Dec 5, 2008
That Was A Practice Roll!
I was looking through my computer desk drawer the other day for my long lost dice that have never really fitted into my dice bag. At one stage I would fill my dice bag up before each game with the specific dice I might need for that session. If it was a WOD or Rolemaster game then I’d throw every D10 I owned in there where as if I was playing ADnD it would be a handpicked mix of die for whatever the occasion required. These last few years though has seen very little need for anything other than a D10 in my dice bag.
Now my kids have got to the age where they are into everything. The eldest seems to be amazed you can get dice with more than 6 sides and the babies constant mistake them for the eldest’s GoGo Crazybone’s. So as you can guess there are dice everywhere in my house these days which could be classed as a safety hazard considering how many D4 seem to have been lost.
The desire to own the worlds entire supply of dice in gamers has always confounded me. Yeah I like to have my fair share but once you get to the stage of having more than you can actually use it just gets silly. As you may be able to work out I’m not your kind of player that will sit and whittle down his bag of 80 D10 in order to find five that roll high at that particular time so that I can pass one particular skill check.
Other than OCD why do people need so many dice?
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I don’t think any of start out to have so many dice. We usually start out with a set of dice. Then we lose a few. After that we buy a new set. Slowly, we end up with all the dice in the worlds.
Of course there are exceptions to be sure. Like your example player with 80 dice.
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My collection’s actually pretty small (particularly since I lost the hand-me-down enormous bag of dice I got from my stepbrother.) The evolution was pretty simple: Two D&D-sets of minis my mother bought me when I started having trouble keeping all my full size dice together and switched down to pockets rather than a fannypack (though I’m still almost short on sixes). Another set of minis I picked up from a friend of mine because she kept losing the small ones and thought I’d do better with them. And of course, the requisite absurd (if diminishing) pile of purple or gray mini d10s I cleaned my FLGS out of after discovering Exalted. Total peaked at about forty-some, all types combined, and has been diminishing due to attrition for a while.
Usually, dice happen to people, I think. It’s a combination of gifts (friends whom you introduce to exotic dice will often find you more exotic dice, which is how I got my nestled-d10-d100, or the “Singular Dice”), having to replace one die and ending up with a set, dealing with being The Dice Source for your group, and occasionally just getting shiny shock from the random race/class dice, the random initial reaction dice, the crystal dice, the geometrically impossible dice like d5s or d7s, the dice where one face is pirate-themed, the directional dice, the dice in numbering systems that aren’t Arabic numerals…. or just buying dice to console oneself for the game one wanted to impulse-buy being out of the budget.
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I have exactly two D&D sets, and that’s it.
Never seen why I can’t just roll the same dice three or four times to get a total instead of actually having 4D10 or whatever.
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See I’m with Hammer on not being bothered by having to roll by dice a few times to get results. On the other hand if a games dice pool is never really going to be more than 10 D10 I’ll quite happily buy them for that game. I’m never likely to have enough games that use anything more than D6 or D10 for large dice pools though.