Last week was a holiday. I got the day off work and spent it NOT at my normal desk, but rather my home desk.
Which begs the question, which desk item should I write about? One on my work desk like I normally do? One on my home desk? Or an item that miraculously appears on BOTH! How strange that there is in fact two items that appear both on my home desk and my work desk.
Of course, any RPG gamer knows this is a vital part of your gaming kit, and is often used in other games.
Magic the Gathering uses them for life counting and calls them “spin down” counters.
Erick Wujcik insists you don’t need them to play RPGs and he might be right.
They can be as small an eraser on a pencil to as big as pillows.
They can have anywhere from 4 to 100 sides.
I have hundreds of them in various shapes, sizes, and colors. I love collecting them.
Guess it yet? D20s, or 20 sided dice, are the mark of a nerd and gamer.
I have three of them on my work desk, each taken from a Magic the Gathering fat pack. I have two on my desk at home, both purchased for playing D&D that got separated from the bunch and now sit looking pretty. I often pick them up and hold them, much the way I will do with a book, to simply feel it in my hand.
When working with Erick Wujcik I was privileged to get to participate in a game he ran that was diceless. It was completely fascinating to see the game and the player response to not having a random element to it. Before this I had played pen and paper RPGs for years and had amassed quite the collection of dice. I was foolish enough to believe I had seen “everything” there was to see with RPGs. (I had even LARPed.) At least I was delighted to discover how wrong I was. Since then I have reveled in learning about the ways other people play RPGs.
As an added point of interest it is quite amusing the rituals and superstition people have about their dice. For instance, I have “friend” sets that my friends can use and I have my set. Don’t touch my set. You will contaminate it and I will start to roll poorly.