HomeReviews And WalkthroughsArduinThe Runes Of Doom, Part XII

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The Runes Of Doom, Part XII — 4 Comments

  1. Double zero = 20. Back in the 70’s there weren’t many d20’s so two d10’s has to suffice when you were rolling your attacks.

    • I started playing in 1978. There were plenty of D20s, often marked 0-9 twice, so you had to color them in. D10s, being non-Platonic, were relatively new, created for gaming only(See Below). We used to roll 2 D20s, of different colors, for percentiles, leading to endless arguments over which color you declared was “high” right after you rolled and saw the result. When more and more D20s were number 1-20, they became less useful as ersatz percentiles, and this led to the explosion of actual 10-sided dice on the marketplace (though it took a while before I started seeing them sold with one die labeled in actual 10s (10, 20, 30…00) and one in single digies. Of course, when Vampire came out in the early 90s, that was when you began to drown in D10s.

      Evidently, the ten sided die was patented way back in 1909. But it wasn’t part of the classic D&D dice. (It’s a common myth that the first D&D sets had chits, not dice. One of the editions of the basic set had chits, true, but it was after the explosion of D&D popularity caused a shortage of the original “low impact” dice TSR had been using. Older sets did include dice… a white D20 (later accompanied by a pink D20, but not in the first edition of Holmes Basic), a red D6, a yellow caltrop… I mean, D4, a green D8, and a blue D12.
      The overlap between the names appearing in Hargrave’s books, and the name of the Chaosium founders, who worked with percentile systems, is very high, and I suspect some D100 mechanics drifted into Dave’s games in various ways.

  2. You’re correct. I meant to say they were double sided d20’s( been a very, long time since I’ve seen one), but the original Arduin combat system was based entirely on OD&D’s descending rules mechanics with a little twist on the number ratings. So, an armor class of 2+7 ( equivalent to -9) was the highest AC you could have.

  3. Before actual d20s that were numbered 1-20 rather than 0-9 twice, we rolled for attacks using a d6 and d20, where the d6 determined whether the d20 result was 1-10 (0 being 10) or 11-20 (0 being 20). A 4-6 roll on the d6 added +10 to the d20 roll. Then we realized we could color the sides or use a crayon..

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