Popular Mechanics - USA (2019-09)

(Antfer) #1

Ptolemaic Egyptians
were rolling them in
300 B.C. The Romans
fashioned them from
glass some 400 years
later. Truly glorious, a
20-sided die, the ico-
sahedron, goes back to
antiquity.
But modern role-
playing games owe their
use to the demands
of statistics-heavy
wargames, starting in
19th-century Prussia.
Early versions used the
classic 6-sided die, but
centuries later, players
were frustrated by its
limitations, especially
with percentages. How
do you mimic the real-


life probability that a
mortar will land in the
right spot 2,000 yards
away with a 6-sided die?
By the late 1960s,
game designers like
Michael Korns started
publishing manuals
like Modern War in
Miniature, which were
filled with tables of real
wartime probabilities,
often in 20 increments
of 5 percent each. For
that kind of math, the
icosahedron was the
ideal random number
generator.
From there, demand
grew, and by the early
’70s—when Gary Gygax
was working on his first
edition of Dungeons &
Dragons—American
game suppliers were
already starting to flood
the market. Today, it’s
grown into our favorite
plucky polyhedral.

ALL HAIL THE D 20 ,


THAT IMMACULATE


ICOSAHEDRON


a being whose magic is
neither arcane, divine,
nor innate, but sourced
from a binding pact with
a powerful eldritch being
(t hin k more Ct hu l hu
than Zeus). Top-level
magic users also lost
some of their god-like abilities.
“We still have the amazing Wish
spell, which is such a big part of
the game’s legacy,” says Craw-
ford. Today, D&D—and the rules
that govern it—stands as an
expression of our cultural rela-
tionship to fantasy. In the ’70s,
the worlds of Tolkien and Vance
helped form it. But as our love of
the genre grew, D&D recast the
rules of magic and made a tool
for anyone to create a fantasy of
their own.

BY THE EARLY
2000S, THE
GENRE HAD
BLOSSOMED.
PLAYERS WERE
READING ABOUT
MAGIC IN HARRY
POTTER BOOKS.


magic needed to change.
“D&D is about giving players
a platform for fantasy storytell-
ing,” says Jeremey Crawford,
D&D’s lead rules designer. “As the
types of stories players wanted to
roleplay grew, we diversified the
types of magic available.”
In 2000, a new set of rules cre-
ated the sorcerer class, a being
who used magic as a natural tal-
ent, as if it ran through their
blood. “We also learned that if a
person signed up to play a magic-
using character, they wanted
to roleplay one full-time,” says
Crawford. Later, in 2007, D&D
introduced different types of
at-will magic, which could never
be exhausted.
In 2014, in D&D’s latest edi-
tion, players met the Warlock,

ids, spells became supernatural
abilities endowed by a collec-
tion of gods. Rather than hit the
library before each adventure,
characters prayed. In 1989, with
another edition of Advanced
Dungeons & Dragons, arcane
magicians now used spells from
9 discrete schools, like Illu-
sion, Necromancy, or Alteration.
Divine magic was split into 16
spheres of influence, like Elemen-
tal, Healing, and Plants. Players
could now create characters with
fantastic new granularity.
But by the early 2000s, players
wanted more. The fantasy genre
had blossomed since the ’70s.
Players were slinging spells in
World of Warcraft, and reading
about magic in the Harry Potter
series. D&D’s rigid conception of


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