[troutman]

Originally Posted by Coys1882

Bought my first set of dice today - and a felt bag too. I once had pride - luckily I can't remember when that was.

The introduction of platonic solid dice, was one of the greatest innovations in gaming, and much of the credit has to go to Gary Gygax:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Gygax

Gygax later looked for innovative ways to generate random numbers, and he used not only common, six-sided dice, but dice of all five platonic solid shapes,[20] which he discovered in a school supply catalog.[10]

http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/news/2008/03/ff_gygax?currentPage=2

Gygax was fascinated by the way the rolling of dice affected — and enlivened — the game experience. "Random chance plays a huge part in everybody's life," he says. He learned this first hand in his job as an insurance underwriter, which was a game in itself. His work involved evaluating policies and calculating how much to charge in premiums based on salary, age, medical reports, and the potential for long-term disabilities. He did special risk underwriting as well, such as evaluating the payout for a Major League Baseball team that wanted to take out a policy on one of its players. "I wasn't popular in the home office because I wasn't chicken," he says. "I'm just a risk taker. I have gut instincts."

Gygax and a few of his buddies carried that DIY spirit even further, devising a game of their own around WWII tank combat. He was determined that his game would avoid the "goofy bell curve"that resulted from rolling a pair of six-sided dice (2s and 12s are rare, while 6s, 7s, and 8s are comparatively frequent). To achieve a more linear curve, he determined that players must pluck 1 of 20 numbered poker chips from a hat, so that there was an equal 5 percent probability of each outcome. Gygax later found the perfect replacement for this clunky system: In a school supply catalog, he discovered dice shaped like all of the Platonic solids, including the icosahedron: A 20-sided die.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice