Beholder King wrote:
Pair 2: d6 & d8 = All the faces are quadrangles.
Holds up an 8-sided die, examines it closely and wonders when BK goes shopping for dice.
And here I thought I was the only person who didn't know this:
The five original shapes used for polyhedral dice are the five Platonic Solids - if you found yourself in ancient Greece or Rome with your dice, a learned person would recognize the shapes, although it wouldn't have occurred to them to put numbers on most of them. (You'd revolutionize gambling...)
Anyway the groupings are: d6 and d8, d12 and d20 with d4 being the single die "pair."
A d6 has six-sides and eight vertices (points where 3 or more faces meet), while the d8 has eight sides and six vertices - so you can nest two dice inside each other in such a way that the vertices of one die will rest against the center of each face of the other; and you can alternate nesting them this way forever.
(In other words, if you start with a d6, and glue a triangle to each vertex of the die, you'll wind up with an octahedron (d8). If you then glue a square to each vertex of the octahedron, you end up with a cube (d6) again, and on and on...)
Its the same with d12 and d20... the d12 has twelve faces and twenty vertices, and the reverse is true of the d20.
The d4 is a special case... it has four faces and four vertices, so you can nest d4s inside of one another forever.
This pretty much occurred to be out of the blue yesterday, and given that I've been playing with the blasted pieces of plastic for three decades now, I felt like a first-class idiot for never noticing it before.
But since it turns out that this is not as obvious as I thought it should be, you guys deserve a prize for taking a crack at it... BK and LC., did you guys get any loot from this year's Free RPG day? I have some stuff left over that I can send you.