Saturday 24 August 2024

RPGaDAY 2024: Day 25: Desirable Dice

Day 25: Desirable Dice 

Dice? Yeah, I got dice.

Oh, you want more?

Some dice are better than others, and I remember the original polyhedral dice where you had to colour in the numbers with a Chinagraph pencil. The plastic was softer than modern dice, and over time D20s ended up round. Given long enough, even D4s ended up as round lumps of plastic. Only the venerable D12 kept it's shape, because they never really got used.
Modern dice may have the numbers already coloured, and they keep their shape, but not all dice are equal. There's a reason why the cheap dice sets available online are cheap.

As a gamer, I've lots more dice than I need, even taking into account the buckets of dice needed in wargames (D6s mostly, but D8s for Deadzone and D10s for Warlords of Erehwon and Fistful of Lead). 
I amassed a good few more recently with the Dungeons and Dragons Adventurer partwork, and some of these are nice. My favourite set is probably the metal set, though they are a bit small.

I've seen dice with miniature weapons cast inside them, dice with skulls instead of dots and even spiked dice (potentially painful), but there's only one set that I ever thought of as desirable.
Back last century, when magazines were actual physical things printed on real paper, a company used to advertise in Dragon Magazine. They made dice out of unusual materials, and as a geology student I wanted the set made from dinosaur fossil. Really wanted them. 
But they were expensive, and shipping from the US wasn't cheap either.
Now I'm more aware of the issues in the fossil business, and I'd avoid them, but back then they were the dog's pyjamas.

And to think I thought I'd have nothing to say about desirable dice, and I didn't even rant about dice apps.

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