Gamer’s Dice

So I recently ordered a pretty big amount of dice from The Dice Shop Online, mostly thanks to a long video from the Spoony One about dice (link), which prompted me to take a look at the current dice I’ve got in my possession and think about what I’d want to do with all of them. I know that, right now, I’ve got about eight full polyhedral sets in use (more or less, keep reading for the explanation about that), with six or seven sets ‘in reserve’ and one bag that has collected most of the d10 dice for White Wolf-style games that require lots and lots of d10s.

Following below I should place a picture I’ve taken recently, which contains all of the dice I’ve got, with their respective containers (which I always find to be just as important). Without containers, after all, dice have the tendency to get terribly lost, which is a gosh-darn waste in my eyes.



Click to enlarge

 

If I don’t go by those in some kind of system, I’m pretty sure I’m going to forget one of the sets, so let’s start with the top left and work to the right, shall we? Note: for some reason, Blogger rotated the picture 90 degrees to the left, so bear with me and work with the little descriptions to actually understand this...

So, we’ve got the black set of six, on top of the grey Sony bag. That dice set was included with the Red Box and is, quite interestingly, used solely for Nolan the elf rogue and his adversaries up until now. This little set has shown itself to have quite the enmity for me, considering the fact that I couldn’t hit the goblins if I wanted to if it hadn’t been for Nolan being an elf and getting a re-roll once per encounter, but the goblins were quite capable of rolling twenties one after the other. Thank goodness for them being minions.
The d10 of this set is interesting in a way that I haven’t seen very often. As people who have ever studied a d10 know, it runs from 1 to 0, so two d10’s can be properly combined in order to get a d100 and get some real numbers going down. This one runs from 1 to 10, though, making it harder to combine, but making more sense when it’s the only d10 in the set and making it very compatible with Savage Worlds games, which is why I’ll probably add a second d6 to that set when the time is right in order to run Savage Worlds properly.
The bag they’re in is, quite frankly, an example of what you’re going to read quite often. It’s a felt bag that came with a set of earbuds that served me for quite long, until one of them failed. However, I don’t really like using that kind of bags with earbuds (because untangling them every time is so much more interesting), so these kinds of bags become unused and, when I find them back again, start getting re-purposed for dice holding. In this case, it’s a rather small bag that’s really good for about one set, maybe with a few extra’s if they’re really necessary. So, all things considered, it’s an excellent bag for a travel-set. However, for that I’ve got…

The second bag, which contains both a grey and a sparkly blue set. That’s two complete sets that I really try to always carry around with me, just in case I forget to pack the dice I wanted to take, and I have a set to fall back on. They’re both sets that have ‘failed’ me before, though, the grey set being used for a Pirate Paladin of Kord that was played in The Hague and lasted for about three sessions of absolutely atrocious rolling, and the blue set being used for an Avenger of the Good gods who got killed by a Paladin of Zarus that he had previously cooperated with and subsequently fell all the way back down to the realms of chaos. Neither set really brought me much success.
They do get the honour of sitting in my spanking, brand new chain-mail bag that I’ve recently ordered from E-Bay, though. It’s pretty hefty, but it looks pretty damn awesome, too, but the most important aspect, really, is that it’s probably sturdy enough to withstand quite a bit of punishment before probably giving up and raining my dice down.

The two d10’s on the tiny blue bag are the Dark Heresy set I’m keeping aside from the others. They’re pretty good at rolling high, which is absolutely terrible in Dark Heresy, so you might say that these dice have got it in for me even more than the rest, considering the deadliness of the game system, and they’ve done an excellent job of making me fail at tasks and killing people up until now.
The blue bag is actually a re-purposed gift bag I got from my girlfriend containing a necklace. After taking the necklace out, I actually didn’t really have a purpose for it, so I took it up to myself to give it a new goal in life and keep my little set of two dice.

The giant set right next to the two little d10’s is my White Wolf d10 set, which I originally built by taking all the d10’s of my original polyhedral sets and, later on, expanding it by buying an amount of single dice to make sure that I could play Exalted with it without re-rolling absurd amounts of the dice. Too bad our Exalted game lasted for about one session before falling apart, which was quite a shame.

The bag was actually made for me by request, and is filled quite well (the dice are just about to lay flat when spread around completely). It’s really made with some spare piece of fabric and a couple of shoelaces, but it really fits the bill quite well and is sturdy as heck.

The fourth, green set, in the little box, is a special little set for me. It was originally bought to form the dice for an elf ranger I was going to play in a cute little introductory campaign, but it didn’t take long until I noticed that these dice appeared to roll higher for me than others. They were my ‘lucky’ dice, and since then, I’ve kept them behind for that moment that my characters would need a little moor oomph.
The box is actually just an old cufflink box that I’m keeping shut with a little rubber band, but it feels right to give this set a little special container that I can snap open to grab the dice when necessary. It’s also exactly big enough to keep one set in comfortably, so the dice don’t klonk together too much during transport.

The set next to that, on the brownish bag, is a little special as well, but that’s just because those are my non-regular dice. Right now it consists of a purple d30, which I originally mistook for a hilariously-oversized d20 when I was just starting out and had just learned about polyhedrals, and three character builder dice. The d6 has chaotic evil, evil, neutral, good, lawful good, and roll again on it, deciding on the character’s morale, one of the d8’s has eight different DnD character classes on it, while the other one has eight different character races on it. It’s geared entirely to fourth edition (or the alignment die would’ve been a d10 to allow for the full alignment spectrum), but it fits the bill if I need to make a new character and don’t really know what to roll with.
The bag has a Sennheiser logo on it, which could be right, because I recently had to replace a set of Sennheiser earbuds. It probably came from that little set, and has worked quite well for me up until now. It actually held my travel set, until my chain mail bag came in.

Down one row, all the way to the left, is a giant set of green dice on a cream bag. I originally bought the dice because of the box it came in, which I needed to hold a particularly large miniature I was going to gift to one of my friends. It was slightly too large for the usual containers dice come in, so these came just at the right moment. I’ve used them only once, so far, though, and they didn’t exactly work out that time. Gave me a lot of low numbers on pretty crucial rolls, though I managed to drag myself out by the skin of my teeth.
The bag was actually included with my first-ever MP3-player, a Creative machine that served me quite well for over five years before, sadly, breaking down and having to be replaced. The bag was about the only one large enough to actually hold the comically oversized dice, so it was a natural choice for the dice.

The following set is a little special to me, being built specifically to accommodate my first ever DnD character, Nick Basel, the cleric of Avandra. There are three d20’s, one for Initiative, one for Skill Checks, and one for Attack Rolls. The one d8 is needed for roughly half his damaging powers and the one d10 is needed for his melee attacks with the Morning Star. The lonely d6 is for the other half of the damaging powers, and the double d6 is for his Healing Word power, which decides on the amount of extra health the power heals. The lonely d6 is actually an artefact from my very first polyhedral set and is one of three dice from that set that is actually still in use (the other two are the d10’s in the white bag I mentioned before).
The bag, I’m actually very disappointed in. It’s a felt bag with a red lining on the inside, but the bag is of a terribly low quality and the ropes holding it closed are unable to properly do so without tying a knot in it, which is a shame.

Almost there, the two red sets on the beige bag are actually used for wizard-like characters who, basically, are built to attack large amounts of enemies and thus benefit from the 2d20 die I’ve got down there, so that I can attack twice as much targets at once. These sets are… Rather undistinguished, with the two biggest points being the abovementioned 2d20 and the fact that the d10’s of the darker set are actually the dice I use for Dark Heresy, so that’s a thing.
The bag is, just like the one above, a bit of a disappointment. It didn’t take long for the ends of the ropes to start splitting and the image printed on the bag to wear down, so I’m a bit hesitant to actually keep using the bag. It’ll have to do for what it’s supposed to do, though.

The last bag is the large, blue bag that is absolutely littered with different coloured dice that don’t really seem to have any connection. That’s okay, because there’s really only one thing that’s keeping these dice together: they’re the rest. Everything that I once used, but opted not to use anymore, and was placed in this bag. It was once called – affectionately – the ‘fuck-off bag’, though I don’t think that’s the right name for it anymore. Right now, it’s really a bag I’m keeping around just in case. In case I need some extra dice, though that’s hardly ever an issue, or in case someone forgot theirs and they can take a grab. There’s only one really complete set in there, though, and that’s the precision set with the un-inked numerals. I’m thinking about inking those some day, so maybe that set might see some use again, some day. It was really used only once, but got retired really quickly when I found out how hard it was to read them.
I… Don’t really know where I got the bag, though. There’s no logo on it, no label (not even on the inside), and I couldn’t remember where it came from if I tried. For as far as I’m aware, it’s been in my room for a long while by now and it’s probably a relic from a time long past. It’s large, though, which is a boon when I’m trying to keep a lot of dice.

Finally, let’s not forget the three dice rings that are lying at the bottom left. Those are the result a Kickstarter I backed, some time ago, and I don’t really keep them in any kind of bag. One of them is an r20, one is an rDirection (having North, North-East, East, etc on them) and the last one is an rAlignment, having the nine alignments from chaotic to lawful and good to evil on them. The r20 gets the most use, which is probably expected, as it was the original product to be made with the Kickstarter, and it actually rolls pretty well and naturally. I really hope it won’t invalidate my other d20’s, though…

So, there you have it, my little dice collection that is soon going to get some extra’s, courtesy of The Dice Shop Online. It’ll be fun to see how that’s going to work out, because it’s going to be a doozy.