"The D30" Topic

All of the above.

As I was a game retailer durning the time the D30 came onto the market I can tell you we sold a bunch of them. How they were used was not a real concern, the customers wanted them and that was what mattered.

Excuse me? I was there for the 1990's, and I remember no such excitement--well, anywhere. Sure you can sell a few because they were new and gamers are dice junkies. Because you can make something doesn't mean it's got a purpose.

I second Fitzovich. But I asked my customers what they were using them for, and they all just wanted them for the sake of having them.

I still have my D30

I use mine in my D&D games, as the DM. I don't use them often, but when I need to randomly determine what day of a month an event occurs, I use it.

I also have some d24's. I use these for determining which hour of the day a random event takes place. For example, if the PC's are rendered unconscious, I roll the d24 to see what time they wake up. Again, I don't use them often, but I do occasionally use them.

The OOP French boardgame, Formula De', used a d30 for determining how many spaces a Formula 1 race car moved each turn, when it was in 6th gear. The d30 was marked 21-30, rather than 1-30. That game used various polyhedra dice to generate how many spaces a car moved, in each of six gears. Each die was marked in numbers different than the number of faces, of course. The d4, for example, was marked 1-2, for 1st gear.

Each gear had a different movement range, which often spanned more than six spaces, covering gears one through six. It was a very smart application of polyhedra dice, IMO. But they were not standard polyhedra dice, either. I believe their successor racing game, Formula D, uses the same polyhedra dice scheme for speed in different gears, as well. Cheers!

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And yes I still have mine.

I've got one, bought in the late '00s or early '10s, but I've never used it for anything.

In practice, there's very few situations were it makes more sense to use a d30 than a d20 (which "everybody" already has) or a d100 (trivially simulated by two d10s, also possessed by "everybody"), so designers have sensibly enough largely stayed away from them.