At work, I mentioned my first dice I ever had were the “wrong color” because the Basic D&D set I had, had a chit card, instead of dice. I cut up the card and put them in Silo cups labeled with the die roll.

This got me down a rabbit hole on why they were they were called Holmes dice, why they were the wrong color, and the deal with chits. I found out that it was called Holmes because J Eric Holmes was tasked with slimming down OD&D rules for this set and my copy included chits because of this article explaining why.

(Note that there were two errors in the article, even though it is recounted by Jim Ward himself. First, I’m pretty sure the print runs back then were about 10,000 copies in size, not 100,000. Second, he’s off by one year as this occurred in 1979-1980, not after 1980. I’m sure of the second, because I received my Basic D&D set for Christmas in 1979 and it didn’t have “dice and a crayon.”)

So, even though I have most of my first dice set (wrong color, different manufacturer, missing 6-sider since it didn’t come with it), I decided to get a replica Holmes set that I saw on sale on Amazon which came out last year for the 50th anniversary (of D&D).

While I understood that the replica would have much better plastic than the nylon (or whatever) in the original set, I was actually disappointed in the set because of two deal-killers in my mind. First, the 20-sider die is numbered 1-20 instead of 0-9 twice. The 4-sided die had the numbers on the top facing outward instead of on the edges facing inward.

Oh well, as luck would have it, I’m cleaning up my garage which is full of my stuff from my old storage unit and I ran across my Gamma World box set which has a set of Holmes dice in it. There was an extra 20-sider in there but it was missing the 4-sider. Gamma World is odd because later TSR box sets used a percentile system (Boot Hill, Top Secret, and Gang Busters) and game with 2 10 siders in different colors (Later D&D’s came with monocular dice and a crayon.) This is because Gamma World is based on Metamorphosis Alpha, the first SciFi RPG. It’s possible I lost the 4-sider, but more likely — because I don’t remember owning a yellow 4-sider, only a red one — TSR didn’t include a 4-sider in order to include an extra 20-sider for percentile rolls.

In any case, since I’m not going to use these dice anyway, I decided to take the “modern inspired” set out and store them separately and put the 4 actual Holmes dice I do own in there.

You can see somewhere after failing to crayon-in the 6-sider I resorted to inking in the numbers. Good times!

In case you were wondering, you would roll the d20 along with a d6. If you rolled a 4-6 you would add 10 to your d20 roll. I colored in half of my extra d20 in my gamma world set which helped me identify it for percentile rolls as well as make it so I didn’t need to roll a d6.