How Gaming Got Its Dice (2013)

Re:How Gaming Got Its Dice (2013) by phlakaton on Wednesday June 14, 2017 @02:56PM (#14555082)

The difficulty is when you have to go hunting for the right die to use, and mistake, say, the d12 for the d20. Or get confused that, for d4s, you have to read the downward face instead of the top face.

That being said, I fell deeply in love with the classic D&D polyhedra the moment I first saw them. Platonic solids are cool! They're delightfully arcane and geeky. They complement each other in a set. I wish the weird d8 and d12 throws came up more often.

Perhaps there's a lesson here for UX in general: sometimes there's a tradeoff between being _simple_ and being _interesting_, and (particularly in the world of games) it's a tradeoff worth taking seriously.

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Re:How Gaming Got Its Dice (2013) by mysterydip on Wednesday June 14, 2017 @04:35PM (#14555903)

I thought with d4s you read the value at the point, not the face on the bottom? Maybe my dice are different.

I prefer the d12 to the d6 for generic rolls, as it allows for the least number of sides with the most human-usable fractions (25/50/75%, 33/66%, and "a little less than 10%").

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Re:How Gaming Got Its Dice (2013) by the_af on Wednesday June 14, 2017 @03:06PM (#14555187)

Well, wargames and RPGs are so complex enough already that surely mistaking the type of die is the least of a player's problems. And D6 used to require complex table lookups (which current tabletop game design seems to eschew), so not sure it was easier to begin with... just the most common shape of dice.

I share your love of D&D dice :)

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