Dice

Dice, the near-universal constant among all gamers. No matter the system, no matter the edition, we all use dice. (Aside from diceless gamers, of course... And those who use online random number generators... And LARPers, I suppose) I remember reading in a gaming magazine once that no matter how well or poorly the rest of the gaming industry is doing, dice sell at a steady rate.

This topic is all about dice and using them. How many do you have? What do you carry them in? Do you name them? Do you like using certain kinds for different characters or situations? Got any of those gemstone dice?

But with dice come our prayers to the Random Number Gods. No matter what a person's belief or lack therof may be, even if they are the hardest of hard atheists, they will pray to the Random Number God and believe in 'lucky' and 'unlucky' dice. Do you have any lucky dice? Any favoured rolling methods?

I find this topic to be...

-puts on sunglasses-

Dicey.

Anyway, I put my dice in a small pencil case along with pencil and eraser, which makes up my role-playing kit. Though I do have another bag of dice in their original dice-bag (I think).

I'm a sucker for unusual dice that rarely get used, but I like having because I can show people. My favourites are ones with an odd number of faces, like my D7.

I have quite a collection of those odd dice. I have: D3, D5, D7, D14, D16, D24, and a D30. Used to have one of those golf-ball like D100s, but it started to come apart a bit, so I ended up cracking it open to see what was inside. Pretty sure it's still around, and I could fix it with a bit of glue.

I also have a collection of 'wedge' dice, which are cylindrical in shape. Not all bad, though the overly large D20 is as hard to read as a D100, and will roll off the table if there's the slightest tilt on it.

I have that problem as well. I have a set of standard dice, but also some crystal dice. My crystal D20 often shifts if someone bumps the table, so I have to remember what number it was.

Yeah, I have a crystal dice set. D20 is stupid as hell but the d4 is quite good. Easier to read than the standard caltrop.

I also have a d24 shaped like a cube with a short pyramid stuck on each side.

And a golf ball. Couldn't resist buying one when I saw it.

Dice are certainly a gamer addiction way out of proportion to the quantity one actually needs.

I'm amused by the designs for D1 dice out there. Perfect for the OCD gamer who has to roll even if there is one and only one possible outcome ...

As Magic: The Gathering players, everyone in my group carries plenty of dice (and dice-like objects, more on them later in this post), but we only really use dice as actual random number generators when rolling to see who goes first. After that, their most common uses are as tokens (though I just print up a bunch of proxies when I make a deck that uses tokens) and counters.

I have a whole lot of "spindown" life counters from Magic Fat Packs (which contain 9 Booster Packs of cards from a specific set, among other goodies like the spindown). They are 20-sided, but they can't truly be called "dice". I think opposite sides have to add up to n+1, where n is the number of sides, to qualify as a "die", but please correct me if I'm wrong.

The "20" faces of the spindowns have the symbol of their set on them. It's like my spindowns are a chronicle of my history as a Magic player.

You can still call those dice, if they're what I'm thinking of. I had one for the longest time, and wondered why the numbers were arranged as such, why it was larger than my other D20s, and why the 20 had that symbol. Didn't know it was meant for a Magic life counter.

While it's traditional that 6-sided dice have opposites add up that way, I don't think it's essential to classification as a die.

For some reason, I used to be a little bit anal about having as many dice as possible look exactly the same. Now I don't give a rats ass, but I've still got a buttload of translucent orange dice.

I prefer regular Platonic solids with high-contrast colours. They're the easiest dice to read.

My DM has had to rule that dice need contrast. He hates it when you have to pick up the die and hold it up to the light and read it. (The living room we play in doesn't have great lighting)

I have a D-Total. The only die to require an instruction manual. It also looks REALLY fragile so besides the fact I need to refer to a manual to use it, I worry it'll shatter and explode.

edited 31st Dec '13 6:02:41 AM by CobraPrime

Are the bricks of colored dice that you can pick up in gaming stores relatively "true" in terms of consistently random rolling? I was eyeballing some yesterday but was concerned about the chance of getting some duds.

edited 31st Dec '13 6:27:04 AM by Willbyr

I'm one of those people who compulsively buy dice whenever I make a new character. I sometimes lose track of dice when the character gets retired/killed, so I have lots of dice just hanging around, too. Oh, and my sister bought me Chessex' Pound O' Dice for Christmas, so that's 16 ounces of randomizing fun that I haven't ever rolled yet (also, I admit to enjoying the process of sorting them by sides, plus a separate section for percentile d10s, way too much).

And that's not even accounting for the fact that I have multiple sets of backup dice. I have the orange-and-red set for when people forget their dice when they come over, the perfectly balanced set from ThinkGeek for when people really want fairness (though the numbers are unpainted, so that set is generally an "emergency only" set), the Death d10 (which has cool looking spiky bits that looks like it'll kill someone if you throw it at them), a huge brass d20 that's the size of a golf ball (though that usually just sits on the mantle, with the 20 facing up of course), and 3d30. I bought the first d30 because I played Button Men back in the day, but I can't for the life of me explain the other two.

At the moment, I have three sets in regular circulation. For the one game I'm currently a player in, I use a dark green/black marbled set with bright gold numbers, while my GM set is bright gold/white marbled with dark silver numbers. Meanwhile, I keep a marbled blue with silver numbers set as emergency backup, in case someone forgot their dice.

[quote]While it's traditional that 6-sided dice have opposites add up that way,[/quote] Most of my dice, regardless of the number of sides, also have this. Not all of them though, I know some of my d8 and d12 do not.

I have always been the least superstitious about my dice from anyone I've ever gamed with. I just roll them, and my collection of dice hasn't increased in around five years. I've got at least 5 of each size from d4 to d20, and a whole buttload of d10s from when I used to play Aberrant regularly. I don't freak out when other people touch my dice, and while I do sometime set out all my dice so that their highest numbers are showing, it's more from boredom and not OCD or "I have to make them lucky!" like I've known other gamers to do.

D10s don't either, because they go from 0-9.

Due to constant heating and cooling, it is actually possible that leaving your dice high-side up may increase their "luck" over a period of several years. Maybe. Said dice would also be disqualified by any even mildly suspicious GM, as they'd read as intentionally heated dice (floating high-number-up in a glass of water)

You have paranoid DM's O_o

Ah, yeah, touching other people's dice. I've never actually met anybody that takes that seriously. Though we have a couple of unlucky rollers in our group, and people have been bit by the bear a few times, for the most part we're not that paranoid about our dice.

I suppose the insanity you hear about in Knights of the Dinner Table is just that, insanity meant for comedy. Though I have read such posessiveness of dice in other manuals.

I have three sets of dice. Two are light bluegreen (I'm colorblind when it comes to light blue and light green so it's just one color for me). I bought them because I thought they were the same color, but apparently they aren't. Oh well. I promptly lost one of the d6s, so I went and got a nicer-looking set of ivory dice. I like to say they're cursed, but really, they just have a good sense of drama.

I've got a cool bronze colored set I bought just after christmas. I'm just starting out so I might get more.

originally I was gonna get a mix of the 3 metallic colors they had, but the shop owner told me that was kind of stupid. This was only after he had picked the individual ones out of the die display and realized what I was doing.

They've also got some jumbo-sized D20s there that I wan to get, just for fun. they're about baseball sized.

Oh man, I need one of those. It would nearly complete the essentials.

(As a nearly-blind person, I have a special fondness for large dice I can see without pickup up. I currenly have percentiles and a D6; I need, at the very least, a D20, with D4, 8, 12 optional.)

I have a full set of tiny metal dice about 5mm in diameter. I never use them, obviously.