RPGaDay Day 9 – What are my favourite dice

RPGaDay prompt 9 is “Favourite DICE”. I’m a bit of a sucker for sets of funky dice, and if you’re reading this, I imagine you are, too. And I have just received my new FlipDice from the FlipDice Kickstarter, which is what I have been waiting for before writing this post. But to pick a single favourite set? I just can’t.

Before we go any further, let me clarify I am only interested in physical dice. D&D Beyond keeps offering me perks of digital dice and frames, and I really don’t see the attraction – where and why would I be rolling those? When I’m playing online (which hasn’t been for a while) I use FoundryVTT, which has dice built in. And when I playing IRL, how can tapping a screen compare with the joy of picking up one or a handful of real dice, maybe blowing on them for luck, and then scattering them across the table?

Early dice

I have been playing since the 80s, and in that time I have acquired a lot of dice, as you can see in the header. But there are a few sets which I am particularly fond of in different ways.

Let’s start at the beginning, with my very first set. Not particularly prepossessing – in fact, they’re the cheapest-looking dice I own. And I even had to colour in the numbers myself with a crayon which came in the box. But they have history. They were in the box with my very first Menzter Basic Rules Dungeons and Dragons red box set. And that gives them cachet and sentimental value.

Moving on from that, I acquired various additional dice in ones and twos from the randoms box in a hobby shop in Elgin, and as you can see, I particularly stocked up on d6s. Why? Fireball and Lightning Bolt from the Expert set, available from level 5. These did 1d6 damage per level of the spellcaster, so once our characters started getting into the teens, this required a very satisfying handful of dice. The Companion Set introduced a limit of 20 dice for the damage of any spell, but although we approached this limit we never actually got a character into the twenties so it never affected us.

I was also given these in a box labelled “weighted dice”. They certainly are weighty. I think they’re solid brass. However, although they are weighted in the physical sense, I have tried rolling them many times, and I believe they are fair. I wouldn’t take them along to the games shop for general use, but they’re quite cool.

More recent acquisitions

Now here are some clever dice. True d% without being so spherical they roll for miles. I came across these in a shop in Austin when looking for souvenirs for the family on a work trip. They are a small d10 inside a larger transparent d10, so I read the outer d10 as the tens and the inner one as the digits. So you can see 51, 24 and 75 in the top three.

Getting more recent now – I saw these and had to put them on my Christmas list. They are rather gorgeous, and I use this set all the time. Hammered metallic reddish purple with golden edges and numbers.

And finally my newest additions are very clever, and are what I have been waiting for to write this post. Tanner Yarro’s patented FlipDice, which arrived a couple of weeks ago. Dice you flip like a coin but read like a dice. They have an inner channel and a ball which rattles around inside then lands at one of the numbers. They look gorgeous and are very well packaged as “Pieces of Fate”. Everyone should have at least one. Fuller review to follow.

And then there are other more normal acrylic dice which I have acquired since restarting D&D in 2017 – still beautiful, if not as distinctive or unusual as the dice highlighted above.

So with that, here’s (almost) my full collection of regular numbered polyhedra – as you can see, two jars completely stuffed full.

What do I use on a day-to-day basis? Usually the purple and gold metal set and the newer ones, plus the original blue ones – there’s really only space for one jar in my kit bag heading out to the session. But it’s very satisfying knowing I have the others in a draconic hording way.