Dice?

[Fred Brackin]

I have had many dice over my long career as a gamer and I have had various and probably only slightly odd ideas about choosing which ones to use.

For example as a GM I've used a set of black dice for hostile npcs, white dice for benevolent npcs and dice in my school colors to represent impersonal fate.

As a player I've used "mood" dice based on colors. For example I have a pair of oversized D20s (partially selected for ease of reading). One is jet black and used for Rogue and Ninja characters and dramatic wizards with "goth" fashion senses. It has a sky blue opposite number for my happier or at least less stealthy characters.

I have had Barbarians or heavyweight Fighters who used only black and blue dice. There was one fellow like that who settled on a set of purple D12s as a "bruise"' color.

My flame-hurilng Alchemist had a whole block of fire-colored d6s.

When I had a sort of "Space Wizard" who used Blue Crystal Energy in a system that used only D8s......well I ended up with a new set of blue crystal d8s.

Not so long ago late at night when my sales resistance was low I orderd a polyhedral set with little yellow ducks set in them. Why? Becsuse I am at heart a rather silly person and the thought of my latest barbarian slaying all of the GM's monsters using the power of little yellow ducks amused me.

At the last session (see the Memorable Quotes thread and the story of Shaggy the Camel) they had come and I set them up in order in front of my character sheet because you (of course!) are going to get all your ducks in a row. This worked better than any other organisational scheme I had used before as I reached for whichever die I needed based on position. I was very surpised at this.

So? What about you? do you do anything odd or amusing about choosing dice?

[Mark Skarr]

I'm fairly "abnormal" when it comes to dice. I have a brick of Chessex dice that I bought that I thought looked nice, and I use those. I've never felt the need to buy a lot of dice. All of the dice I own live in a 5¼" floppy disk box. I've never needed more than that.

We do have a set of the ugliest dice we could find, kept in a garish leopard-print bag that used to function as the "House Dice" for when gamers would forget their dice.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

I'm fairly "abnormal" when it comes to dice. I have a brick of Chessex dice that I bought that I thought looked nice, and I use those. I've never felt the need to buy a lot of dice. All of the dice I own live in a 5¼" floppy disk box. I've never needed more than that.

I'm the same on all counts, except I use the classic Crown Royal bag. I play almost exclusively GURPS, so my Chessex brick of speckle-blue d6s gets by far the most attention.

[whswhs]

I have three d6 that are a light pink with a sort of mottling, very pretty. I use them for running GURPS campaigns. I also have two more that are a light blue, which I use for Big Eyes Small Mouth campaigns, though I haven't run one of those in quite a few years.

I have two bags of FUDGE dice of various colors; I picked out a matched set or two when I'm about to start a session of my current FUDGE campaign. I used to let my players pick sets they liked, but since I'm in Lawrence and they're in the San Diego and Seattle areas now, that doesn't work any more; they have to roll their own . . .

[johndallman]

I had a period of designing lots of dice and getting them made by Chessex. This resulted in campaign-specific, and indeed character-specific dice at times. Photos here.

[Fred Brackin]

Oh, if anyone else wants their own ducks they appeart to still be availale.

https://viridiangaming.com/collectio...ks-given-23777

If you follow the links on that page you'll find a bewildering variety of dice. Inclusions appear to be a specialty. You can also have dice with skulls, fish, dinosaurs, flowers and even little yelow ducks in Santa hats.

[Anaraxes]

When I first started with TTRPGs, I raided my wargames (Avalon Hill, SPI, those old grognard ones) along with Risk for d6's, to go along with the TSR Basic Set dice in my Crown Royal bag that I got from an uncle. (The d12 has somehow gone missing, but the rest are all there, in the same bag.) I always liked the slightly smaller form factor of the AH d6s, which if nothing else came in handy when playing Hero System. Also took the d100 set from my Rolemaster game (two d20s marked with double 0-9s; d10s hadn't been invented yet). Added a couple of other polyhedral sets after a few years when "high impact" dice became a thing. And still use those.

Wound up with a few sets of FUDGE dice when we did a FATE game. Two sets of Genesys dice for Star Wars. Recently a whole set of d10s for The Dark Eye. Various sets of d6, mostly from SJG when they do something I like or as addons for Kickstarters. But none of those really made in into the CR bag to get used.

One really handy non-dice accessory I bought was the disks from an Othello game (which game I bought for the purpose, as the entire game is cheaper than a set of replacement disks; go figure). They come in handy as tokens for karma/fate/hero/advantage/focus points in whatever game you might be playing, with the two-color flippable nature being particularly good for some of those rules. (Anything where player use turns a point in the poool to GM use, or you need to represent Light Side/Dark Side or good/bad karma benefits.) Also have some poker chips which more often get used for RPGs than for poker, but I find that the Othello tokens are smaller and handier at the table.

[ericthered]

I bought "pound of dice" back in college and I'm still using it. it cost about $17 for about 100 dice, maybe 60% of which are white or beige and the last 40% are an array of colors, with some size variation. Getting matching sets of three is easy. Matching sets of six, which I use for other games, is a bit trickier.

For the last five year though, I've been using digital rollers. My most common options are discords "Dice Maiden", dicelog.com, rolz.org, and inspiration pad pro.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Added a couple of other polyhedral sets after a few years when "high impact" dice became a thing. And still use those.

.

My college roomie who started all this had some dice that obviously weren't "high impact". They'd been rolled round in just a few years.

Ive gotten used to D20s that are actually numbered 1-20 but back in the day they were only done 1-10 twice and we used model paint in 2 different colors and you had to call one color "high" when you rolled. There were proceedures where you rolled a d6 to determine "high" or "low" also.

D10s in general and D10s numbered 00-90 still look odd to me.

But yes, my Risk set from back int he day probably doesn't have any dice in it now but dice used to be common additions to boxed sets and I got up quite a collection that way.

I went through a period when all my d6s were the smaller 12mm. I could read pipped d6s of thhat size when "numbered" d6s needed to be at least 16mm. I still have 2 velvet dice bags. A red one for D6s and a blue one for polyhedra.

[Rupert]

For many years I used a set I bought in a local bookstore (the only place in town you could get rpgs and related stuff). I've no idea of the manufacturer, but they were bought in the early 80s and in thirty years the only wear they've got is needing the paint in the numbers refreshing.

A bit more recently I started using the red and blue d20 I got in the Torg boxed set.

These days for GURPS I use a collection of 15 or 16mm d6s from random sources. Usually I have nine on hand, three red, three white, and three blue, thus allowing easy rolling of three skills checks at a time (useful for quickly resolving multiple NPC actions, etc.).