polyhedron love

so many shapes. so many colors. so many games. so many uses. playing dungeons & dragons? better have the whole set! got a star wars game coming up? how many six-siders you got? did you remember your off-color one for your wild die? marvel? gurps? vampire? hope you brought your d10s.

they were pale sea green, pearlescent plastic with white numbers on their faces. i remember the first set i ever bought. i was 14, excited as hell, about to embark on my first purchase towards being a real gamer. full set. d4 through d20. i even remember the silly little rituals i went through in order to guarantee they'd roll the way i wanted them to. i spoke to them (yes, i really did). i offered them a place of honor if they were good to me. i carried them in my pocket the entire first week i had them, just so they'd get used to me. then friday night rolled (ha ha) around and i got to use them for the first time. i petted my shiny little d20 and threw it across the table for the first round of combat.

oh, how those pretty shiny little pieces of gamer geekiness failed me.

i think i almost cried. i just spent six dollars and twenty-five cents of my mother's hard earned money to critical miss and lop the hand off of one of my compatriots? WHAT KIND OF GAME IS THIS?! my poor little elven fighter-mage-thief turned into a low-rent butcher without even the talent or intelligence to tell the difference between the stinking horde of kobolds and the cleric of our group? all by one single toss of a 20-sided die? such betrayal!

and the sale was final, too.

those dice never treated me right. locks i'd thought i'd picked spontaneously developed deadly poison traps. sea green pearlescent plastic bastards. somewhere out there, there was a geometrically-shaped deity laughing. first-level random encounters became bloodbaths. the party'd take a walk out to the local tavern and end up in ravenloft.

bastards. all seven of 'em.

i gave up on them and went out to buy another set. purple and black, numbers etched in silver. i gave the sea green pains in the ass to a friend (who never seemed to have a problem with them, incidentally. bastards.) and played exclusively with the new set. i guess sea green was never my color.

i bought my star wars six-siders in vegas. i mean, what's a better place to buy 'traditional' dice than a place where people lose money rolling them? admittedly, i didn't use them much, as at the time i played star wars i hadn't even seen the movies (bad geek. very bad.). but hey, they worked pretty well. i had absolutely no idea what was going on, but yeah. they worked.

it was my d10s that got the most workout. between marvel superheroes, the few gurps games i played, and of course, vampire... well, i'm surprised the numbers didn't wear off.

i don't have my dice anymore. i don't know whatever happened to them. on the rare occasions i do game, i use a handful from my husband's vast collection.

i use dice now more for randomly choosing which movie to watch than to decide the fate of any fictional character.

but i still remember that first exhilarating rush of owning my own set.

and the crushing defeat which followed.

bastards. if plastic polyhedrons have a hell, i hope they're melting.