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<blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8938643" data-attributes="member: 19857">So the original polyhedral dice - d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20 - are all regular polyhedrons and are the platonic solids. They have the nice characteristic that all of their faces are the same size and are all regular polygons and fit together in a regular pattern and so make for good randomizers. I know that d20s and d4s as well as d6s were used in ancient times in dice games (not so sure about the d12 and the d8 off the top of my head).&nbsp; There is no regular polygon between a d12 and a d20.Now you'll notice that I left off the d10. That's because it's the one of the &quot;core 6&quot; polyhedral dice that is not a platonic solid. Instead it's an irregular polyhedron - it's faces are not regular polygons but instead weird diamonds that fit together in an irregular pattern. The d10 became prominent in the late 1970s - I think I've read it was actually invented in the early 20th century but nobody really used it. Prior to the d10 folks just used a 20 side die numbered 1-10 twice (or just ignored the 10s digit when rolling a d10). But with a d10 you could easily create a d100 and now you had the 1% granularity that so many people wanted.The rest of the non-platonic dice come into games much later - in the 80s and 90s and even the early 00s. By that point the game had standardized around the dice we know and love (and in fact many folks were arguing that polyhedral dice were overkill and you should be making games with just d6s or d10s). So the embrace of the d14, d16, and d18 has not been terribly widespread.EDIT - Or what [USER=16760]@The Shadow[/USER] said.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Jer, post: 8938643, member: 19857"] So the original polyhedral dice - d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20 - are all regular polyhedrons and are the platonic solids. They have the nice characteristic that all of their faces are the same size and are all regular [I]polygons[/I] and fit together in a regular pattern and so make for good randomizers. I know that d20s and d4s as well as d6s were used in ancient times in dice games (not so sure about the d12 and the d8 off the top of my head). There is no regular polygon between a d12 and a d20. Now you'll notice that I left off the d10. That's because it's the one of the "core 6" polyhedral dice that is not a platonic solid. Instead it's an irregular polyhedron - it's faces are not regular polygons but instead weird diamonds that fit together in an irregular pattern. The d10 became prominent in the late 1970s - I think I've read it was actually invented in the early 20th century but nobody really used it. Prior to the d10 folks just used a 20 side die numbered 1-10 twice (or just ignored the 10s digit when rolling a d10). But with a d10 you could easily create a d100 and now you had the 1% granularity that so many people wanted. The rest of the non-platonic dice come into games much later - in the 80s and 90s and even the early 00s. By that point the game had standardized around the dice we know and love (and in fact many folks were arguing that polyhedral dice were overkill and you should be making games with just d6s or d10s). So the embrace of the d14, d16, and d18 has not been terribly widespread. EDIT - Or what [USER=16760]@The Shadow[/USER] said. [/QUOTE]

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