like it when he leaves his dice out).
Jeff Tidball is a writer and game designer whose credits include
Pieces of Eight, Cthulhu 500, and Fantasy Flight Games’ edition of the
Horus Heresy board game. He’s served as the line developer for Ars
Magica, Feng Shui, and Decipher’s The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game.
Jeff holds an MFA in Screenwriting from the University of Southern
California, and lives with his wife, sons, and dog in Minnesota’s Twin
Cities. His website is predictably located at jefftidball.com and he is
one of Gameplaywright’s co-founders, along with The Bones editor Will
Hindmarch.
Monica Valentinelli is a professional author and game designer.
Described as a “force of nature” by her peers, Monica is best known
for her work in the horror, dark fantasy and dark science fiction
genres and has been published through Abstract Nova Entertainment,
Eden Studios, White Wolf Publishing, Apex Magazine and others. Her
credits include: the horror game Exquisite Replicas by Abstract Nova
Entertainment and Worlds of the Dead by Eden Studios. For more
information about Monica, her work and her contact information, visit
www.mlvwrites.com.
Chuck Wendig is a novelist, a screenwriter, and a game designer. He
is a fellow of the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriter’s Lab. He developed
the entire Hunter: The Vigil game line. He currently lives in the wilds
of Pennsyltucky with a wonderful wife and two very stupid dogs. He is
represented by Stacia Decker of the Donald Maass Literary Agency.
Wil Wheaton is an on-camera and voice actor, writer, and
champion of geek culture. He is a columnist for LA Weekly and Suicide
Girls Newswire, a top 100 Twitter user, and the author of several books,
including Just A Geek, The Happiest Days of Our Lives, and Memories of the
Future, Volume One. In both 2009 and 2010, Forbes named him one of
the top 20 most influential celebrities on the Web. This is all amusing
to Wil, who doesn’t think of himself as a celebrity, but is instead “just
this guy, you know?” He lives and games in Pasadena, California, and
blogs at wilwheaton.typepad.com.
214
About the Authors
Gameplaywright Press is the publishing imprint of Gameplaywright,

which also publishes a web site that explores the intersections of games
and stories. Visit the blog: gameplaywright.net.
215
A l s o f r o m G a m e p l ay w r i g h t P r e s s
Things We Think
About Games
“It is rare that I actually shout ‘Yes, goddamn it!’ when reading a book.”
— Richard Dansky, manager of design at Red Storm Entertainment
“An unholy mixture of helpful guide-

book and jabbing provocation, it will
earn its right to rattle around your
brain. It is essential reading for de-
signer, critic, and straight-up rank ‘n’
file gamer alike.”
— Robin D. Laws, author of
Hamlet’s Hit Points
Things We Think About Games

collects dozens on dozens of bite-
sized thoughts about games. From
the absurd to the magnificent, the
demonstrable to the dogmatic, it spans
both the breadth of games—board,
card, roleplaying, and more—and
the depth of gaming, offering insights
about collecting, playing, critiquing,
designing, and publishing.
Written by Will Hindmarch & Jeff Tidball

Foreword by Robin D. Laws • Introduction by Wil Wheaton
With John August, Pat Harrigan, Fred Hicks, Kenneth Hite,
John Kovalic, Michelle Nephew, Philip Reed, S. John Ross,
Mike Selinker, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Trade Paperback, 160 pages

ISBN 13: 978-0-9818840-0-4
ISBN 10: 0-9818840-0-8
Stock No. GPW0001
$20 US
Read more online at gameplaywright.net/thingswethinkaboutgames

Thebones Usandourdice

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Thebones Usandourdice

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Thebones Usandourdice

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

www.

Things We Think About Games

Hamlet’s Hit Points

Revised Electronic (PDF) Edition

Foreword by John Kovalic i

1d6 Article Page

1d20 Essay Page

This book was supposed to be about how dice make us crazy.

So what makes it special?

Torg die does not yield to such whims. Instead, it tends to

Hicks even keeps a shrink-wrapped copy of the game, just in case it

Sophocles, he of the accurate assessment of God’s dice, ascribed

pieces) to boot, making Thoth the true father of wargaming.

No one in the world would be a good dice

Astragaloi show up in the archaeological record wherever sheep and

The dice … are of a great variety of materials

Speaking of Indians… No, the other Indians. The Hindu scripture

The Swedish king threw two sixes, and said

Snorri continues, a tad snarkily, “We have heard nothing else of

Norwegian monastic chronicler Edvin of Tautra to hotly deny the

Speaking of Merrie Englande, it has apparently been dice-crazy since the

The frolicsome company had begun to

those upon whom the lot fell were obliged

Drinking, house rules “played in several different ways,” dice, and

If Hercules and Lichas play at dice

The hazard of the die. Thereby hangs a tale…

who slipped it in while nobody was looking. Be that as it may, after a

Similar four-sided dice show up in Egyptian tombs, including that of

the Emperor, or if you were an old man, or during Saturnalia, or in the

Yes, dice can be dangerous. In 1250, King Erik IV “the Plow-Taxer”

of Ahmedabad in India, invited his rival Changez Khan to a dice game

Tolumnius, King of the Veii, happened to

upon a promise of leniency. Instead, he forced them to play dice against

chances) depend on the ratio of unfavorable results to favorable results,

publisher released Mozart’s Dice Game, which used 2d6–1 to select

The British Museum in London has a wonderful collection of historic

Dr. Irving Finkel: I started collecting as a boy of about 9 after I

The oldest die known to me is a cubic example, with opposite faces

How commonplace were dice in antiquity? Were they specialized gadgets

The problem of tracking the spread of dice in the ancient world is

It was a real wrestling match to fit the content of the cuneiform

Roman game that in due course became backgammon. This was also

The Game of Twenty Squares as known at Ur is on boards from

the bull in answer to a technical enquiry from someone in the USA,

It is likely that the cherishing of one’s lucky dice is as old as dice

Why don’t we have a dice museum somewhere?

1. Celluoid, an early form of plastic, is notoriously unstable over time. Outgassing

In general, we tend to think of randomness in games as a bad thing.

Randomness has been part of games since their earliest inception —

modern era, many of them documented by Stewart Cullin in a series of

cultures as part of their religious practices.

Skill vs. Chance

confusedly, adopted toward gambling the attitude that some people

Different games appeal to different aesthetics. People who love story-

gameplay between story elements.

lesser degree, need a degree of randomness to sustain player interest.

Let’s start by examining Little Wars, H.G. Wells’s landmark miniatures

Thus, if the inferior force has 4 units, and

as cut-and-dried as the rules for melee. In the Newtonian universe, they