A Song of Dice and Buyer

No? OK, I tried.

Anyway, the idea for this post came when I received the faux jade polyhedral dice set that I ordered for our upcoming Art of Wuxia campaign.

I am usually a dice snob and I am an advocate of Gamescience dice, but as this would be the first time we are playing a wuxia campaign, I thought I will steer fully into it and get a set of dice that look the part. Perhaps I will save them for only the boss fights.

Several years ago I decided to cull my dice collection and use only Gamescience dice as much as possible. When I bought the new set of dice, the idea came to me to do an audit and see how far I have deviated from that goal.

These days, for the RPGs that use polyhedrals I use the Gamescience sets pictured above. You will notice that there are 2 d20s for each set to allow for advantage/disadvantage in 5E. Actually, the light green set hardly sees any action as I made the mistake of using blue crayons for the numbers and they are impossible to read against the green felt base of my dice trays.

For games that use only d6s, I have three sets of six d6s. Except one of the red d6s is missing... I am sure it will turn up soon...

Of course, some games require more of one type of dice, such as Horizon Wars, which uses only d12s, and a lot of those. I bought twelve of these, which cost quite a bit, and which is made worse by the fact that we have decided the rules aren't for us.

Then there are rules that require specialty dice which Gamescience do not make, which are:

Blood Bowl. I got these block dice many years ago, and it's a testament to the design of the game that they are still used in the current edition. The d6s have a scarab for the '1', which was something I thought fit my Khemri-themed team. I was tempted to get a set of the new GW dice for my Skaven team, but that would be wasteful.

Gaslands. I normally avoid games that require proprietary dice, especially those that are expensive (see the next entry...), but Gaslands just looked so fun I decided to get a set.

Forbidden Lands. The problem with the Forbidden Lands dice was that not only were they expensive, they were out of stock most of the time. I decided to re-create them by getting cheaper skull dice and other dice in the appropriate colours. They are not a perfect replica, but since the higher dice are not used often, the set was adequate. In retrospect I went overboard and bought more dice than I needed in my attempt to imitate the colour scheme faithfully, since I already owned...

The (not) Dice of Rolling. I posted about these before. The idea for this set of dice is that each die type was of a different colour, so it is easier for the user, particularly players who are new to polyhedral dice, to quickly identify the dice they need. The number of dice and the use of two colours for the d6s were based on the rules which I use for my convention games, which were where I expected to use these dice. I should have bought two more d20s of a different colour though.

There are some other dice in my collection which don't see a lot of action or any at all, but which I still decided to keep. They are:

The original Fighting Fantasy Heroes dice. I got these in around 1986 when I started my GMing career. As you can see the years have not been kind to them and the three are the only survivors from the original set of six.

Specialty dice. A slightly different perspective in this photo. The top row shows a d3 and two Average dice, and the bottom row shows an Artillery die and a Deviation die from GW. These hardly see any use, but are useful to have around in case you ever need them.

Gifted novelty dice. Here are three dice given to me by my friends: a home-made glow-in-the-dark d10, a d6 with Roman numerals, and a d120. The last one is pretty impractical as it rolls for a long time and is difficult to read. 

Finally, like most wargamers, I have a lot of Chessex d6s. These are useful as casualty and status markers. I got a brick of the green dice for my Night Goblin army, and the blue one for my WOTR/Empire army.

There are a few more polyhedral dice which I did not show, and which I think I should give away in the future.

What does your dice collection look like?