About Dice

Ah dice. Bane of my existence, but the game wouldn't work without them. Indeed, they're one of few truly irreplaceable bits of gaming kit - using cards as an alternative just doesn't have the same style, even electronic rollers fall short, and diceless roleplaying is obviously wrong and unacceptable to all right-thinking people (joke).

(Incidentally, this week has also seen a very odd metaphysical event. Two dice fell off the table during the game and have simply disappeared. They aren't hiding in my living room, because there just isn't anywhere I haven't checked, but nobody picked them up. They seem to have simply ascended to a higher state of existence.)

But I'm in a bit of a ranty mood, so here are two oddly-specific nitpicks...

Firstly, why doesn't everyone use colour-coded dice? And, for that matter, why do dice manufacturers persist in producing matching sets of dice, when the converse is much easier to use?

It really shouldn't bother me as much as it actually does. I know that. But it does, so here goes.

In theory, picking out the right die should be easy. They're different shapes and different sizes, after all. Want a d8? Pick the one with eight sides! It couldn't be simpler, surely?

And yet, in practice it's just not that simple. Simply put, the shapes aren't as immediately distinguishable as might be hoped. And, in particular, the d8 and the d10 are really quite easy to confuse. (Oddly, many people also seem to have problems with d12s and d20s, which are more distinct.) Almost every session, someone seems to either roll the wrong die or, more commonly, spend time searching out the right die amongst a pile of similarly-shaped lumps of plastic.

There's an easy fix, of course, as I've already said: colour-coded dice. If all your d8s are blue and all your d10s are green, you're not going to mix those up easily (unless you're colour-blind, of course!).

(That said, there's another useful scheme that can be applied using colours. If your character has two attacks, you could instead have two different-colour d20s each matched with a d8 of the same colour. Then, declare the order in which the pairs are to be counted ("the reds are my first attack; the blacks are my second attack"). And then, when your turn comes, you can just roll all four dice together. Use each d20 with the appropriate modifier to see if that attack hit, and if it did you already have the damage rolled. Instead of having to make four individual rolls, you're down to one... a saving of several seconds.)

The second rant is also connected to dice colours: what's with the hard to read dice?

The classic form of this is the green speckled dice with red numbers. Due to the nature of the human eye, this particular combination is oddly difficult to pick out. However, the combination I've been seeing most often (with apologies to one of my players) is a dark blue die with black numbering.

It's rather bizarre. After every roll, the player has to bend forward and squint at the die to make out the numbers, which is both time consuming and error prone.

(I could understand it if this was all an attempt to cheat, by producing numbers that just weren't there. But I'm very confident that that's not the case here. I guess it's just a matter of the player being particularly attached to his 'lucky' die. I suppose that's fair enough.)

On a slightly different topic...

I have a bag of dice that I use for D&D. This contains the following dice:

• 9 d20s. This is a set that has evolved due to some horrific rolling in the past. The bag originally included 3 that had a split red/black colouration. However, because those dice hate me, I added my previous 'good' dice, which were two blue and one white d20. And because those dice hate me, I added the venerable d20s I got with my Basic and Expert Sets - one red, one blue, and one black.
• 2 d12s, purple.
• 4 d10s. These are in two pairs, one green and one black, with each pair consisting of a normal d10 and a 'tens' d10. This allows me to generate one or two percentile results very quickly, or roll up to 4d10 at a time.
• 5 d8s, yellow.
• 10 d6s. These are of mixed colours, but are all 'pipped' rather than numbered. Turns out that the 'pip' style of die actually predates our numbers, and I do like to be old-school. I don't have any 10 dice of the same colour here, but fortunately the d6 never gets mistaken for anything else.
• 5 d4s. These are all in the 'modern' style, with the numbers are to top of the caltrop rather than the bottom, because they're easier to read like that. Again, I wasn't able to get matching colours here, but the d4 never gets mistaken for anything else (except PAIN).

The reason for the particular numbers is as follows. There are three d20s because I roll more attacks than anything else, and it's good to have spares in case one gets dropped. (Of course, I now have three sets of three.) There are two d12s and sets of d% because these get rolled reasonably infrequently. The remaining sets are sized based on the maximum damage of particular effects - magic missile can do up to 5d4, fireball up to 10d6, and I forget what does 5d8.

Of course, these numbers are only really suited for use in 3e. Both newer and older editions, and other d20 games, use slightly different balances of dice... and yet I use the same bag for them all. I don't like to be totally consistent.