This set of cheap retro dice takes me back to a not-so-great TTRPG experience
Name: Dungeons & Dragons Retro Holmes Replica 50th Anniversary Dice Collection
Description: This is a nearly standard-size set of 5 sharp edge plastic dice. The set contains: d4, d6, d8, d12, d20. No d10 or d%. The dice are each a different color (d20: white, d12: blue, d8: green, d6: red, and d4 yellow) The dice are not inked and the set came with a black crayon for coloring in the engraved numbers. The Font carved into these dice is mixture of very slightly different fonts. I couldn’t identify a single font that had the following characteristics:
A knee on the front of the 2
A straight stem on the 6 and the 9
An 8 with a wider bottom like a snowman
A slanted flag on the top of the 1
Curled ends on the 3
Futura Bold, Frutiger, Scandia, and Aeroport each had some of the digits correct except for the 8. I had trouble finding a font with a fat-bottomed 8. Bernhard Gothic SG was the only font I found in my short search that had an 8 with a larger bottom circle.
Size:
d20: (Face->Face) 20.43 mm (Point->Point) 25.35 mm
Where did they come from: Barnes & Noble in Kansas City, MO.
How much did they cost: $20
Material / color: Plastic, Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, White
Quality: Pretty good / clean for plastic dice.
Readability: Not great when you buy them but after you color in the digits with the crayon, they’re pretty good.
Value: They’re a good value and for me they are very nostalgic.
Overall Rating: 8/10 for nostalgia reasons.
Attempts needed to roll a natural 20: 4
Fifty d20 rolls: 2, 18, 13, 18, 9, 2, 3, 2, 10, 11, 12, 16, 5, 1, 15, 15, 8, 6, 2, 16, 5, 7, 16, 18, 18, 8, 8, 12, 14, 16, 17, 5, 6, 17, 1, 15, 19, 1, 13, 5, 18, 3, 1, 8, 13, 9, 14, 4, 15, 11
Mean: 10.02
Median: 10.5
Mode: 18
4d6 drop 1 stat block: 8, 16, 13, 17, 17, 16 (87 total !!!!) A Level-headed human Monk from a Young Offenders institute who never turns the other cheek
For reference: the Standard Array method totals to: 72 and the Point Buy method totals to: 69.
20th level Monk still attacking that Stone Giant (CR7) with maxed DEX and WIS, Monk weapon and fists both deal 1d12 (martial Arts Die) damage.
Monk weapon attack: 6 + 11 = 17 HIT! 1d12 + 5 = 12 damage
Stunning Strike: Giant’s CON save: 18 + 5 = 23: Succeeds!
Bonus Action: Flurry of blows:
first blow: 7 + 11 = 18 HIT! 1d12 + 5 = 9 damage
Stunning Strike attempt again: Giant’s CON save: 10 + 5 = 15: Fails, Stunned!
Second blow (at advantage): 16 + 11 = 27 HIT! 1d12 + 5 = 11 damage
Second Monk weapon attack (at advantage): 18 + 11 = 29 HIT! 1d12 + 5 = 17 damage
Total: 49 damage and the Stone Giant is stunned until the end of the Monk’s next turn.
(This is another excuse for rolling dice)
Random Tables rolls: (using 2d8 since there is no d10 or d% in this set):
Enemy Last Words: 78 – Stares pitifully at one of the party members and says “But, I did this all for you!”
Things Demons / Devils ask for in their contracts: 58 – The character gets the halfling lucky trait but for a roll of 20 instead of 1. The fiend is siphoning their luck for unknown reasons.
(I’m getting these random tables at: https://d100tables.com by the way
Final Thoughts: Boy do I have some thoughts…
My history with TTRPGs started when I was in middle school. I went over to a neighbor’s (“Billy”) house. Billy was a year older than me and much more mature. He was into D&D and said that he played, although I never saw evidence of this. Billy had all the books and accessories but the only people I ever heard of him playing D&D with were me and another neighborhood kid: Chris.
Having only ever played board games to that point, it was very interesting to play this new kind of game with seemingly no boundaries and rules that we seemed to make up as we went. This game that required oddly shaped dice that didn’t just have 6 sides! There was zero role-playing in our game though. It was just a dungeon crawl and lots of: “I open the door with my sword drawn…” “You see a black dragon…” seemingly over and over. I’m sure there were other monsters but as a DM, Billy sure liked feeding us black dragons.
We played for several days over one summer when we could all get together and eventually Billy started leveling up our characters very rapidly as Chris and I were killing these black dragons and other monsters with a single swing of our two-handed swords. We didn’t know any better and went along with it. While we were adventuring, rather than having us roll initiative (was initiative even a thing in 1st edition D&D?), the first to attack was which ever of us (Chris or I) said: “I’ll attack it with my two-handed sword” first. Eventually Billy leveled Chris and I up to 20th? 30th? level each as we cleaved our way through this odd underground dungeon just chock full of small rooms with black dragons living in them. No hoards of gold/treasure, just tons of XP for our two heroes.
At this point Billy gave Chris and I his copy of Dieties & Demigods book to look through so that we could pick a god that we were going to turn into. The goal being that we would fight each other PvP. Billy had already picked Odin who was the most powerful of the gods in his book. Since Billy owned the book, he knew which one he was going to pick well ahead of time. I remember Chris picking Thor and I went a different route and picked Kali the Black Earth Monster. I saw that Kali had 8 arms and thus 8 attacks, I figured I’d have a chance to overwhelm them with a flurry of 8 strikes every round. It turned out that I’d misread the book and it she was actually named: Kali the Black Earth Mother. This gave Billy and Chris reason to laugh at me for a few minutes because I picked a female deity. It was the 80s and the inherent homophobia they had just made my choice too funny to pass up the chance to laugh at and continue to tease me about later.
Our game quickly devolved into Billy trying to lord over Chris and I fighting each other PvP as gods. When one of us would start to do well, Billy would punish us with some hastily made up rule to let the fights drag on longer. We wanted to go back to dungeon delving but instead we had to be Billy’s puppets and keep fighting each other. The loser had his character sheet ripped up. I don’t remember who won (we all kind of lost in my opinion) or how much longer it went on but we didn’t play any more D&D with Billy after that.
This left a very sour taste in my mouth for D&D. I bad-mouthed D&D whenever someone mentioned it, and resolved that I’d never play that stupid game again. Secretly I still loved looking through the books and modules at the one store in town that sold D&D products. I loved the artwork, the detail of the dungeons on grid paper, and the monster descriptions / stat blocks.
I also loved the dice. The local “five and dime” store near me sold dice. They had a few different types of dice but tons of different colors. I was drawn to the tinted see-through acrylic dice, as these were the coolest dice at the time. My weekly allowance wasn’t much so I would try to save up and buy one die at a time when I had enough money. I eventually bought maybe a set of 6 dice which were all tinted acrylic but in different colors. I don’t know if I wanted a set of dice in all different colors or if I just started buying them and couldn’t find matching colored dice the next time I went back to the store. The dice also didn’t come pre-inked back then that I remember. At least not the ones that I was getting. You had to use a crayon to mark the numbers yourself and would have to re-apply with the crayon as the bits of wax would chip out of the number grooves.
Fastforward to 2020 and the pandemic. Some friends started a D&D campaign for their kids who really wanted to play and asked me repeatedly to join with one of my kids. I agreed eventually and figured I’d just give it minimum effort and join in with the most basic character (Dragonborn Fighter) and play a little bit but mostly stay out of everyone’s way. It turned out that playing D&D again unlocked a deep sense of enjoyment of TTRPGs that I’d pushed down for a few decades. I was quickly hooked and I looked forward to playing with them every weekend.
Also dice! Oh the dice. There are so many dice options now and with a significantly bigger weekly allowance as an adult I unleashed my inner Dice Goblin. Being so dice-poor as a kid definitely feeds into my desire for dice now. I love to look at them, to roll them, and hold them. They’re also a symbol to remind me that I made it out of my shitty childhood… Going from scraping together allowance money to buy a single die at a time to now being able to afford really REALLY nice full sets of dice.
Seeing this set of retro D&D dice in a bookstore on a trip to Kansas City just triggered a bit of nostalgia you could say. I don’t particularly like the dice but I had to get them. They unlocked some memories and feelings I guess.
So, The dice. These dice I’m reviewing are very light and made of very cheap plastic. The sizing of each die is odd with the d8, d6, & d4 being over-sized which makes the d12 and d20 feel undersized. It’s also really strange to have a set with only 5 dice. I think that’s the oddest part for me. These dice are very hard to read without the numbers colored in. Much easier to read the one I stared to color. I think I’ll try to paint the numbers and do the thing where I color the high number of each die a different color. I kind of like that in a set of dice.
My kids are all too old for crayons so we don’t have any in the house any more. I could borrow a few from a neighbor across the street but I don’t miss that really, crayons were always such a mess to deal with when you’re trying to scrape the wax into the grooves on the die and wipe away any that chips out, then having to re-wax the numbers regularly. I hope painting works better.
The box that these came in says that they are: “retro Holmes replica” dice. I had to look this up and found out that it’s in reference to J. Eric Holmes who wrote the first edition rulebook for D&D based on Gygax/Arneson’s original work. The art on the front of the box that these dice came in is the wizard & red dragon from the original 1977 D&D basic set box cover. What I don’t understand is how in the hell is the wizard supposed to walk around and keep that dunce-cap style hat on? You can’t run from monsters in a dungeon with a hat like that! You’d have to hold it with your non-wand hand.
The weighting on these dice is probably terrible. I’ll be interested to see how they do in my weekly game next time I’m there. In fact, I’m going to bring only these dice to the game that week and see what happens. The 50 roll test of the d20 was dead center with a median of 10.02, so maybe it’s balanced.
Wow. I didn’t think I had that much to say about these dice but I guess I did. These take me back to some bad memories of my beginnings with D&D. Billy had an awful temper and actually ended up bullying me for several years while we were both in high school which was frankly godawful. It’s one more reason I don’t like to go back to the area where I spent my childhood.
I don’t know if I’d recommend these dice to anyone as they’re not fancy, heavy, intricate, or beautiful. They didn’t need to be any of those things for me to buy them though. Just the memories that they invoked were enough.
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