You can do a lot with a couple of dice.

Sure, you look around for RPG dice and you’ll find sets of 7. The 5 Platonic solids and a couple of tens. Some sets have even more dice. Oddballs of all shapes and sizes. Maybe sets of ten tennies or 6 sixes, or… a dozen twelves?

However, so many games out there use the time honored bones. The 2d6 curve is quite useful if you take the time to learn how it works. In a pinch you can just raid the monopoly set to play Apocalypse World, Advanced Fighting Fantasy, or A Time of War.

Going back to those “couple of tens” found in the standard RPG set, you can use those to play any of the percentile based games out there. Unlike the 2d6 curve, Percentile dice offer the advantage of being intuitive in terms of understanding your chances. If you have a 45% chance of doing something, even the most numerophobic gamer can figure out that their chances are….45%

Far from being boring or passé, 2d6 and % dice let you do a whole lot with your imagination, a set of rules, and a couple of dice.