Is use of d20's patented?

[Mark Chance]

That begs a question: exactly who created the first twenty-sided die?

Probably Archimedes. He loved polyhedrons.

 

[Zander]

That begs a question: exactly who created the first twenty-sided die?

No one knows. The Louvre museum in Paris has a couple of D20s from antiquity. One, which is Egyptian with Greek letters, dates back to the Ptolemaic period (323 - 31BC). A pic of a casting can be found here:

http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=2504&stc=1

The other is Roman and is numbered I to XX. I'm not sure its date (I don't have my notes to hand) but it's about 2000 years old.

Hope that answers your question.

 

[MerakSpielman]

That is just too cool!

I didn't know the ancient egyptians played D&D!

Or maybe it was D20 Modern... Remember that comic in the 1st ed DMG? Some D&D characters are sitting around a table throwing dice, explaining to their friend, "It's a great new role playing game. We pretend we're workers and students in a technologically advanced society."

 

[PowerWordDumb]

While I don't know who invented them, I know that polyhedral dice were around and sometimes used by wargamers before Chainmail/D&D.

Well of course... the non-polyhedral (unihedral by extension?) dice were quite difficult to use, being one-sided spheres and all. Rolling '1' all day is no fun.

 

[PowerWordDumb]

Well, certainly 20-sided dice were around well before D&D. Gygax and co. found them in some sort of catalog for educational supplies or something. IIRC, He could only buy them in sets of 6--one 4 sided, one 6 sided, one 8 sided, one 10-sided, one 12-sided, and one 20-sided. Or something like that.

If that is actually true, particularly the "sets of six" part, then that's a fascinating little nugget to add to my mental collection about the beginnings of our hobby. Thanks for sharing!

Edit: I decided I just just hop over to the "Ask Gary" thread and get the answer straight from the horse's mouth as it were, but I figured it'd be bad form to pester him with something he may have answered before. Having neither the access to the search function to find out or the patience to dig through all four "Ask Gary" threads for the information manually, I guess I'm stuck wondering for a bit, unless someone can do a search on my behalf? Appreciation declared in advance, of course!

 

[johnsemlak]

Here's a quote from an article entitled "Here there be Dragons", which you can find online with a goggle search probably

The introduction to the game recommended additional materials as game aids?a board game from Avalon Hill called Outdoor Survival (as a resource for "off-hand" wilderness exploration), the Chainmail rules (as an alternate combat system), and a set of polyhedral dice. The dice are something that Gygax came across in a school supply catalog, and later sold through Tactical Studies Rules. They were small plastic Platonic solids with numbered sides, presumably for use in geometry classes. Arneson had purchased his own twenty-sided dice sometime earlier, from a company in England that later went out of business. "I had the only three sets of d20 known to exist, at that time, in the USA," he explains. Later versions of the game came with numbered cardboard chits that you could draw at random out of a cup; dice did not come with the game rules until 1981.

finding more info in the gary thread might take some seaching....I'll see what I can find.

 

[TheLorax]

Well of course... the non-polyhedral (unihedral by extension?) dice were quite difficult to use, being one-sided spheres and all. Rolling '1' all day is no fun.

Wouldn't that be soccer? (or any number of other sports games )