Live and let dice.

Some people will know exactly what these are:

And they will probably have a guess why there is no twenty- or eight-sided dice in the set -- because those are probably still in the dice sets belonging to my old friends, decades after the fact.

These four dice were in my first set of dungeon dice, the basic set needed for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. To determine the results of actions in the game, a participant must have a four-sided die, a six, an eight, a ten, a twelve, and a twenty. (It's best to have two tens in case you have to roll a number between 1 and 100; one die is designated the tens and the other the ones. Or you could roll the same ten-sider twice.) I got these from a local toy store, which probably didn't know what the hell the kids were up to now but the older ones wanted these, plus the books for the games and lead figures to paint. The dice came with a red crayon, which was used to rub color into the numbers of the dice. Later in my career I went to the beloved Compleat Strategist on E. 33rd Street, which is still there and still carries a breathtaking array of games and gaming equipment.

There is an etiquette to dice in role-playing games. Messing with a man's personal set of dice is like messing with his car or his gun. Players get very attached to their dice, especially if they were used to make an epic lucky run in a well-remembered game. Then the player will revere the set of dice even if they let him down for weeks and get his or her favorite character killed. They were there for me in the Vault of the Unbegotten, by Crom! Gamers are probably more superstitious about dice than craps players are.

You might borrow a fellow player's dice if yours are on a cold streak, of course, and if you suddenly get a critical hit that turns the party's fortunes around in a desperate battle, you might even want to steal them. Enemies, they say, steal your money; friends steal your books. And your dice.

Once I finally understood what role-playing games are and how they worked, they became my favorite kind of games. I did not and don't much care for board games. In my house, playing a game meant either losing, which was no fun, or winning, and being beaten up for being "smug." (Smugness, I have found, is an easy characteristic to project on anyone who has just beaten you.) Role-playing games were cooperative, meaning the players were usually united in a quest, and no one else in my house was interested in them, which was another plus.

Of course, if you decided to go all Leeroy Jenkins at a delicate spot in the adventure and get the party wiped out, you might be threatened with bodily harm in real life.

I have a lot of affection for those summer afternoons spent rolling dice in parents' basements and rec rooms. I also have a bunch of other dice from other sets in a dice bag -- actually a repurposed velvet jewelry sack -- but the blue set above is always special; my first set. I haven't even played a D&D campaign in eons, but I still use them as randomizers when I can't decide which task on my list of tasks to do first.

Sometimes I tell people I'm a recovering geek, but I'm not sure I ever have recovered. The nerdiness went underground in my twenties but would pop out here and there. Maybe one day I'll start a campaign in the old folks' home. "Okay, players, this one's called 'The Secret Potion of the Senacots, or Questamucil.'"