I have a few, but mine are heavily eroded.

Is this the going rate?  
** expired/removed eBay auction **

Invincible Overlord wrote in Pinkies:The colors on my old school dice are quite varied, but I'm not aware of anyone collecting them by colour...

The elder dice—and btw I'm choosing my words to not sound like a hip hop artist talking about an R&B musician—were not varied in color!

The pinkie was special because you only got it if you ordered the percentile dice. You got all the others, including the white d20, if you ordered the polyhedra dice.

Perhaps the dice were different in your land—how you spell color has not escaped notice. But take a look at p. 12 of the Holmes rulebook. The pinkie was the tens die and the whitey was the ones die in a percentile roll.

The pink / white d20 percentile generators were also provided in some games like Boot Hill and Top Secret - at least the early printings.

I wrote a post about these dice here:
ZENOPUS ARCHIVES: TSR Percentile Dice in the 1970s

Dice history is something I wish were better known.

Who made the first d20 numbered 1 to 20 instead of 0 to 9 twice? This must have happened c. 1980.

Who ruined Platonic perfection and made the first d10? Also happened c. 1980. Why a pentagonal trapezohedron instead of a pentagonal bipyramid?

Who made the first d10 numbered 00 to 90. This is the die that replaced the pinkie.

The last question is a shill. Primary source in Dragon #156, April 1990, p. 73:

throwi wrote in Pinkies:Not to intentionally derail your thread here, but the advertisement above shows "Shade of the Sinking Plain" as a Gamescience "goodie" but was produced by ICE?  Co-produced by North Pole Publications?  Are they in some way affiliated with Gamescience?

~throwi

Probably a U.S. distributor or reseller. The Armory used to sell a lot of stuff they had not produced. Heck, even TSR, the Dungeon Hobby Shop, did.

grubbiv wrote in Pinkies:Dice history is something I wish were better known.

Who made the first d20 numbered 1 to 20 instead of 0 to 9 twice? This must have happened c. 1980.

...

Didn't Tim Kask give a brief history somewhere on how polyhedral dice were provided to TSR?

There are stories by Zocchi that both he and TSR initially ordered the dice from Creative Publications. TSR eventually ordered directly from the manufacturer in Hong Kong. Zocchi had his own molds made.

This statement from the Peterson post is interesting if true:

Intriguingly, the supplier, Creative Publications of California, only sold their 20-sider in a set with four other dice: one of each Platonic solid

So pinkies were always ordered direct from Hong Kong? Did TSR ask for a second run of the d20 mold in another color?

There is an interesting dragonsfoot post by Jim Ward on why TSR ran out of dice in 1980. He blames the problem on Kevin Blume, who he says designed the dice that appeared in the Moldvay set. However, Zocchi says this in a boardgamegeek.com interview:

T.S.R. was the first company to make a ten-sided shape and sell 7 piece dice sets. They were the first to provide a d-20 which read 1-20. While everyone else making dice changed their 0-9 twice twenty-sided dice molds, I made the mistake of putting a + sign on half of the digits on my 20-sided dice.  These were very slow sellers and many gamers didn't want to add 10 to the numbers which came up with the plus sign. After losing a large market share to those who had 1-20 numbered dice, I made a 1-20 shape also.

If we put the two together, K.B., who is usually described as a non-gamer and even a villain, is responsible for the d10 and the d20 numbered 1 to 20!

I think Zocchi is a bit mistaken. The dice sets he was thinking of were the 6 piece sets that came in the Moldvay box.

I have a single modern D10 that has a 10 instead of a 0, & was wondering how prevalent that is. No idea where it came from, as it was in my collection for a while before I noticed it. It's green with white numbers.

Re: your original post, Noble Knight had a bunch of '70s sealed TSR dice (set of 5) going for $12.50 each a few years ago, & I picked up a Holmes set with a sealed dice set for $10 not long ago.

Re: the dice in early Boot Hill or Top Secret, I've been told that these came with pinkies, but the catalog illustrations show a dark-red, 20-sided percentile die along with the white die. Were these just mock-ups for the photo, or an effect of color distortion in the photo, or did TSR sell red dice that quickly faded to pink? The latter would suggest that Kevin Blume was sourcing directly from the drow, which must have required all kinds of unholy pacts.

sauromatian wrote in Pinkies:I have a single modern D10 that has a 10 instead of a 0, & was wondering how prevalent that is. No idea where it came from, as it was in my collection for a while before I noticed it. It's green with white numbers.

Does it have this pattern?



If so, dicecollector.com may have one from the same mold in his collection, but he doesn't know who the manufacturer was.