I’m a huge fan of dice of all kinds, but Dungeons & Dragons dice in particular. Casino dice just don’t do it for me — in my mind that’s just the crummy six-sided dice that are in every board game I ever owned as a child. But D&D dice are something different entirely, they’re the portal into an awesome world of imagination and storytelling.
I remember being really into Dungeons & Dragons before I ever played it — before, in fact, I really knew entirely what is was. I have no idea where I first heard of D&D or what attracted me to the name, but when I was in junior high my brother and I decided that we wanted to play. We went to the local B. Dalton book store and looked through their two shelved filled with Dungeons & Dragons books. At the time, that seemed like so many.
I remember most of the books were Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and we certainly didn’t feel we were ready for advanced yet, so we finally found a boxed set that was just labeled Dungeons & Dragons — Hollow World. It said it had everything you needed to play in Hollow World.
Of course anyone at all familiar with D&D knows all the mistakes that happened here. Hollow World was just a setting, and it did not have everything you needed, because at the very least you needed the player’s handbook and some dice to play the game at all, and preferably the DMG as well (since that’s where all the magic items were). Nevertheless, we poured over that Hollow World boxed set and tried as hard as we could to deconstruct the rules based off of the references. Since they introduced some new races (and we thought it was weird that there were no dwarves or elves or humans in D&D, but oh well) we were able to get a decent feel for the character creation process. Of course the only dice we had were the old d6s from board games, but somehow we managed (though it was very clear from the rule that we were supposed to have special D&D dice).
In the end what we played was not Dungeons & Dragons by the rules — not at all. But it was a fantasy RPG. We played, and when we played it was mostly roleplaying and not much combat, which we didn’t really understand that well from the rules.
I do recall that at some point my brother discovered a store that was still not really a game store, but it had a lot more gaming stuff in it — including the all important Dungeons & Dragons dice. So at long last we had those strange and wonderful dice in our hands to do our gaming with — in particular the d20, which at the time was the talisman of D&D to me.
Of course I still game today, though I almost never play Dungeons & Dragons. But the look and feel of those D&D dice is still somehow magical and wonderful.
I’ve talked a bit before about machining equipment and how we work with a lot of machine shops at my work. The nice thing about this is I often feel like I have a pretty good handle on the whole CNC machining terminology, working with enough of it day in and day out. As always, just when I feel like I understand a section of the industrial market, I come across something to prove that I don’t know what I thought I knew. In this case it has to do with both vertical machining centers and 5 axis CNC machines — both coming from the same client.