>The only reason why the D20 is popular and is used at all us because Gary Gygax wanted to sell more merchandise
>The original plan from the other co-designer was to use a 2D6 or 3D6 system like other wargames
I thought Gary was cooler then this!
>The only reason why the D20 is popular and is used at all us because Gary Gygax wanted to sell more merchandise
Making shit up and just deciding it's true is a sign of extremely low IQ, why would you even do that here?
But it's true though.
It's completely false.
Arneson is the one who "discovered" the d20. You have to realize that plastic manufacturing was nothing like it is now, and we can actually identify the two places that were producing d20's at the time, Japan initially as an education tool, and later England as a novelty item among the war gamers there. Arneson took a trip to London, saw the d20 in a hobby shop, and brought it back to America. Later, TSR actually was one of the only companies you could purchase d20s from in America for quite a long time, and all they were doing was importing English dice and repackaging them because no one in America was making them.
Gygax didn't really care about the d20 and also initially didn't care at all about D&D either. He had very little faith that the game would sell, and for several months he was completely right, in no small part because he didn't even bother to advertise the game. He published the game with only a tiny print run, as cheaply as possible, and spent far more of his time and attention worrying about trying to promote his more traditional war games. It's understandable, but in hindsight Gygax and his followers trying to present himself as the Deity of Role Playing Games is laughable when he initially treated the game like a redheaded stepchild.
It took months before the game suddenly surged in popularity, thanks to word-of-mouth and an enormous amount of house rules developed by a community that formed around the game, before he decided to re-evaluate it and realize that he might have something more than a novelty war game spin-off.
Just what I said but with more flare.
>"arneson didn't want d20"
>he is actually the one who "discovered" the d20 and brought it back to add to the game
>"Yeah, thats what I said"
based moron.
I don't know whats so hard to understand about it. No need to be so meeeaaaaannn.
The story makes more sense the other way round, with Gygax being the shrewd businessman who sold math rocks to wargamer autists so they could precisely roll for a 79% chance of something happening.
Something they used to use big-ass tables using multiple d6 rolls for to approximate before that.
That's if you are making the mistake of assuming a guy who succeeded in losing the rights to his Golden Goose Game by running his company into the ground would be particularly shrewd, business savvy, or had any measure of foresight. He was conniving, not clever, and he could only go so far before running out of people to backstab.
Gygax likely saw the dice as an obstacle rather than an asset, and it was years before TSR figured out how to get a steady supply of dice, offering a cardboard "chit" system instead. Gygax, instead of seeing the dice as some proprietary technology he could sell at a sizable profit instead recognized it as a barrier to entry, one he didn't own the rights to but the game was designed around. The business of importing dice and selling them only came much later.
The first printing of D&D did not include dice. It didn't even include the later chit system. It was a tiny print run of 1000 extremely low quality copies, and even this took months to sell through, with Gygax quietly smothering the baby in its crib because he had so little faith in the game. We're talking about the most minimal investment he could have made, a blind shot in the dark, and he would have just put it in the list of his other failed games had it not been for it striking a chord with a community, completely surprising Gygax.
Gygax had no plans to sell dice, dice which he couldn't patent, trademark, or otherwise protect. The dice being available via 3rd parties was one of the only ways the game even could have taken off.
That's what I am trying to say.
None of this is true. I was there, I am Arneson.
The legit one, or the bastard from the Latina housekeeper?
The D20 is literally the only good thing to directly come from D&D, beyond works in other media tangentially inspired by it.
Gary Gygax stole the idea of dungeons and also dragons from a guy called Jimmy 'The Big Ass' Wainscotting, who invented RPGs in 1830 but forgot to tell anyone.
Wargaming as a whole was stolen from military tactical briefings. That's how it always was.
I think it was the other way around, actually. Alexander The Great learned what war was when he watched some guys play 40k in the local gamestore.
No wonder he won by listbuilding and GG'd after the deployment phase.
I remember from reading about Aristoteles that he said that Alexander once won a battle where 10 000 warriors on both sides had gathered, because he told the owner that his opponent hadn't washed for over a week and he got thrown out of the store. But Aristoteles was an unreliable narrator in this matter so it is possible he attributed this sensitive nose to Alexander just so he'd seem more impressive, when it was actually determined by an unknown third party.
>money causing innovation is... LE BAD
The National Ministry of Interior Tabletop Wargaming would have discovered the d20 sooner than capitalism
Arneson actually invented the icosahedron. Until that moment in time that shape was completely unknown to science, and he won a Nobel prize in geometry for it.
There is nothing wrong with a dice that functions in incriments of 5%. The issue is that D&D is fricking queer.
it's nice to have a die where chance of values goes up in 5% increments.
with all dice systems, the question you need to ask is "how do I want the probability of success to change as obstacles get more difficult to overcome?"
sometimes something like PbtA's 2d6 works well, sometimes RuneQuests's percentile dice (which allows you to frame every roll as "what is the percent chance someone would succeed" works fine.
there's also the added factor that people like the icosahedron shape because it's fun. I think a really underused dice distribution is 2d12, where a roll of lucky 7 is always a success and a roll of unlucky 13 is always a failure. it has a nice distribution pattern too
That's the secret: Gary was never cool
you mean someone who created a product or service wanted to profit from it?
SHOCK!