NeoGrognard

“I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That’s what I call a liberal education.”
—Tallulah Bankhead

We all know it. Somewhere deep down in the bottom of our cockles, we have to admit dice superstitions are rubbish.

But there’s at least one dude who thinks there might be something to ‘em. He thinks we are just used to worn down and odd shaped dice. His name is Lou Zocchi, and he’s been around since, well, dirt.

Lou’s first mention in the annuals of RPG history is way back in Dragon magazine #1 (back then the magazine was called “The Dragon.”) in a review of the game “White Bear and Red Moon.” Touted as a “fantasy boardgame simulation based on the epic accounts of ages ago such as ‘The Iliad, Beowulf and Conan,” the reviewer warns the reader not to be daunted by the 60 page rulebook. Ah, the days of 60 page rulebooks!

The game by the way was the first set in the Glorantha setting (you know, the setting for RuneQuest) and was the launch product of Chaosium, but that has little to do with Lou.

I’m pretty sure that Lou was just a distributor for the game. Back then distributors for these types of games were far and few between. Throughout the history of gaming Lou has been there as a game distributor, game designer, and— maybe most famously—as a maker of dice.

A picture of my dice graveyard(s). The smaller, prism-shaped bottle holds the older dice, including all of my original GameScience dice, early TSR dice, and dice I swiped from board games. The large is home to later retirees. Sitting between them is my Zocchihedron. Off the camera, the cats are lurking, ready to pounce on the d100.

By his own admission he was the first person in the U.S. to make polyhedral dice, and he has three patents for dice, including the 5-sided die (more on that later) and that golf-ball-looking, roll-for-half-the-game, d100—the Zocchihedron. Boy, do my cats love the Zocchihedron. Basically a round ball with numbers 1-100 evenly spaced, inside the ball are some kind of irregular shaped bearings, outside the ball is a piece of clear plastic that gives the die its rolling shape. My cats, those great and might hunter of dice, hear its jingle and think it’s the great white whale.

Now I’ve never had the privilege of meeting Lou, our paths never managed to cross at Gen Con or Origins, but it’s a shame. He seems a character. Part of the earliest RPG crowd, Lou would entertain at Gen Con with his “adopted son” the ventriloquist dummy, Woody. He also performs magic tricks; you can find his act on YouTube.

You just can’t make this up. One day I think someone should make a show about the game industry in the 70s; some strange and wondrous mash-up of Mad Men and Big Bang Theory. I think Steve Winter should write it.

Anyhow, America’s elder statesman of dice is pretty darn sure that most of the dice we use are biased. A very basic form of his argument is that those nice pretty rounded-corner dice that most of us use may have started balanced, but the tumbling system used in their creation makes malformed dice. His full argument in all its glory is presented in the following pair of videos. They are well worth the watch.

One Gen Con I bought these dice from a company whose name I don’t remember. They are fantastically ornate, which is what caught my eye, and makes me believe they were early offerings from Q-Workshop dice. Anyhow I was using my nice new dice during the show and I was rolling crap. One of the guys I was playing with (I’m pretty sure it was Chris Tulach) asked if he could see my dice. When he took a close look at my 20-sided he just started laughing. “It’s lopsided!” he howled, and threw it back to me. And he was right. Thanks to Lou, now I have a good guess as to why.

I was so taken with Lou’s passion I bought a couple sets of GameScience dice (the company Lou founded, its ownership being transferred to a group that takes the name of his company).

I already own GameScience dice. If you bought dice in the early 80s chances are good that you have a number of GameScience dice. I bought my Zocchihedron, sometime back in the 80s. All of them sit in my dice graveyard, a glass jar and a vase that are home to all my retired dice (or at least the ones that didn’t end up in the trash). I retired all my original GameScience dice—all hard, sharp and many rather ugly—almost as soon as polished and painted dice came on the market. All the while I was entirely unaware of who the hell Lou Zocchi was. I didn’t become aware of his existence until a couple of weeks again when Mike Mearls brought up that he was using GameScience dice for his 1e game. I had a vague notion that GameScience claimed to be the best dice in the business, but in my ignorance I was unconvinced. After watching Lou’s video I was seeing them with new eyes, informed eyes.

This is my lopsided d20 that my friend laughed at. Maybe it’s some Far Realm artifact.

The two sets I bought were of the hand-painted 12-dice variety. I was curious about the d3, d5, d14, d16, and d24. I own one of the first d30s produced by The Armory (now Chessex) as well. I even had the 30-sided dice tables, but I loaned it to a friend and never saw it again. I’m just a sucker for strange dice.

And I am here to report that they are just as hard and sharp as they ever where, but not nearly as ugly. I started to use them during my games, and they roll well, but they just don’t feel right. I like the smooth comforting feel of those tumbled and polished dice but I didn’t want to be doomed by bad dice and their questionable rolls.

So I decided to run simple chi-square tests, using the perimeters put down back in Dragon magazine #78. I tested one of my polished d20s that I was particularly fond of, one of the GameScience d20s, and that lopsided ornate dice my friend laughed at. You know what I found? They all performed similarly and within the limits for unbiased behavior. The GameScience die did perform the best, but all three were sufficiently random. Now while I was using a scientific method, I doubt the simple test I ran on these three dice in my collection tells us anything about the general state of dice in market, but it did make me realize something … D&D ain’t Vegas, baby. You can always roll up a new character. As long as they are random enough and I like how they look, feel, and rattle on my dining room table I’m going to use them.

But I do raise my glass to Lou, his passion, vision, and salesmanship. Thank you Lou for making those dice.