The Bones Us and Our Dice Will Hindmarch 9780981884011 Books
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This isn't about math. It's about unlucky breaks and victory against all odds. This isn't about percentiles and probabilities. It's about late-night game-ending rolls where everything hinges on that climactic moment when one single die skitters across the table and determines the fate of a hero, a city, an empire… The Bones gathers writing about fandom and family―about gamers, camaraderie, and memories― and ties them together where they meet our dice. These are essays and anecdotes about the ways dice make us crazy, about the stakes we play for and the thrill we get from not knowing what the next roll will bring. Step back and look at how we play with dice. Contributors include game designers Mike Selinker, Kenneth Hite, and Keith Baker, writer/actor Wil Wheaton, writers Ray Fawkes and James Lowder. (Subject to change.) Published in conjunction with GamePlayWright.net
The Bones Us and Our Dice Will Hindmarch 9780981884011 Books
Do you remember your first set of polyhedral dice? Mine came in the old mid-1980s Dungeons & Dragons boxed set. They were a ridiculous baby-blue color and were almost ludicrously ugly. I couldn’t keep them with the boxed set, so I put them in a plastic baggie and stored them in a dresser drawer for a few decades.A couple years ago, I decided to dig my original dice out — it turned out that I’d actually lost two of the six dice at some point. The fact that I’d managed to lose two of my original polyhedrals sent me on a dice-collecting binge for about a month. I still can’t bring myself to keep my original dice with my newer ones — I still hold out a vague hope that I’ll find the two lost ones someday, and I’ll be able to return the originals to my dice bag in triumph.
It's not like I ever get to play any roleplaying games. There's no RPG scene going on where I live. But I’m still obsessed with my dice.
And that’s what this book is about: dice. The history of dice, and our relationship with dice.
We start off with a few history lessons from Kenneth Hite and Irving Finkel (and a cartoon history from “Dork Tower” cartoonist John Kovalic), all about the very first dice — known as astrogaloi, the anklebones of a sheep, which had four sides that could be labeled and thrown, either as gambling implements, toys, or prophetic devices. There are other essays about randomness in games — and about randomness in computer games — as well as an interview with the inventor of the magnificent Dice-o-Matic.
After that come a number of essays, remembrances, funny stories, and entertaining ruminations on dice, games, and the ways they impact our lives. We get work from Wil Wheaton, Matt Forbeck, Jesse Scoble, Paul Tevis, Jeff Tidball, Monica Valentinelli, Ray Fawkes, Keith Baker, and many, many more.
The historical articles at the beginning, outlining the development of dice and gaming from ancient times to today, were genuinely eye-opening, and the analysis by gaming guru Greg Costikyan on randomness-vs.-skill in games was similarly fascinating. The interview with the guy who invented a Lego machine designed to roll over a million dice every day, just to keep players in play-by-email games satisfied that their digital rolls were actually random, was both informative and funny — there’s little statistical difference between computer-generated random numbers and the rolls of six-sided dice, but gamers are more accepting of the randomness of dice.
A lot of the other essays are great, too. We read about rituals gamers use to keep their dice lucky, or to punish them when they're unlucky, a wedding themed around dice, a story about actress Daryl Hannah, a tribute to six-sided dice, a tale about a set of homemade metal dice, and essays on dice and divination, dice as weapons, lost (and found) dice, the scarcity of modern polyhedral dice in third-world nations, and much, much more.
If you love games, if you love roleplaying, and if you find yourself sometimes obsessing over new dice, old dice, and the long-vanished 12-sider from your first RPG, you should go pick this one up.
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Tags : The Bones: Us and Our Dice [Will Hindmarch] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. This isn't about math. It's about unlucky breaks and victory against all odds. This isn't about percentiles and probabilities. It's about late-night game-ending rolls where everything hinges on that climactic moment when one single die skitters across the table and determines the fate of a hero,Will Hindmarch,The Bones: Us and Our Dice,Atomic Overmind Press,0981884016,Entertainment Games,GAMES & ACTIVITIES Reference,Gambling - Table,Games Gamebooks Crosswords,Reference
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The Bones Us and Our Dice Will Hindmarch 9780981884011 Books Reviews
Jeff and Will at gameplaywright are masters at deconstructing gamers and the people who play them. They approach the their work with scholarly eyes and geeky hearts, and that can be felt throughout The Bones. This collection of essays by game industry luminaries gets to the core of how I feel about my dice, so much so that I'm pretty sure I nodded along through each one.
If you've ever found yourself praying for a natural 20 or cursing your dice for abandoning you for an entire game session, do yourself a favor and pick up The Bones.
Do you remember your first set of polyhedral dice? Mine came in the old mid-1980s Dungeons & Dragons boxed set. They were a ridiculous baby-blue color and were almost ludicrously ugly. I couldn’t keep them with the boxed set, so I put them in a plastic baggie and stored them in a dresser drawer for a few decades.
A couple years ago, I decided to dig my original dice out — it turned out that I’d actually lost two of the six dice at some point. The fact that I’d managed to lose two of my original polyhedrals sent me on a dice-collecting binge for about a month. I still can’t bring myself to keep my original dice with my newer ones — I still hold out a vague hope that I’ll find the two lost ones someday, and I’ll be able to return the originals to my dice bag in triumph.
It's not like I ever get to play any roleplaying games. There's no RPG scene going on where I live. But I’m still obsessed with my dice.
And that’s what this book is about dice. The history of dice, and our relationship with dice.
We start off with a few history lessons from Kenneth Hite and Irving Finkel (and a cartoon history from “Dork Tower” cartoonist John Kovalic), all about the very first dice — known as astrogaloi, the anklebones of a sheep, which had four sides that could be labeled and thrown, either as gambling implements, toys, or prophetic devices. There are other essays about randomness in games — and about randomness in computer games — as well as an interview with the inventor of the magnificent Dice-o-Matic.
After that come a number of essays, remembrances, funny stories, and entertaining ruminations on dice, games, and the ways they impact our lives. We get work from Wil Wheaton, Matt Forbeck, Jesse Scoble, Paul Tevis, Jeff Tidball, Monica Valentinelli, Ray Fawkes, Keith Baker, and many, many more.
The historical articles at the beginning, outlining the development of dice and gaming from ancient times to today, were genuinely eye-opening, and the analysis by gaming guru Greg Costikyan on randomness-vs.-skill in games was similarly fascinating. The interview with the guy who invented a Lego machine designed to roll over a million dice every day, just to keep players in play-by-email games satisfied that their digital rolls were actually random, was both informative and funny — there’s little statistical difference between computer-generated random numbers and the rolls of six-sided dice, but gamers are more accepting of the randomness of dice.
A lot of the other essays are great, too. We read about rituals gamers use to keep their dice lucky, or to punish them when they're unlucky, a wedding themed around dice, a story about actress Daryl Hannah, a tribute to six-sided dice, a tale about a set of homemade metal dice, and essays on dice and divination, dice as weapons, lost (and found) dice, the scarcity of modern polyhedral dice in third-world nations, and much, much more.
If you love games, if you love roleplaying, and if you find yourself sometimes obsessing over new dice, old dice, and the long-vanished 12-sider from your first RPG, you should go pick this one up.
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