I was telling my wife about GoDice (which immediately record their results electronically on an app), when she suggested an article about how RPG playing tools have changed since D&D was released. This will mostly be about dice and dice rolling, of course.
Early Changes to Rolling
Early changes included the dice tower and the Dragonbone electronic dice rolling device. The original dice tower was the Fair Shake Dice Device, hand-made with real wood. You drop the dice in the top, they bounce around inside, and come out at the front. The idea was to thwart those who claim to be able to control dice rolling (as implied by the name of the device), and it was cool as well. Nowadays we have dice towers that can be folded up, ones that are 3D printed, and ones that are more physically elaborate than the Fair Shake.
The Dragonbone was released long before smartphones and tablets, of course. It contained a circuit board that generated random numbers. You’d move a slider to indicate what kind of die (number of sides) you wanted to roll, and it would respond by lighting up one or more LEDs on the front. It was quicker than rolling a single die, though it could not roll several at once. A button-push caused a new roll, so you could do 3d6 in succession fairly rapidly.
Today we have lots of dice apps for tablets and phones, some more elaborate than others.
Dice
The dice themselves changed. The early polyhedral dice were made of soft plastic that gradually wore away at the corners. This gave way to harder plastic such as used today. Lou Zocchi came up with transparent dice without coloring in the numbers, dice that had not been tumbled, so that they had sharp corners (you used a fine-point marker to color the numbers). Lou claims this gives a more consistent result to rolls.
We also got modifications such as dice with a skull and crossbones or zombie, or a NSFW four-letter word, instead of a 1. Today we have metal dice, stone dice, and elaborate steampunk and fantasy dice as well, with lots of “carving” on each side. We even have Doublesix dice, D12s with the numbers 1-6 twice or 1-4 three times.
The latest idea is dice that immediately record their result on a tablet/phone app, GoDice, Kickstarter in January raising well into six figures. The idea is that you don’t have to do any arithmetic, nor write anything down, and the set of five six-sided dice includes games like Yahtzee. For a lot more money you can get two shells (each installs around a d6) that allow a D6 to act as the usual polyhedral kinds of dice, plus D24.
Boards
Early on, if you wanted to use a movement grid for battles, you made your own. This was quick enough to do on a large piece of cardboard with a yardstick and marker. At some point I got elaborate and etched huge bathroom wall tiles, much like whiteboard but much cheaper, so we could write on the surface and easily erase. Later we got fabric-based “battle mats” that could be marked with water-soluble marker and erased, in both squares and hexes.
Pieces
Not everyone can afford miniatures, and the original metal ones had to be painted. There were no pre-painted plastic minis. I substituted cardboard or tile squares, with the name of the character written on it, color-coordinated by character class. (Some players put their own artwork on their piece.) This worked even better for the monsters, as different size tiles could be used for the big ones and the long ones . The combination of character miniatures and tile monsters worked well. You can buy in a DIY store pieces intended to be laid down as tile, with individual small tiles that can be torn off the backing to be used as pieces.
There are lots of 3D cardboard and plastic/resin terrain pieces nowadays. At best in early days we had flat cardboard. My eyes were opened recently by a vendor at a convention selling an amazing variety of RPG 3D printed figures. I’ll write a separate column about this.
The obvious direction for almost all such changes is electronic, of course. There are apps, certainly for online play, that let you show everything during a battle on a screen, and move “pieces” with a mouse or finger, but I haven’t used them.
Your turn: What new technology have you introduced to your tabletop games?
Early changes included the dice tower and the Dragonbone electronic dice rolling device. The original dice tower was the Fair Shake Dice Device, hand-made with real wood. You drop the dice in the top, they bounce around inside, and come out at the front. The idea was to thwart those who claim to be able to control dice rolling (as implied by the name of the device), and it was cool as well. Nowadays we have dice towers that can be folded up, ones that are 3D printed, and ones that are more physically elaborate than the Fair Shake.
The Dragonbone was released long before smartphones and tablets, of course. It contained a circuit board that generated random numbers. You’d move a slider to indicate what kind of die (number of sides) you wanted to roll, and it would respond by lighting up one or more LEDs on the front. It was quicker than rolling a single die, though it could not roll several at once. A button-push caused a new roll, so you could do 3d6 in succession fairly rapidly.
Today we have lots of dice apps for tablets and phones, some more elaborate than others.
Dice
The dice themselves changed. The early polyhedral dice were made of soft plastic that gradually wore away at the corners. This gave way to harder plastic such as used today. Lou Zocchi came up with transparent dice without coloring in the numbers, dice that had not been tumbled, so that they had sharp corners (you used a fine-point marker to color the numbers). Lou claims this gives a more consistent result to rolls.
We also got modifications such as dice with a skull and crossbones or zombie, or a NSFW four-letter word, instead of a 1. Today we have metal dice, stone dice, and elaborate steampunk and fantasy dice as well, with lots of “carving” on each side. We even have Doublesix dice, D12s with the numbers 1-6 twice or 1-4 three times.
The latest idea is dice that immediately record their result on a tablet/phone app, GoDice, Kickstarter in January raising well into six figures. The idea is that you don’t have to do any arithmetic, nor write anything down, and the set of five six-sided dice includes games like Yahtzee. For a lot more money you can get two shells (each installs around a d6) that allow a D6 to act as the usual polyhedral kinds of dice, plus D24.
Boards
Early on, if you wanted to use a movement grid for battles, you made your own. This was quick enough to do on a large piece of cardboard with a yardstick and marker. At some point I got elaborate and etched huge bathroom wall tiles, much like whiteboard but much cheaper, so we could write on the surface and easily erase. Later we got fabric-based “battle mats” that could be marked with water-soluble marker and erased, in both squares and hexes.
Pieces
Not everyone can afford miniatures, and the original metal ones had to be painted. There were no pre-painted plastic minis. I substituted cardboard or tile squares, with the name of the character written on it, color-coordinated by character class. (Some players put their own artwork on their piece.) This worked even better for the monsters, as different size tiles could be used for the big ones and the long ones . The combination of character miniatures and tile monsters worked well. You can buy in a DIY store pieces intended to be laid down as tile, with individual small tiles that can be torn off the backing to be used as pieces.
There are lots of 3D cardboard and plastic/resin terrain pieces nowadays. At best in early days we had flat cardboard. My eyes were opened recently by a vendor at a convention selling an amazing variety of RPG 3D printed figures. I’ll write a separate column about this.
The obvious direction for almost all such changes is electronic, of course. There are apps, certainly for online play, that let you show everything during a battle on a screen, and move “pieces” with a mouse or finger, but I haven’t used them.
Your turn: What new technology have you introduced to your tabletop games?
