Numbers

Twenty-Sided Dice

Twenty-sided dice are an esoteric piece of gaming paraphernalia, but necessary for playing Dungeons & Dragons, a fantasy, role-playing game, popular with the unpopular. As such, the term is often used in a humorous way to refer to nerds, geeks, and others who are differently focused. "The Onion's uncontested eminence in the satiric newspaper industry notwithstanding, you would not readily pick out its staffers from a crowd as elite wielders of media power. T-shirts and sneakers are de rigueur, and the dominant style is the unshaven, underexercised, Nazarene look of bookish people who probably suffered a steady program of jibes and wedgies in junior high school and carried pocketfuls of 20-sided dice."—Wells Tower, "Onion Nation: If its absurdist twists and wicked parodies of conventional journalism are just a joke, thecountry's leading satirical newspaper is having the last laugh," The Washington Post, November 16, 2008, p. W08.

How It's Used

Harry Thomas: Oh, good. 'Cause as a Weezer fan who's done his share of time with twenty-sided dice, I wanted to ask you what kind of characters you played in Dungeons and Dragons.

Rivers Cuomo: I gravitated toward the, uh...elven, or half-elven, something with high dexterity... a fighter—thief, maybe?

Thomas: You went split class?

Cuomo: Yeah.

Thomas: Bold move.

“To put it simply, Dungeons and Dragons reinvented the use of the imagination as a kid's best toy. The cliche of parents waxing nostalgic for their wooden toys and things 'hey had to make themselves' has now become my own. Looking around at my toddler's room full of trucks, trains, and Transformers, I want to cry out, 'I created worlds with nothing more than a twenty-sided die!’”

“In 1974, Gary Gypax and Dave Arneson, two gainers who had obviously read The Lord of the Rings, invented the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. The game spread largely through networks of teenage boys, and by 1979, the year the classic Dungeon Master's Guide was published, it seemed that every youth who couldn't get a date was rolling the storied twenty-sided die in a shag-carpeted den. Meanwhile, a more electronically inclined crowd at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was experimenting with moving fantasy play from the basement to a computer network. The fruit of their labors was the unfortunately named MUD (Multi-User Dungeon). Allowing masses of players to create virtual fantasy worlds, MUDs garnered a large audience in the 1980s and 1990s under names like Zork, Myst, and Scepter of Goth. (MUDs came to be known as 'Multi-Undergraduate Destroyers' for their tendency to divert college students from their studies.)”

“In his 2005 book Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson argued that fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons are cognitively demanding, requiring players to build 'elaborate fantasy narratives all by rolling twenty-sided dice and consulting bewildering charts that accounted for a staggering number of variables.' Players must calculate the effect of various combinations of weapon, opponent and allies 'that would leave most kids weeping if you put the same charts on a math quiz,' Johnson wrote. They must use deductive reasoning to infer rules as they go, such as the use of various implements, what you need to do to level-up, intermediary goals, who's friend and who's foe.”

“Some of Gilsdorf 's profiles of fantasy lovers are quite potent. The most heartbreaking of the lot is Nissa Ludwig, 39, an avid online gamer who suffers from a degenerative muscular condition, and who enjoys inhabiting worlds in which her character can fight otherworldly monsters, swim in crystal-clear rivers, and ascend craggy, treacherous peaks, 'I can't run through the grass barefoot anymore,' Ludwig tells Gilsdorf. 'It's something I cannot do. But my avatar can.'

“Encounters like this underscore, sometimes emotionally, the escapist element of fantasy—an idea on which Gilsdorf focuses intently, chewing it over in various iterations throughout the book. But while it may be emotionally affecting, it isn't a particularly new or original observation. We know humans are attracted to escapism, and it's been plainly apparent since long before the first awkward teenager tossed the first twenty-sided die. But there's more at work here—a mere desire for escapism can't explain, say, the extreme popularity of World of Warcraft.”

Also Known As (AKA)

Twenty-Sided Die

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