#RPGaday Topic 9: Favourite die/dice set

[Agemegos]

I'm doing RPG-a-day in August, as promoted by Dave Chapman (Autocratik). This is Day 9 of 31.



Favourite die/dice set

My favourite dice set is a percentile pair. Linear distributions alone allow a clear understanding of how hard or easy a task has become. And combinatoric distributions such as 3d6 and 4d3-4 get very coarse-grained near 50% where I most want fine adjustment: setting a difficulty of 45% on 3d6 is very fiddly.

I like one die to be marked in tens and the other in ones to avoid any possibility of confusion. I like them to be a warm yellow or yellowish-orange so that they stand out from clutter and other people's filthy dice. I like them clearly marked in black or dark blue or green. And I don't like transparent dice because they are sometimes hard to read. Apart from these practical and aesthetic considerations I have no attachment to any particular dice. I'm not sentimental that way, and I think that using "lucky" dice is cheating and would still be cheating even if they were truly supernatural and not weighted, burred, or otherwise physically biased.

Compulsively anecdotal, I will now meander off into accounts of two blokes I knew who were remarked upon for their luck in RPGs. Both used dark-coloured dice in which the numbers were not filled in; one fellow read "the die that stops rolling first" as tens, the other read "the die that ends up closest to me" as tens. Neither of them had similar luck in keeping friends, or holding down jobs for that matter.

[sir_pudding]

I like bigger dice. I prefer acrylic. I have a nice full set of smoky green and black 24mm dice and 24mm 3d6 in speckled green and grey for GURPS.

[johndallman]

I like metal or stone dice; my most-used dice are a set of three brass d6s, and the my dice bag also has smaller polyhedral sets in steel, brass and haematite. The bag is thick leather.

[Parody]

I have a set of red swirled dice that I've used since the 80s that were my favorite dice for a long time. I don't use them for adventuring anymore (I think I'm missing some of them) but the d6s are in with my Car Wars dice, and they love to set people on fire.

My current favorite dice are 3 d20s. One is gold with black lettering, one is black and blue (sort of a moonlit night look) with white lettering, and one is white and gold with black lettering. They're "campaign dice"; each represents one of my last three campaigns, and I bought one for each player and the GM in each campaign.

The dice I've most drooled over (figuratively) was one of the sets that Crystal Caste made for the Gen Con Charity Auction. They were made out of Wooly Mammoth ivory. (I loved elephants and wooly mammoths as a kid. :) I believe they sold for more than I paid for the entire convention trip + shopping that year.

[Phoenix_Dragon]

I've got a small collection of d6s that I've had for about two decades, maybe more. I can't actually remember where they came from; some board game that had ten or so of them. They're mid-sized red dice with rounded corners and shallow pits filled in white for pips.

Over the many years, I've lost some of them, but still have several. Three of them live at the base of my monitor, ready for GURPSing; the closest also serves as my "fiddly", something I can roll around between my fingers because I'm completely incapable of sitting still without fiddling with something, and as a result it no longer has any of the white in its pips.

And my players think they're evil, which makes me like them even more.

[Michael Cule]

I don't fetishize my dice. I have a bag full of the various dice I have accumulated through the years and I take out whatever I need for a particular game.

Sorry.

I'm not totally without dice related superstition though: I won't use green dice. Actor's tradition related to anything green being bad luck.

[RogerBW]

I have quite a lot of dice, but recently I've taken to getting a specific set for each campaign I run. For example, for Torg under GURPS I'm using 3d6 in Chessex Gemini Blue-Red to copy the red-and-blue of the original Torg die.

I have some Crystal Caste metal d6s which are very satisfying to roll, though the gold-ish coating is quite thin and tends to come off when I hold them with sweaty hands (I have unusually enthusiastic sweat so don't let this put you off them). I may pick up a set of the uncoated steel ones for just this reason; they'd be appropriate for the cyberpunk game I'm setting up.

I haven't yet found anything suitable for the WWII campaign, possibly because the obvious candidate has red, white and blue colours with a Union Flag on one face. I abhor dice with symbols replacing one of the faces. (Yes, even the lovely Ogre Designer's Edition dice.) This is because there's no consistency: sometimes the logo replaces the 1, sometimes the 6, so one has to check every time.

One of these days I'll pick up that extended percentile set I've seen, marked in powers of ten from 1,000 to 0.001 or something similar, just to be annoying.

[derendel]

My favorite set was one that I won. A set of Promethean the Created dice that I got for getting the second round of a Geist the Sineater tournament at Gencon a while back. I play a lot of World of Darkness and Promethean is one of my favorite lines.

[Rocket Man]

For years, I used a handful of red-and-white six-siders that I grabbed from an old Axis and Allies set with some black ones from a Bupkis game mixed in. This proved especially handy when I hit games like In Nomine where it mattered to be able to tell one die from the others!

In terms of appearance, I love the classic D&D mix of polygons. But for functionality, the bell curve of the 3d6 resonates with me. I keep a pencil box nearby with a lot of large, brightly colored d6's so they can be quickly and easily read during a game.

Nothing against d10's, though; I enjoyed the TSR Marvel Superheroes and the Mayfair DC Heroes for a long time, after all.

[simply Nathan]

I have a set of standard D&D-style polyhedrals in red with white numbers, a dark blue d4, and a whole bunch of extra d6.

My favorites, I think, are the smallest three d6 (two normal-looking white ones with black pips, one transparent purple with white numerals). I keep these with my LEGO Microfigures in a small tin just so I have some dice easily accessible for playing a GURPSlike dungeon crawl should the mood strike me.