From consecutive dice to 2x1d6 grid to d66

In the last post, I was probing for the earliest use of d66 (where the first die counts as the tens place and the second counts as the ones, but numerals go only from 1 to 6). With help from friendly visitors, I was sent looking for the first edition of Traveller, from 1977.

They were right! Traveller, Book 3, used a primitive version of d66.

There I found this chart, shown below, which may be the earliest use of d66 in the rules of a role-playing game. The book puts it not as Toon's rules did in 1984, as "tens-and-ones," nor did either call it "d66." Traveller says instead, "Throw two dice consecutively, and index the result to the table." (Book 3, p. 19; table on p. 21) The blank space on the table means no encounter if you roll a 6 for the first die. Notice how the table is (oddly, to me) filled out with blank space for all "first die = 6" results.

 

On the next page (p. 22), though, we find a table of patron encounters, in which the use of two consecutive six-sided dice is presented as a grid rather than as consecutive numerals.

 

My hunch is that this second format is the earlier one, conceptually. The bigger chart above resorted to listing the two dice as digits in order (11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, etc.) because each result was keyed to too much information, requiring too many columns, to be fit into a 6x6 grid (really 7x7 if we take into account the heads of column and rows). When the chart became too big, another format was called for, which we see in the Random Person table: consecutive dice digits.

This suggests that the d66 format arose in d6-only games as a convenience of presentation, or, in other words, to facilitate typesetting, layout, and ease of use. It was only a matter of time before somebody (like Toon's author, Costikyan) would suggest reading the two numerals as tens-place and ones-place digits, reading the results as "eleven, twelve," etc. That opened the way for the conventional name "d66" to be coined on the analogy of d100.

Common solutions to shared problems

When I first began to typeset my own home rules, I used consecutive d6s in the pattern that is now called d66 (without knowing it) to lay out random charts for character generation. Because my rules were inspired by Fighting Fantasy, another FF-derived set of rules, Troika!, was additionally inspirational here when it came to character generation, which uses d66 for random generation of character templates. (The use of character templates in the original Talislanta RPG of 1987, and the character professions of the original Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay of 1986, were just as much in my mind here.)

I immediately encountered the problem of presentation on the page, so I started to lay out my fuller charts with consecutive dice results (though I use dice with pips and not numerals). At that point, I remembered the "tens-and-ones" of Toon. Soon afterwards I found that lots of new indie games were using d66 or variants of it, from Ben Milton's Maze Rats to Idle Doodler's Off-White Cube to the splashy Mörk Borg (and you should check them all out). Turns out that for one of the few times in my life, I was doing something currently popular, but I didn't know it. More power to the D6!

On reflection, though, it's not surprising that the "d66" would be invented several times over independently. The "d66" solution is an almost obvious creative response to three impulses that constrain each other: (1) the wish to randomize character or world set-up with dice, combined with (2) insistence on d6 only, combined with (3) the necessity of clear, simple layout on a finite page.

Because I missed Traveller in my early days of gaming, I had no idea that the same problem (layout on the page) had led to the same solution. I'm willing to bet that most of the game designers who resorted to d66 didn't know it, either.

Here below is a snip from my own fantasy game home rules. My grid was not based consciously on anybody else's (though I must have seen such tables). It was an outcome of design decisions. It looks uncannily like Traveller's random patron table from 1977, doesn't it? That's not so strange. It's just 6 by 6 with headers for columns and rows, in this case divided into two registers because it grew too long horizontally. The numerical parameters come from my choices to use six-sided dice only and to randomize this aspect of character generation.

 

Or take for example this chart from my home rules, used optionally to generate characterizations, which, if used, can be more game-mechanical (like rules-light versions of disadvantages in GURPS) or merely rule-less descriptors, as the Referee decides.

The point here, at the end, is that role-playing gamers continually reinvent the same solutions to common problems based on constraints adopted in common. And that's not a bad thing. It's partly why we can so easily shift from one set of game rules to another and it's pretty much the same hobby. But this realization shows that in-hobby interest in the earliest games potentially has more to teach us about game design and table-top RPG play styles. Why reinvent solutions when we can excavate them? Both are fun. As I have remarked many times, there was a lot of variety from the start of role-playing games, no distinct, original way of doing things.