The first D66 and an early "rules-light" RPG

Last time, I wrote about the beginnings of slot-based encumbrance, keeping track of your character's equipment in terms of "items carried" rather than calculating weight and adding it up.

It turns out I was close but not close enough. JC's useful comments pointed out that the beginning of slot-based encumbrance was in the second edition of RuneQuest, from 1979.

This time I'm probing for the origins of the now-ubiquitous d66. That is when you roll two six-sided dice and treat one as the tens place and the other as the ones, giving you a range of 36 possible results. Among the rules-light indie game designers of today, d66 is a favorite procedure for generating stuff from tables.

Let me cut to the chase and say that the earliest instance of d66 that I have found is from the innovative role-playing game of 1984, Toon: The Cartoon Role-Playing Game, by Greg Costikyan, developed by Warren Spector, published by Steve Jackson Games. (Toon was one of the early games I can think of to exhibit Steve Jackson Games' house style of layout with a main column and side columns of supplementary information.)

[UPDATE April 2: It turns out that there is a considerably earlier "d66" table, occurring in the original Traveller rules, Book 3, from 1977. Thanks to faoladh and Alea Iactanda Est for pointing this out in the comments. Traveller is one of the early games I never played, and I rarely saw the rules even for sale in the early '80s. I think my first sci-fi game was Star Frontiers. This is another instance in which a game from the earliest years pioneered something forgotten very soon thereafter, and in which the loremasters of the internet offered helpful tips to steer me right.

I'm leaving the rest of the post as it was, because Toon still deserves attention.]

Now, I hope that somebody will come along and leave a comment to point out some earlier game that uses d66. But the way that Toon introduces it, with a slightly laborious description, suggests that it was unheard of in 1984. It was new to me at the time. I remember puzzling over it when I got the book as soon as it appeared, thinking it was a funny way to do things. After explaining that this is a d6-only game, the rules say (p. 4 of the original edition):

Sometimes you will get to make a special "tens-and-ones" dice roll. This means you roll one die and say: "That's the tens." Then you roll another die and say: "That's the ones." Instead of adding the rolls (the way you normally do when you roll two dice) you read the two rolls one after another. For example, if your first roll is a 4 and your second roll is a 3, you've rolled a 43 (not a seven!). This system gives you a number from 11 to 66, which will come in handy when you are choosing one item from a long list.

I recall that this was an idiosyncratic dice system at the time. I had to explain it to my friends who tried Toon with me and one of them didn't get it at first.

[UPDATE April 2: None of my friends would have been able to identify Traveller in 1984, let alone tell me what it was. Toon included "tens-and-ones" procedures in character creation, however, and that may be a first.]

Toon came with tables of random stuff that was way ahead of its time from the perspective of, say, 2018, when random tables were all the rage for instant adventures. The inside cover of the rules give two d66 tables, one a "Random Item/Animal" table and one a "Random Trap" table, for recreating the whimsy and spontaneity of animated cartoons like Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny, and the rest.

The game In Nomine, published originally in French in 1989, used a D666 (a d66 + a third die to determine degrees of success). The 666 thing was fitting kitsch for a game about battles between angels and devils, a theme so very typical of the end of the '80s and throughout the '90s. The first English edition of In Nomine was by by Steve Jackson Games in 1997.

Wikipedia says that the Games Workshop games Necromunda (1995-?) and Mordheim (1999) used D66 by that name. So the use of two six-sided dice for tens-and-ones is at least as old as 1984, but the term d66 seems to have caught on among tabletop wargames of the mid- to late '90s after the model of d666 from the game In Nomine.

Since then, the name d66 stuck and spread. Nowadays, any rules-light role-playing game that uses six-sided dice exclusively is bound to have d66 tables.

But the apparent source is, remarkably, one of the earliest role-playing games to emphasize free-form, genre-and-trope based play, slot-based encumbrance, minimal stats, and interactive creativity. Toon may therefore be the godfather of the new indie rules-light RPGs. Toon's basic rules take up only 8 pages of the book, and they are stretched out to fill space at that, with cartoon drawings and ample margins. (There is a more ample discussion of rules and cartoon emulation later in the book.) It's just the kind of game that indie designers pack into two pages today in feats of concision.

The forgotten innovations of Toon are very much to the credit of Greg Costikyan, who was a playful innovator and RPG designer before he moved on to computer game development. He co-designed Paranoia (1984) and he also designed another award-winning game based on the humble and powerful D6, the Star-Wars Role-Playing Game (1987).

In the first issue of alternative RPG magazine Different Worlds, in February of 1979, several game designers were invited to ruminate on the topic of "My Life and Role-Playing." Rather than providing autobiography, as the other designers did, Costikyan (then nineteen years old!) came up with a somewhat prescient fiction called "Future Fantasy." He imagined a future world in which, by the year 2010, total immersion games were possible, plugging our heads directly into virtual reality. In this world, the end might come in the form of "ecocatastrophe," and (without explanation) the name of E. Gary Gygax was one of those synonymous with Antichrist! To make sense of this, remember that this is just when AD&D was completed, and Gygax's "One True Way" of fantasy was deeply resented. Maybe here, in this attitude of resentment towards big-corporate role-playing games, we see another way in which some of the indie game designers have their antecedent in Costikyan.

Maybe Toon deserves another look today among those inclined towards rules-light and free-form play. 

If you know an earlier use of 2d6 for "tens-and-ones," let me know in the comments!

[UPDATE: Thanks to the readers who pointed out the antecedent in Traveller.]