Continued from “A Neutral Human Fighter.”

“What’s a tavern?” I said.

“It’s like a bar in medieval times,” said Garth.

I only knew what a bar looked like from cowboy movies with Clint Eastwood and John Wayne. The image jarred with the knights and castles in my imagination.

“What am I doing there?”

“You’re looking for adventure. An old man comes through the door…”

I imagined saloon doors swinging back and forth and the hollow thud of boots on a wood-plank floor.

In a lurching gait, the old man approached the table where I sat. He warned me that the local volcano would soon erupt and the town would be destroyed. He pulled a scroll from his cloak.

“This is the Scroll of the Dead. To appease the gods, you must read it over the lava pit in the center of the volcano and throw it in.”

Then the old man fell forward across the table, a dagger in his back.

“Roll these dice six times.”

Garth pushed three Yahtzee dice across the blue notebook that lay flat between us. We were sitting on the floor in his room. He leaned against the bed.

Having watched Kaytar explore the dungeon and defeat the wizard, I was ready, by Garth’s decree, to play this new kind of game he called “medieval fantasy adventure role-playing.”

I sat cross-legged. I had a pencil and an old copy of Better Homes and Gardens, which supported a blank sheet of ruled paper.

“When can I roll that one?” I eyed the dice that looked like a ball it had so many sides. The color was light blue like a summer sky. Each side was a small triangle, just big enough to fit a number. The edges were worn and rounded.

“That’s for attacking monsters and making saves. We’ll get to that later. First, you have to make a character.”

I cupped the dice in two hands and dropped them on the notebook.

“Thirteen. Good,” he said. “Write down ‘strength’ with thirteen next to it. That means you’re pretty strong. You can be a fighter.”

“Can I cast magic spells like Kaytar?”

Garth pursed his thin lips into a flat pucker. He did that when he was doubtful about something. “Playing a magic-user is more complicated. It’s easier to start with a fighter.”

I rolled the dice five more times and recorded the numbers on the sheet next to “intelligence,” “wisdom,” “constitution,” “dexterity,” and “charisma.”

Garth explained what each score meant, adding, “Anything higher than ten is above average.”

Other than the strength and a dexterity score that gave the character a bonus to “missile fire,” my fighter was mediocre.

I rolled another dice for “hit points,” which, the way Garth explained them, were more like life points. Then Garth told me to roll the three dice again.

Reading the results, he said, “You have one-hundred fifty gold pieces.”

“What are gold pieces?”

“Pieces are coins. There are other kinds too, like copper, silver, and platinum. Platinum is the most valuable.”

This brought to mind a pirate’s chest buried in a dune. “So, is it a treasure?”

“Not really, it’s just money you have to start with. You use it to buy equipment to go down into the dungeon. That’s where you’ll find the real treasure.”

He gave me the pale blue book open to a page with lists of items and their costs. “You’ve got plenty to get everything you’ll need for the adventure.”

I scanned the lists and asked a bunch of questions, mostly of the sort “What’s that and what’s it for?”

I understood most of Garth’s answers, though my imagination ran a bit far with “morning star,” and I was flummoxed by the concept of a “pole arm.”

In addition to newfound knowledge in medieval weaponry, from the list I learned about some other terrifying monsters I might encounter and how to combat them. There was a mirror for use in fighting medusas, holy water to throw on undead—which weren’t living either, wolfsbane against not just werewolves but a whole family of were-creatures, garlic to repel a vampire, and stakes to drive through its heart.

I wanted to buy one each of those with my gold pieces, but Garth assured me I wouldn’t need them this time.

“What’s the difference between a ‘draft horse,’ a ‘light horse,’ and a ‘warhorse’?”

“You don’t need a horse. You’re going into a dungeon.” Garth pursed his lips again. “Look, all you need is armor, a missile weapon, and a melee weapon.”

“What’s a may-lay weapon?”

“It’s for hand-to-hand combat, like a sword.”

After more questions and not a little time, in which Garth’s impatience grew, I decided on plate mail armor and shield, which Garth said gave me a good “armor class,” a sword, bow and arrows, and rope, water skin, torches, tinder box, and a back pack to carry it all in.

I wrote these in a list on the sheet and subtracted the cost from one-fifty. With remaining funds, I added a lance to my armament.

“If I don’t get a helmet, I have enough money for a draft horse. I could be a knight on a horse with my lance.”

“A draft horse is for plowing fields and pulling carts.”

I could not be deterred. Garth relented. “Okay, spend your money on a horse, but you can’t take it into the dungeon—or a lance either!”

That settled, Garth explained a concept he called “alignment.” I understood there were good guys and bad guys, like when we used to play cops and robbers. I wanted to be a good guy, but Garth advised me to play a neutral character to start, and I didn’t argue.

“Okay,” Garth said, “you can think of a name later. You’re in a tavern…”

The next day, Garth’s neighbor came over. Jarrod was a tall, skinny kid. He wore glasses with a cloudy film that made it difficult to see his eyes. When he talked, it sounded like he was chewing a mouthful of rocks.

After our introduction, Jarrod pulled a folded sheet of ruled notebook paper from his back pocket. “This is my character,” he said around the rocks. He unfolded the paper and handed it to me. “He’s a sixth-level magic-user.”

At the top of the page, I saw “KAYTAR” written in block letters. There were penciled columns of words and numbers, which I didn’t understand, but “magic-user” was ringing in my ears. What a character is and what kind of magic one might use I did not know, but I would soon discover both.

We sat on the floor in Garth’s room. The pale blue book lay next to the denim bag, from which spilled dice on a tight-knit polyester carpet, the color of fern.

Garth had a two-pocket folder, like the ones we used in school. It was blue, and he peeked inside it during the game, keeping the contents hidden from view. He said, “This is my dungeon folder. I’m the dungeon master, and I describe the dungeon to you as you explore it. You’ll see how it works. Just watch.”

After some discussion, Garth and Jarrod picked up where they left off the previous game. I gleaned that Kaytar was in a dungeon, which was dark and dangerous. He explored corridors with vaulted ceilings, navigated intersections, passed under archways, and opened doors.

As Kaytar went, Garth described what he saw, and Jarrod said what Kaytar would do. Jarrod talked about his character in the third person: “Kaytar lights a torch,” “Kaytar goes right,” “Kaytar opens the door.”

Behind the doors were rooms that might have rotting leather sacks full of coins or gems hidden in them, or they might have a monster, like a minotaur or a gargoyle. Kaytar might, by searching the room, find the coins or gems, or he might be viscerated by the gargoyle.

There were also traps and pitfalls. When the ceiling didn’t fall on him or a poison dart come flying from a hole in the wall, Kaytar might fall through a trapdoor in the floor. Kaytar avoided the flying dart, but he didn’t notice the trapdoor and, so, was deposited in a lower level of the dungeon.

“You enter a high chamber,” said Garth. “Stairs go up on one side to a balcony that overlooks the room. There’s a man standing there, wearing long dark robes. He’s surprised. What do you do?”

Jarrod looked through cloudy glasses at Kaytar’s sheet. “Hey, can Kaytar use that scroll he found?”

“Yes. It’s a sixth-level spell.”

“Kaytar unrolls the scroll and casts disintegrate.”

“Okay, the wizard gets a saving throw.”

Jarrod bit his lip. Garth threw a dice on the dungeon folder. The three of us watched it roll to a stop.

“A five!” Garth said. “The robed man crumbles into a thousand tiny pieces. He was a thirteenth-level wizard!”

Jarrod beamed. Chewing rocks, he said, “That should give Kaytar enough experience points for seventh level.”

My best friend, whose name was Garth, told me the best way to learn to play the game he called “Dee-an-dee” was to watch first. “My next-door neighbor will come over tomorrow,” he said. “Now I want to show you the dice.”

We sat at a folding table in his room. He plopped a ragged denim bag on the linoleum tabletop, loosened the drawstrings, and dumped out a pile of dice.

As they clattered to a stop, I saw familiar white bone dice with dark pips, which must have come from a Yahtzee game, and clear red casino dice with white pips. There were big ones and small ones. Among them were dice of different colors. Blue, green, brown—the colors weren’t bright but drab, and they didn’t have pips but numbers.

The unfamiliar is often invisible. Under my eyes, there was something new in the world, and it took a moment for my consciousness to adapt. Jumbled up in the melee of plastic and pips and numbers were odd-shaped solids. These weren’t normal cube dice. Instead of squares, their faces were triangles and pentagons.

Garth said, “They’re polyhedrons.”

I picked one up. Holding it between thumb and forefinger, I turned it around. It was blue with black numbers. The corners and edges were worn and discolored, like a dingy sock. Each face was a pentagon.

“How do you roll it?”

“Like normal dice.”

“How do you know what number it is?”

“It’s the number on top.”

Rolling it in my palm, I couldn’t see any top. I dropped it on the table. One side showed a “3” flat up.

Garth reached for a dice. “This one’s different. It only has four sides.” He showed me a pyramid. “You have to toss it up and twirl it, like this.”

The dice spun in the air. He turned it around where it landed. “The numbers at the bottom of the sides are all the same. I rolled a four.”

He tapped the top point with a finger. “I call them caltrops. Don’t step on these.”

platonic body noun
variants: platonic solid
: any of the five regular geometrical solids comprising the simple tetrahedron, hexahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron

polyhedron noun
pronounced ˌpä-lē-hē-drən
plural polyhedrons or polyhedra ˌpä-​lē-hē-​drə
: a solid formed by plane faces

—Webster’s

A modern set of role-playing game dice consists of six polyhedrons. Each dice is used to generate random numbers from 1 to the number of faces—or sides—it has. In game parlance, they are known by this upper limit: d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20.

Five of them, the four-, six-, eight-, twelve-, and twenty-sided dice are platonic solids. Despite the name, Plato did not invent them, but the regular geometrical solids figure in his philosophy. In Timeaus, he associated each of them with a classical element: tetrahedron (d4), fire; cube (d6), earth; octahedron (d8), air; icosahedron (d20), water. The dodecahedron (d12) Plato associated with heavenly constellations.

The ten-sided dice (d10), the only one of the set not a platonic solid, was added in 1980. It is an irregular-faced decahedron called a pentagonal trapezohedron. It is used to generate decimal numbers, most commonly 1 to 10 and 1 to 100, the latter range by rolling two dice, one each for the tens and ones places.

When a d10 is not available, a d20 is rolled and the tens digit ignored. Early d20s were numbered from 0 to 9 twice, one series being marked with a dot or colored differently—as the numbers on Kevin’s d20 are colored red and blue. To make this dice perform its d20 function, it’s rolled with a d6. A 4 to 6 on the d6, adds ten to the roll.

In the summer of 1982, I was 13 years old. The year before, I had moved with my family to another town half a state away from my first best friend. A few months later, he moved away too, and the kids in his new neighborhood played D&D.

I went to visit him in June. I remember that I had just arrived when he held up a thin, pale blue book and said, “Man, you’ve got to play this game!”

You only ever have one first best friend. Mine introduced me to DUNGEONS & DRAGONS.