Grognard Games

[grognardgamer]

Hi Everyone,

www.youtube.com/user/GrognardGames is launching in January. Everything from Woodgrain box, 1st print run rares and in depth discussion of game evolution. It's not just an OD&D channel though... interviews, reviews, 'RPG archaeology' and in depth looks into the past will be staples of the channel.

We'll have some surprising looks at things, and we have one of the best kept secrets in all of D&D to reveal once we've been given the go ahead to do so. I don't know how I can tease you any more than that Head over now for our intro vid and subscribe - this channel is for OD&D and the people who play it and I hope we live up to that promise.



Martin

[Sean Michael Kelly]

Awesome! Exalt and welcome!

[grognardgamer]

Thanks Sean, what a warm welcome!

[Deleted]

OK, subscribed. Now I've just got to stop my bad habit of automatically deleting the YouTube emails when they come in. I'll try hard as your channel sounds interesting grognardgamer.

[grognardgamer]

Dec 29, 2012 13:52:30 GMT -6 @austrodavicus said:

OK, subscribed. Now I've just got to stop my bad habit of automatically deleting the YouTube emails when they come in. I'll try hard as your channel sounds interesting grognardgamer.

Lol! The first video is up - just our intro sequence, but it shows we're trying to get to a better level than the usual YouTube fare. First proper video will be up soon, thanks for the subscription

[Deleted]

Well, the first "proper video" has got me excited and interested in what's to come. The woodgrain box made me envious. The focus on old school gaming, the promise of delving into its history, and the promise of looking at the games of the OSR all got me hooked. I agree, a well presented video that is well and above the usual YouTube fare. Have an Exalt.

[grognardgamer]

Jan 6, 2013 13:19:38 GMT -6 @austrodavicus said:

Well, the first "proper video" has got me excited and interested in what's to come. The woodgrain box made me envious. The focus on old school gaming, the promise of delving into its history, and the promise of looking at the games of the OSR all got me hooked. I agree, a well presented video that is well and above the usual YouTube fare. Have an Exalt.

Thank you! And thank you for sharing the video on your blog as well - we haunt the depths of the blogosphere as observing lurkers in the darkness too.

[increment]

Nice to see that you plugged the Acaeum and this forum as well in your Appendix N video. You have a great enthusiasm for the history, and I hope it gets more people interested in the origins of gaming.

[grognardgamer]

Jan 11, 2013 17:48:45 GMT -6 increment said:

Nice to see that you plugged the Acaeum and this forum as well in your Appendix N video. You have a great enthusiasm for the history, and I hope it gets more people interested in the origins of gaming.

Thanks Jon, much appreciated. I rather enjoy your blog, it's a very small world these days!

[rredmond]

Dec 29, 2012 13:52:30 GMT -6 @austrodavicus said:

OK, subscribed. Now I've just got to stop my bad habit of automatically deleting the YouTube emails when they come in. I'll try hard as your channel sounds interesting grognardgamer.

Heh. Agreeing with you Dave. Too easy to just delete, I've watched all the videos and enjoyed them. Even the less crisp frognard

[increment]

While in previous installments of this series, there have been a few minor points where I might quibble about the history, there'd been nothing really worth mentioning. The episode about dice, however, in my opinion has some pretty serious errors, omissions and misunderstandings. This is too long for a Youtube comment, but might be of interest to folks here.

The account that Dave Wesely brought polyhedral dice into wargaming, while often repeated, is not supported by any evidence, and in fact the evidence strongly shows a very different path of transmission. Strategos N, for example, does not use any polyhedral dice. There are multiple statements regarding Blackmoor from Arneson that they had no "funny dice" at that time either, and that is supported by all the surviving ephemera of the system. However, it is pretty clear from a variety of articles appearing in the Wargamer's Newsletter how d20s got introduced to Gygax, how they ended up in Tractics (1971) and subsequent games leading up to D&D. Interestingly, this involves a British wargaming concern that actually tried to patent the d20. But before that, there were already numerous earlier wargaming manuals in the 1960s (like McHugh, 1966) that refer to the d20 as a means of generating percentile numbers. We can even find icosahedra mentioned in IFW fanzines as early as 1968. The source that Guidon Games used to buy d20s for Tractics only sold them in sets with the other polyhedral dice, and thus we can see in the era articles from Gygax describing how to use them, at around the time that D&D was beginning to take shape. It is also certainly worth noting that the earliest edition of D&D actually makes very little use of dice other than the d6 and d20.

The way in the video that the dice are presented in order, from 4 to 20 siders, with an individual history of each given, also obscures the most important thing about the five dice that originally shipped with D&D: that they are Platonic solids. That is indeed why those shapes are good as dice, because those five geometric shapes roll with special fairness because each of their faces and vertices has the same relationship to the center of gravity of the object. These properties were understood by Plato in the Timeaus, and certainly polyhedra with these qualities were common in the ancient world. The earliest 8-sider was not made for a poker game. The video at a high level conveys the impression that these dice were all invented independently, in different times and places. Since a number of prehistoric societies had grasped the construction of these shapes, there's some truth in that, but their suitability as dice is based on the geometric insight into the quality that these five shapes have in common. Leaving that out and treating the dice piecemeal misses pretty much the whole point of why these shapes became dice.

Moreover, presenting the 10-sider in the middle of the other dice glosses over the fact that it was not shipped with the earliest versions of D&D, because it was not one of the Platonic solids and thus was not in the sets TSR resold (and yes, we do know where they got them from). d10s as we know them only came onto the scene years later, and their method of construction owes to a very different insight than the patent shown in this video. It is actually pretty hard to make a fair 10-sider.

While there are a few cases where a d20 is employed as a percentile die to deliver 5% increments, in the early history of the game one rolled 2d20s as the canonical percentile dice. Remember that early d20 were not numbered 1-20, but were numbered 1-10 twice. Thus you rolled 2d20 to get a number between 1-100. This was the scientific use for d20s before gaming reclaimed them in the 1960s - for example, in the early 1960s the Japanese Standards Association sold d20s in 3s to generate numbers from 1-1000. Because d20s were expensive and exotic at first, there were tables people used to convert the role of 2d6 into 5% increments to generate percentile numbers - those for example were used in Fight in the Skies are other wargames of the period. The ranges of probabilities that dice might resolve, alone or in combination, was much studied by Gygax before D&D and is the subject of a number of articles he wrote in the period.

Finally, there's a ton more to be said about the exact moment when someone started rolling dice to decide whether not a hit occurred - when people realized you could decide fictional events by using instruments of chance within a statistic model - which is a real turning point in intellectual history. That has its own whole fascinating history.

I'm not sure where you were "looking around in the research" about this, but if my notes seem valuable, you can find a ton more about all of these subjects in my book, most importantly in the section on dice (3.2.1.2). Again, while in general I think this series has been good, on this episode I think you need to go back to the drawing board.

[grognardgamer]

Jan 25, 2013 16:02:32 GMT -6 increment said:

While in previous installments of this series, there have been a few minor points where I might quibble about the history, there'd been nothing really worth mentioning. The episode about dice, however, in my opinion has some pretty serious errors, omissions and misunderstandings. This is too long for a Youtube comment, but might be of interest to folks here.

The account that Dave Wesely brought polyhedral dice into wargaming, while often repeated, is not supported by any evidence, and in fact the evidence strongly shows a very different path of transmission. Strategos N, for example, does not use any polyhedral dice. There are multiple statements regarding Blackmoor from Arneson that they had no "funny dice" at that time either, and that is supported by all the surviving ephemera of the system. However, it is pretty clear from a variety of articles appearing in the Wargamer's Newsletter how d20s got introduced to Gygax, how they ended up in Tractics (1971) and subsequent games leading up to D&D. Interestingly, this involves a British wargaming concern that actually tried to patent the d20. But before that, there were already numerous earlier wargaming manuals in the 1960s (like McHugh, 1966) that refer to the d20 as a means of generating percentile numbers. We can even find icosahedra mentioned in IFW fanzines as early as 1968. The source that Guidon Games used to buy d20s for Tractics only sold them in sets with the other polyhedral dice, and thus we can see in the era articles from Gygax describing how to use them, at around the time that D&D was beginning to take shape. It is also certainly worth noting that the earliest edition of D&D actually makes very little use of dice other than the d6 and d20.

The way in the video that the dice are presented in order, from 4 to 20 siders, with an individual history of each given, also obscures the most important thing about the five dice that originally shipped with D&D: that they are Platonic solids. That is indeed why those shapes are good as dice, because those five geometric shapes roll with special fairness because each of their faces and vertices has the same relationship to the center of gravity of the object. These properties were understood by Plato in the Timeaus, and certainly polyhedra with these qualities were common in the ancient world. The earliest 8-sider was not made for a poker game. The video at a high level conveys the impression that these dice were all invented independently, in different times and places. Since a number of prehistoric societies had grasped the construction of these shapes, there's some truth in that, but their suitability as dice is based on the geometric insight into the quality that these five shapes have in common. Leaving that out and treating the dice piecemeal misses pretty much the whole point of why these shapes became dice.

Moreover, presenting the 10-sider in the middle of the other dice glosses over the fact that it was not shipped with the earliest versions of D&D, because it was not one of the Platonic solids and thus was not in the sets TSR resold (and yes, we do know where they got them from). d10s as we know them only came onto the scene years later, and their method of construction owes to a very different insight than the patent shown in this video. It is actually pretty hard to make a fair 10-sider.

While there are a few cases where a d20 is employed as a percentile die to deliver 5% increments, in the early history of the game one rolled 2d20s as the canonical percentile dice. Remember that early d20 were not numbered 1-20, but were numbered 1-10 twice. Thus you rolled 2d20 to get a number between 1-100. This was the scientific use for d20s before gaming reclaimed them in the 1960s - for example, in the early 1960s the Japanese Standards Association sold d20s in 3s to generate numbers from 1-1000. Because d20s were expensive and exotic at first, there were tables people used to convert the role of 2d6 into 5% increments to generate percentile numbers - those for example were used in Fight in the Skies are other wargames of the period. The ranges of probabilities that dice might resolve, alone or in combination, was much studied by Gygax before D&D and is the subject of a number of articles he wrote in the period.

Finally, there's a ton more to be said about the exact moment when someone started rolling dice to decide whether not a hit occurred - when people realized you could decide fictional events by using instruments of chance within a statistic model - which is a real turning point in intellectual history. That has its own whole fascinating history.

I'm not sure where you were "looking around in the research" about this, but if my notes seem valuable, you can find a ton more about all of these subjects in my book, most importantly in the section on dice (3.2.1.2). Again, while in general I think this series has been good, on this episode I think you need to go back to the drawing board.

Really good, excellent critique. As you know from the email I just sent to you, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for and I'm not a guy that resents a mistake. Someone who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

Very good material, thank you for such a considered response and I hope we can keep the discussion alive via email to come to a new video that will be unsurpassed in factual accuracy

Martin

[aher]

grognardgamer: Love the vidcasts! Keep up the great work!!!

Jan 25, 2013 16:02:32 GMT -6 increment said:

the most important thing about the five dice that originally shipped with D&D: that they are Platonic solids.

If anyone wants a truly exhaustive explanation of why Platonic solids are so important, I highly recommend Prof. N J Wildberger's "Algebraic Topology: a beginner's course." This is a series of 40 lectures on YouTube. Each lecture is about 43 and 1/2 minutes long.

In particular, lectures 8 and 9 focus on the Platonic solids--their history and place in mathematics. But I believe he starts to talk about them as early as the course overview in lecture 0. He may mention them in connection with the sphere (lectures 3 & 4). And lectures 15 & 16 on the "Rational curvature of a polytope" are useful for understanding the solid angle at the vertices of these shapes.

I watched all 40 lectures and thought they were great! Disclaimer: I have a math degree. Your mileage may vary. ;D Actually, I never would have gotten interested in math if it wasn't for my introduction to D&D at an early age--polyhedral dice, probabilities, dungeon mapping, counting treasure, minmaxing my PCs and all that...

Jan 25, 2013 16:02:32 GMT -6 increment said:

those five geometric shapes

Lecture 9 "Applications of Euler's formula and graphs" is where Prof Wildberger uses Euler's formula to prove that there are at most 5 Platonic solids.



Only the d4, d6, d8, d12 and d20 are Platonic solids. Skip ahead to the table below for a moment. Notice that each Platonic solid has a "dual." Duals have the same number of edges, but numbers of vertices and faces are swapped. The icosahedron and dodecahedron are duals. The cube and octahedron are duals. And the tetrahedron is self-dual.

The d24 and d30 are examples of Catalan solids. These are duals of two of the 13 Archimedean solids. Prof Wildberger discusses these as well.

Jan 25, 2013 16:02:32 GMT -6 increment said:

It is actually pretty hard to make a fair 10-sider.

The d10 is a pentagonal trapezohedron, third in an infinite family of trapezohedra, which are dual polyhedra to the antiprisms. Unfortuantely, the course doesn't discuss these.

Jan 25, 2013 16:02:32 GMT -6 increment said:

each of their faces and vertices has the same relationship

The relationship between the vertices, edges and faces of a graph inscribed on a closed surface is called "Euler's Formula." Consider the following table:

Platonic solid	Vertices	Edges	Faces
cube	8	12	6
dodecahedron	20	30	12
icosahedron	12	30	20
octahedron	6	12	8
tetrahedron	4	6	4

Euler's Formula says:

Vertices - Edges + Faces = 2

This actually generalizes to the "Poincaré Formula":

V - E + F = χ(g)

where chi (χ) is called the "Euler Characteristic" of the closed surface with genus g. Roughly speaking, the genus tells us how many holes are in the surface.

For orientable, closed surfaces like spheres and torii

χ(g) = 2 - 2 g

For non-orientable, closed surfaces like the projective plane (g=1) or the Klein bottle (g=2)

χ(g) = 2 - g

A sphere is a closed, orientable surface of genus 0 (no holes), so χ(0) = 2 - 2 × 0 = 2. Topologically, our Platonic solids are equivalent to spheres. This explains why their Euler Characteristic is 2.

Perhaps the best way to think about it is that the Platonic solids are our "best approximations to a sphere" or at least the best we can do with regular polytopes. By "regular" I mean that the edges are all the same length and every vertex has the same number of incident edges.

So a natural question that arises: Among the Platonic solids, which is the best approximation to the sphere?

The answer is the dodecahedron, because it has the smallest angular defect, the largest vertex solid angle, and it fills out its circumscribed sphere the most. Prof Wildberger discusses this conclusion in his lectures.

But why else might a roleplayer study these algebraic topology lectures?

In H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, the sunken city of R'lyeh is characterized by its non-Euclidean geometry. A great illustration of this can be found here:

Benjamin K. Tippett's paper "Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacific" discusses the possible physics of this.

Some of you might have at one time or another wondered: How might I create a dungeon in a non-Euclidean space?

If you inscribed your dungeon map on the surface of a sphere (χ=2), you'd be inscribing it in a elliptic geometry. It turns out that inscribing your dungeon on the surfaces of either a torus or Klein bottle (χ=0) would be Euclidean, although the Klein bottle is non-orientable, so as you moved around certain closed loops, your left and right hand sides would be interchanged--as if you traveled into a "mirror universe." For closed surfaces with χ < 0 such as the double torus (χ=-2), you're dealing with hyperbolic geometries.

When we map a dungeon, we always use graph paper with hexes or squares. It turns out that there are only 3 ways to "tesselate" a Euclidean plane with regular polygons: hexes, squares or triangles.


It turns out that if you are working with the hyperbolic plane, you have a lot more choices. The Dutch artist M. C. Escher is well known for his tesselations of the hyperbolic plane.


It may not look it, but the above illustration is the entire hyperbolic plane, tesselated with a regular polygon! To understand why, watch the lectures on algebraic topology, and pay attention to lectures 3 and 4 on "inversive geometry" and lecture 21 which actually shows how to tesselate the hyperbolic plane.

Lots more to discuss about Platonic solids and topology, but I don't want to derail your thread any further!

[grognardgamer]

Aher, that's amazing. I would like to use this in a follow up video and reference back to this thread, is that okay with you mate?


In addition....

The Grognard Games video channel is pleased to be able to announce a series of conversations with the very charming, handsome and charismatic Rob Kuntz for your participation and viewing pleasure.

After numerous discussions on the phone it became very apparent that a one or two hour interview simply wouldn't do justice to the variety of topics that we wanted to discuss together, so we will be running a series of conversations ranging from OD&D & play test history to ideas of creativity and inspiration and a great deal more as the series develops

We're very excited about the project, and we do hope that you'll join in the discussions with us. The channel link is below in the banner, and we invite everyone to participate in the forthcoming conversations - subscribe now so you don't miss out on the videos and the chance to ask questions


Martin & GG Team
Grognard Games »

[aldarron]

Awesome Martin!

[jmccann]

Hey Martin, I have watched the vids on the new channeI am glad to see the new channel is being updated often. I have mostly enjoyed the vids and am looking forward to seeing more of them.

I don't want to pile on too much, but the one about dice was pretty weak. After aher's post I don't have much to add other than to urge anyone interested in dice to learn about the platonic solids and other polyhedra.. I will be checking out those lectures, the description sounds very interesting.

I took an algebra class a few years ago and the prof said we could bring polyhedra to an exam that covered rotational groups among other topics. I thought of bringing my dice but did not. During the exam though, I heard the familiar clatter of dice being poured out, and someone was dumping their gaming dice out of a string bag! I found it amusing that by virtue of being a gamer and having the dice some of us may have had an advantage (a tiny one, but still an advantage) over the mundane non-gamers. My casual familiarity with these shapes definitely gave me a leg up in envisioning the rotational groups, even for non-platonic solids.

[grognardgamer]

No worries, I have a follow up set in the pipeline!

We're trying to balance quite a lot and time is not always kind to how long it takes to put some things together. I'm rarely 'home' and travel for work, so uploads are not as frequent as originally envisaged.

Aher's response is superb, and I will be doing a follow up using that material - the channel thrives on people sharing information, and I can't thank everyone enough who's come forward to share information and items with me, it's been phenomenal. I can't do it all justice, and I can't use everything at the speed it's come in - it's an amazing problem to have!!!!!!!!!!

Everything out so far is introductory, so do keep watching as expansion comes episode by episode Thanks for the support and critiques, it makes things stronger and allows us to get better content out

[jmccann]

Feb 11, 2013 11:12:31 GMT -6 grognardgamer said:

No worries, I have a follow up set in the pipeline!

We're trying to balance quite a lot and time is not always kind to how long it takes to put some things together. I'm rarely 'home' and travel for work, so uploads are not as frequent as originally envisaged.

Aher's response is superb, and I will be doing a follow up using that material - the channel thrives on people sharing information, and I can't thank everyone enough who's come forward to share information and items with me, it's been phenomenal. I can't do it all justice, and I can't use everything at the speed it's come in - it's an amazing problem to have!!!!!!!!!!

Everything out so far is introductory, so do keep watching as expansion comes episode by episode Thanks for the support and critiques, it makes things stronger and allows us to get better content out

I hope I did not seem too negative, it is just that some of us REALLY like the platonic solids. In a platonic way only (to be clear),

I very much enjoy your channel. I am looking forward to watching the RJK interview. I just realized I had not subbed so you have one more sub as of a few minutes ago.

[grognardgamer]

Feb 12, 2013 0:37:33 GMT -6 jmccann said:

Feb 11, 2013 11:12:31 GMT -6 grognardgamer said:

No worries, I have a follow up set in the pipeline!

We're trying to balance quite a lot and time is not always kind to how long it takes to put some things together. I'm rarely 'home' and travel for work, so uploads are not as frequent as originally envisaged.

Aher's response is superb, and I will be doing a follow up using that material - the channel thrives on people sharing information, and I can't thank everyone enough who's come forward to share information and items with me, it's been phenomenal. I can't do it all justice, and I can't use everything at the speed it's come in - it's an amazing problem to have!!!!!!!!!!

Everything out so far is introductory, so do keep watching as expansion comes episode by episode Thanks for the support and critiques, it makes things stronger and allows us to get better content out

I hope I did not seem too negative, it is just that some of us REALLY like the platonic solids. In a platonic way only (to be clear),

I very much enjoy your channel. I am looking forward to watching the RJK interview. I just realized I had not subbed so you have one more sub as of a few minutes ago.

Not in the slightest mate, I'm so easy going it's silly I don't see the point in getting uptight over pretend elves and a few dice, but I do love them dearly nonetheless.

[Keith]

Are there other videos on the Grognard Games YouTube Channel?

I've subscribed, but for some reason I am only seeing the first one ("Welcome to Grognard Games").

I don't use YouTube very often, so this could definitely be user-error

Just curious if I'm missing something. I really liked the first video, and I'm very envious of that woodgrain box!

Thanks,
Keith

[rredmond]

It hasn't been updated in 2 months, but I see 11 videos there.
Hope that helps keith.
--Ron--

[Keith]

May 29, 2013 13:46:19 GMT -6 rredmond said:

It hasn't been updated in 2 months, but I see 11 videos there.
Hope that helps keith.
--Ron--

Helps a lot! I wasn't sure whether I was navigating to the right place. Sounds like I wasn't.

Thanks!