Saturday, June 10, 2006

D20 Old School

Last night when I went to play D&D with some good local friends, I actually scrounged together a sack full of dice and brought it along. This seemed like a big step, for some reason.

When I got there I searched for D20s and I only found two. They were both the old-fashioned "0-9 twice" D20s. One of them (the oldest) had one set of 0-9 inked in in green, and one set in red -- green indicated 11 through 20, of course. The other had 0-9 twice with a tiny plus mark engraved next to one of the sets of 0-9.

I rolled the latter and got a 1+, or 11. I was like "OK, 1, with the plus, that's eleven..." and I got a bunch of hootin and hollerin' about these crazy fancy new age dice with a plus on 'em like a fudge die or something. (I've got a bit of a rep as a Forge nerd among these guys.) I tried to explain about the old 0-9 twice dice, which serve equally well as percentile and twenty-sided, and which were de rigeur before ten sided dice came out and usurped the role (roll?) of percentile dice from the icosahedrons.

They were all "yeah whatever" and the conversation went to other things, but -- is it really that old school to use 0-9 twice dice? I mean, I remember when ten-sideds first came out. Is it so unheard of to use the old kinda dice anymore?

Do these kids today know *nothing* about how "back in my day we used icosahedrons as percentiles, ten-siders, AND twenty-siders, and we LOVED it dammit! Uphill, both ways!"?

hoo boy.

Friday, June 09, 2006

Liz at the Forge

Liz Danforth, my favorite fantasy artist EVAR since I was like TEN YEARS OLD, shows up on the Forge, and her first post is a reply to one of mine. How cool is that? (Joe pointed this out to me.)

Of course, she'd posted to a really really old thread, and woke it up, and people started replying, so Ron had to come in and put the smack down on the various posters. It's kinda funny cause he's simultaneously Mr Stern Moderator, and a google-eyed Danforth fanboy like myself.