Dice!

January 26, 2008 1:10 PM

Looking for something unique to bring to your next gaming session? Star-spawn will cringe in fear when they see you have shown up to battle bearing these long-lost relics of R'lyeh. The dwarves have toiled long in the mines and quarries of Khaz Modan, and even crafted the bones and teeth of great ancient beasts to create deadly weapons for your gaming arsenal. Perhaps most impressive and prized of all these unique equipages is this rare trophy of the cold and frozen north.

Trap dice.
Kama Sutra dice.
Monster dice.
Cheat dice.
Cyberdice.
Some awesome knucklebones and hand-made period dice replicas.
Pizza topping dice!
Also be sure to check out the website of Kevin Cook, the man who boasts the Guiness World Record for largest collection of dice in the world (warning: ugly website). You can browse the dice by theme or look at all of them on a single page.

posted by Demogorgon (33 comments total)

there are a few broken links in there.
posted by empath at 1:16 PM on January 26, 2008

also, who needs dice if you have an iPhone?

iPhone dice roller
posted by empath at 1:17 PM on January 26, 2008

Cool.
posted by lazaruslong at 1:27 PM on January 26, 2008

Okay, it looks like maybe I messed up the 'mines' link. Any others not working for people? I seem to be able to load all the others fine.
posted by Demogorgon at 1:27 PM on January 26, 2008

Those are all some pretty sweet bones. :D
posted by BeerFilter at 1:32 PM on January 26, 2008

I have 34 hit points!
posted by Mr. President Dr. Steve Elvis America at 1:40 PM on January 26, 2008

Awesome post, this geek has spent many hours dictating the lives of fictional characters at the whims of a dice roll.

For d20s and glory!
posted by baphomet at 2:05 PM on January 26, 2008

knucklebones games and probabilities.
EHEU! CANIS
posted by eddydamascene at 2:13 PM on January 26, 2008

I'm not buying any new dice. The set I've had since high school still works fine.

But those metal dice, well... they would have killed at the D&D parties back in the day, wouldn't they?
posted by caution live frogs at 2:16 PM on January 26, 2008

When you absolutely, positively have to out-dork every motherfucker in the room.
posted by kjs3 at 2:28 PM on January 26, 2008 [4 favorites]

Fuller sits quietly in the corner hugging his shoggoth plushie.
posted by jfuller at 2:37 PM on January 26, 2008

My dice lust has just reached a whole new high. I know a certain orc barbarian who I suspect has heard of those cheat dice...
posted by honeyx at 3:15 PM on January 26, 2008

Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck by Ricky Jay.
posted by ericb at 3:26 PM on January 26, 2008

It's been years since I've gamed at a table with other nerds, but the sight of cool dice still sets my geeky little heart to racing.
posted by Shohn at 3:32 PM on January 26, 2008

Gamescience 20+ are still my favorites. The Q-workshop dice are cool to look at, but not very practical -- they're hard to read, and I've heard they aren't printed very well. (Something about water-soluble inks, I heard, but that might just be rumor.) Precious stone dice are cool -- I'd love to have a set of amethyst ones -- but they're also tiny compared to regular dice.
posted by jiawen at 3:53 PM on January 26, 2008

But empath, does the iPhone die roller generate truly random rolls?
posted by gauchodaspampas at 4:01 PM on January 26, 2008

Somehow, I was disappointed that the six-sided Cthulhu die only had six sides.

gibbers
posted by phooky at 4:23 PM on January 26, 2008 [2 favorites]

The icons on those trap dice are great -- very Portal-esque.
posted by xthlc at 5:25 PM on January 26, 2008

Somehow, I was disappointed that the six-sided Cthulhu die only had six sides.

It only has six sides that you can see, without having delved deeper into the mythos...

My dice bag is feeling very needy right now, and my geeky little heart flutters.
posted by Aversion Therapy at 5:30 PM on January 26, 2008

They attack the darkness!
posted by Balisong at 5:58 PM on January 26, 2008

NNNEEERRRRDDDSSSS

/obligatory
posted by killdevil at 8:04 PM on January 26, 2008

wielding nontransitive dice, cthulhu beats nyalarhotep most of the time, nyalarhotep beats yog-sothoth most of the time, and yog-sothoth beats cthulhu most of the time.
posted by bruce at 8:49 PM on January 26, 2008

oh, and unless the iphone die roller incorporates random entropy changes from an actual physical system, as opposed to software merely executing a mathematical algorithm (and i don't think it does), the answer to gauchodaspampas's question is "no".
posted by bruce at 8:57 PM on January 26, 2008

Word of warning: I bought some metal dice once, don't remember who made them, and the sides were irregular. I like neat dice, but I like truly random numbers (within the limitations of the technology) more. So if you're going to buy dice made out of unusual materials, you might want to put hands on them give them a good looking over first.
posted by L. Fitzgerald Sjoberg at 9:53 PM on January 26, 2008

I love awesome dice, although I rarely use any of mine nowadays. Yeah, jiawen, amethyst dice are awesome, but my set is awfully small; then again, if they were normal sized there is probably no chance I could have ever afforded them.
posted by Stunt at 10:33 PM on January 26, 2008

Word of warning: I bought some metal dice once, don't remember who made them, and the sides were irregular. I like neat dice, but I like truly random numbers (within the limitations of the technology) more. So if you're going to buy dice made out of unusual materials, you might want to put hands on them give them a good looking over first.

Then again, lots of plastic dice have bubbles and other irregularities that can also make them less than perfect randomizers. And then there are those dragon dice and things that seem very unlikely to be perfect randomizers, either. The only way to be sure is to get a store to let you borrow them and do a chi-square test. :)

I love awesome dice, although I rarely use any of mine nowadays. Yeah, jiawen, amethyst dice are awesome, but my set is awfully small; then again, if they were normal sized there is probably no chance I could have ever afforded them.

True 'nuff. I think I'm more annoyed at the sense of false advertising they give me -- seems like the ads rarely give a clear indication of how big they are. But if they ever do industrial amethyst dice at regular size, I'll definitely get some.
posted by jiawen at 11:21 PM on January 26, 2008

Oh, and if you rarely use your dice, try to find a game! :) (self-link, by the way)
posted by jiawen at 11:23 PM on January 26, 2008

You cannot influence the iphone diceroller with the power of your mind. Many a pc has been spared a grim death by dint of the sacred chant:

"Ohcomoncomeoncomeonpuleeeeeeeeeese......"
posted by Jilder at 5:01 AM on January 27, 2008

I'd love to find some dice in the form of some of the Catalan solids. The only one I've seen is the rhombic triacontahedron as a d30. It would be particularly geeky to have the rhombic dodecahedron as a d12 - does anyone know if any of these are produced?
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 9:32 AM on January 27, 2008

bruce: it's very common, perhaps even normal, for software die-rollers to incorporate entropy from external sources such as the precise timing of the request for the next die roll. Works great. It may even use the OS entropy pool, which has plenty of things to draw from (the touchscreen, the accelerometer, GSM timings, etc.)
posted by hattifattener at 3:08 PM on January 27, 2008

Two Catalan solids for you, DevilsAdvocate: The 1970s version of "Astro Dice" included rhombic dodecahedra, but they're long out of production. (There's a different "Astro Dice" currently on the market that uses regular dodecahedra.) Try ebay.

The tetrakis hexahedron, on the other hand, is currently available as the d24 from two manufacturers. If you want to encourage innovation in dice, you should buy the Gamescience version, since they're the company that's shown the most willingness to try new shapes in recent years. Also, their owner/president/salesman is just really cool, in a crazy-old-man sort of way.

In fact, come to think of it: An FPP about dice that didn't include Lou Zocchi? Shame on you, Demogorgon!
posted by faster than a speeding bulette at 7:54 PM on January 27, 2008 [1 favorite]

Huh, I have nowhere to use dice anymore, and haven't for decades, but that still got my heart racing. And I'm sad to say that, as thoroughly hard-to-read and impractical as they are, and despite the fact that I'm not a Matrix fan, never was into VR, don't like cyberpunk, and never liked SF role-playing games (except Paranoia), those cyberdice were my favorites.
posted by Bugbread at 12:15 AM on January 28, 2008

I just bought some dice...I didn't need more but I couldn't resist the vintage style plastic dice these guys sell. It's just like 3rd grade in 1979
posted by Megafly at 12:22 PM on January 28, 2008