Episode 3: Dynamite Dice

Lean in, I have something spectacular to tell you.

About dice.

Now your average die, the one everyone is familiar with when you break out Monopoly for family game night or bust out the serious poker chips at Vegas, is a six-sided little cube, pips arranged in symmetrical designs on each plane. Usually one through six, although I've seen variant schemes. There are thousands of different colors and materials to choose from, but the most common today would be plastic, smoothed on the corners for increased rolling and to lessen manipulation. And the most dominant color: black and white. Simple.

They were playing with dice in Rome, in Greece, in civilizations lost to time and unnamed. Millennia later, two men named Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson would show up and figure out a new game to play with them, and the six-sided die would become merely one weapon in an arsenal of polyhedral dice used in role-playing games. Four-sided. Eight-sided. Ten-sided. Twelve-sided. Twenty-sided. With simple, basic statistics, people around the world began building worlds, destroying them, and rebuilding.

Now this isn't all that spectacular. The spectacular bit is this: it was an old, old trick. The Greeks knew all about building a universe out of polyhedrons. Plato devised an elemental system of five separate elements, and to each he assigned a shape: pyramid/fire, cube/earth, octahedron/air, icosahedron/water, and dodecahedron (every other shape can be broken down into right-angle triangles; the dodecahedron cannot, and thus was a “cosmic” element – the aether). The world in Plato's view was built of mixtures of these elements. Contrary to Einstein, Plato's God did indeed play dice with the universe.

My favorite is the decahedron, the humble ten-sider the philosopher found no use for. Most of my favorite role-playing games use it exclusively. Simple to construct percentages, easy to scale from 1 to 10. And it spins like a dream. Each side is a lop-sided diamond, squat near the equator and pointed at the pole. A twenty-sider is easy to spin; it's almost a sphere and it wants to roll. You have to coax a good spin out of the ten-sider, give it space, and somehow that makes success sweeter. My favorite ones are a fiery orange, not quite burnt. The numbers are black and bold. And the orange is an illusion from a distance; peer closer and you see flecks of every warm range: smudged yellow, salsa red, and a sea of soft orange swimming around the splashes. Spinning, they all merge together like the tip of a flame with faint black stripes. Then it wobbles, clatters, and comes to rest.

And they explode. In many games that use them, a ten “explodes,” adding one die to another until they fizzle and cease exploding; there is no limit to what that ten can become, its potential astronomical. Every lump of plastic, or stone if you lay out enough cash, can go nova. Only a ten can do this. Other dice may “crit” or “stack” or even achieve a “nat.” But no other die explodes.

Handle your ten-siders with care. Plato was wrong about the pyramid. Dice with a decahedron, and play with fire.