NeoGrognard

“Let us go where the omens of the Gods and the iniquity of our enemies call us! The die is now cast.”
— Julius Caesar, 49 BCE, just before leading his troops over the Rubicon.

When Caesar crossed the Rubicon he hesitated because he knew the risk. That illegal act could win him everything or could end his ambition and probably his life. He was putting himself in the hands of Fortuna.

Dice have always had power. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that the gods themselves controlled the outcome of every roll, and it’s not hard to understand why. Dice are mediums of pure chance; the agents of independent probability. Since their inception prayers and profanity shower over them as people try in vain to urge out beneficial outcome. Lives (both real and imaginary) have been lost at the whim of their rattling. For all we really know, the Big Bang may have been kicked off with the roll of a natural 20 (maybe a natural 1).

The oldest dice found by archeologists are part of a backgammon set found in Iran, but the Romans seem particularly experimental when it comes to dice with more sides than 6. The oldest d20 come from the 2nd century CE and we still have no idea what it and its strange symbols were used for. I would like to think they were playing a game called Arenas & Gladiators but they could have easily been used for some form of divination game

I’m a strong believer that they are the best tools for determining resolution determination in RPGs. They are flexible, portable, and unpredictable—especially in the limited number of rolls one makes over the course of an RPG session—and yet there is an impartiality to them that, almost contradictory, harbors trust in them. They are the authority of chaos, and it’s a powerful authority. And with all powerful and capricious authority, superstitions abound.

When I was 14 I went to my friend Eddy’s house. A geek extraordinaire, Eddy was a skilled artist, minis painter, and consummate geek. His room seemed filled to the brim with every single strange and wondrous RPG you could buy in the mid-80s (his favorite was Aftermath! Somewhat based on his favorite movie, The Road Warrior which he owned on VHS; an enviable score for the time), many painted minis, and stacks upon stacks of Savage Sword of Conan comics. Needless to say, I really looked up to Eddy…except when it came to dice.

Dice were Eddy’s bane. His rolls almost always ran cold, and the problem was when his cold streak went long enough Eddy got mad—well pissed, really. He would storm off, grumbling, slamming doors, and hitting things (usually walls). Today someone would suggest Eddy go to anger management, but back in the wild and woolly 80s, we would just let him walk it off and kept on playing.

Among the clutter of Eddy’s room, high above stacks of half-finished drawings, dog-eared comics and game books, and vials of minis paints, laid carefully on a shelf far from the chaos, sat Eddy’s dice. They were the only thing on the shelf, all carefully arranged in neat lines by the number of sides, each one with the “1” side up.

“What’s this about, Eddy?” I asked.

“I started to keep them on the 1s side to get it out of there system,” he snarled a bit, obviously still shaken from the whooping he got during a little PvP altercation that occurred in the last game I ran. He really shouldn’t have challenged the barbarian, Phantos, to a duel.

“Plastic settles with the weight of gravity. Aren’t you afraid that the weight of the dice will slowly settle and after a while only roll ones?” It was a joke, I was being playful, but I could tell by the look on Eddy’s face, he was taking it serious.

“Shut up,” he responded with a furrowed brow, his teeth grinding with each syllable. I figured I wouldn’t push it, and (somewhat uncharacteristically) shut it. But I noticed with following trips to his nerd lair that he started rotating the sides on the shelf. Obviously my joke was something he took seriously. It didn’t help his rolls.

I’m always amazed at the strange beliefs that surround a gamer’s dice. As a DM I’ve heard many players mumble that they’ve wasted a crit, when they roll a natural 20 during initiative, or when a non-attack rolls. As if there were a limit to the number of 20s you can roll inherent in the dice. It’s as absurd as hoping for another ace, when you have all four in play, but it doesn’t stop people from lamenting inopportune rolls. Even my friends with degrees in mathematics and a strong background in probability will often utter these kinds of statements.

I’m certainly not immune to dice superstitions. I’ve dramatically retired dice by casting them to the far ends of rooms, proclaiming loudly “you are retire,” to the sometimes shock and often howls of delight from my fellow players. And while I admit it’s cathartic, retiring dice in this way has never really helped my rolls. It’s just made people laugh.

There is part of me that wonders if there isn’t something just a little pagan about dice superstitions. That we are still trying to bargain with lady Fortuna on some kind of primal and emotional level by creating ritual andbelief structure around our dice, even though our rational minds know it’s just not going to help. And in a day andage where electronic dice rollers are can be found all over the place, I think it may be this sort of latent paganism that keeps us using our shiny toys. Like little relics or fetishes we search for the dice that best fit our personality. Sometimes we even name them or give them mystical properties.

A full set of the Crystal Caste meteor dice. The meteor comes from the Edmond meteorite, discovered in a Kansas field in 1983. A full set sold for $500 dollars in 2003. Good luck finding one now.

When I was younger I had a translucent gray d20 my players called “old smoky” that my players hated when I brought out from behind my screen to make crucial rolls. They were sure it was loaded, had magical abilities, or both, because it tended to roll just what I needed, be it a high or low result.

My friend Jason Bulmahn bought one of those meteor d20s from Crystal Caste in 2003 for $100.00. To this day when playing D&D he keeps that extraterrestrial in a pouch that hangs from his neck and uses it to confirm criticals. It rarely fails its task. Every time he reaches for it, his players just groan, well aware of the punishment they’re about to receive. I’ve played in many of his games and have personally felt the sting of that rock from outer space. It’s a Cthulhu-spawned monstrosity, I tell you.

Okay…okay… maybe it’s just not properly balanced.

Do yourself a favor, and just listen to the conversations and actions revolving around the roll of the dice during your next game. Dice worship and appeasement happens so often we often become deaf to it. It becomes background noise, like so many Monty Python and Star War references.

There is an argument that dice superstitions have to do with less with human psychology and more to do with how gaming dice are commonly made, but I’ll save that until next time. For right now, please share some of the strange dice rituals and superstations you’ve come across, and whether or not you think they are valid. Dice stories are always fun.