Dungeons and Dragons only uses its iconic, strangely shaped polyhedral dice because co-creator Gary Gygax stumbled across them in an educational catalog meant for school math teachers in the early 1970s.

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Dungeons and Dragons only uses its iconic, strangely shaped polyhedral dice because co-creator Gary Gygax stumbled across them in an educational catalog meant for school math teachers in the early 1970s. Finding standard six-sided dice far too limiting for his incredibly nerdy and complex combat algorithms, he ordered these obscure plastic shapes to calculate weapon damage and saving throws with far more mathematical variety. Early players couldn't even buy the dice in standard stores, forcing them to use a set of numbered chits drawn from a cup, which sounds like the absolute saddest way to slay a dragon. Today, modern tabletop gamers possess a downright pathological obsession with buying hundreds of these brightly colored math rocks, proving that Gygax successfully commodified geometric shapes for an entire generation of nerds