There has been much throwing about of brains on the OSR blogs over the DCCRPG's use of Zocchi dice. The most common complaint seems to be that the Zocchi dice add nothing to the game and their use is an attempt to be different for the sake of being different. While it may be too late to weigh in on this, I'm going to anyway. I suspect that there's another element to this decision: a desire to act in the spirit of Gygax and Arneson. Let me explain further.
When OD&D was developed in the early 1970s, there was no need to use those "weird" dice that are now so familiar to us (i.e. the d4, d8, d12, and d20). If I remember right, Chainmail doesn't use them, and in any case one could design a roleplaying game system that only used d6; Ken St. Andre did just that in 1975 with the first edition of Tunnels and Trolls. But OD&D used them anyway. Whether this arose out of a desire for more flexibility than a d6 would give, or a desire to be different, or some other issue, I don't know, but the fact remains that OD&D used these weird and rare dice. And TSR didn't put them in the box sets, either; you had to get them from educational suppliers, as I recall.
I think Goodman Games is doing the same sort of thing: they intend to use all of the dice out there, just like OD&D used all of the dice out there in 1974. Do they have to? No. Is it a bad idea to? Maybe. But just like TSR did in 1974, Goodman Games is setting their product apart by using "weird" dice.
I remember filling in the numbers of my dice with a crayon. Then my mom stepped on a few of them on the floor of my bedroom and there was hell to pay.
ReplyDeleteI doubt I'll ever play DCC, but I would like to score some of those Zocchi dice.