Well, I wasn’t expecting them to be cheap. Just surprised at their virtual non-existence, especially as the gamer demographic ages (and presumably makes a higher income). The last few times I was at PAX I saw a company offering fancy gaming tables in the ballpark of $10k. I think there’s a market for high-end stuff.
The GameScience stuff looks better but still a bit crappy–ugly colors, quality control problems, and requiring hand-painting. And still injection molded, so you have problems with surface finish and dimension variations.
Still, this is one of those things where it might be hard to find the intersection point between the manufacturing cost curve vs. demand price curve. I’m all too aware of the cost of low-volume machining; it’s why I learned how to do CNC machining myself.
And before anyone asks, yes, I am tempted to have a go at it :).
A shame there are no casino games requiring polyhedral dice! That casinos have to throw away their dice after a small number of uses is why they are so cheap (despite still being in virtually perfect condition).
I love the Bathsheba dude’s stuff. His site is where I first ran across the technique a few years ago (I guess it’s been more like several years, now that I think about it). I have a friend with one of the pieces and it looks great. Just a tad too expensive to justify at the moment.
Those gaming tables were probably from Geek Chic. Some friends of mine bought a table and chairs from them a couple of years ago – it’s great stuff (and doubles as excellent dining-room furniture), but maaaaaan, it’s pricey.
Gamescience was around, and touting their precision dice, when I started playing D&D in the early 80s. And, at that time, there really was a difference in dice (and plastic) quality between their stuff, and what else was available. Most other gaming dice of that era was made in a plastic on which the edges would easily begin to chip or become rounded, just from casual use (or bouncing against other dice in a dice bag). And, those dice were still better than the dice that TSR was originally packing with their boxed D&D sets, which were repurposed educational tools (for teaching kids geometric solids), and which were made of a soft plastic which didn’t hold up well under actual usage.
However, gaming dice in the past 15 years or so tend to be made of higher-quality material (the primary makers / distributors in the US these days are Chessex, Crystal Caste, and Q Workshop), and you simply don’t see the beat-up dice that you did when I was first playing. They also almost always have slightly rounded edges, not the razor-sharp edges of casino dice. Are modern dice as “unbiased” as Gamescience dice purport to be (or as a truly unbiased die would be)? Almost undoubtedly not…but I suspect that they’re “close enough” for the vast majority of gamers.
Yeah, I suspect that’s the rub. There’s absolutely a niche market today for high-end dice, but it’s almost entirely for dice made from rare / exotic materials (gemstones, metals, woods), rather than super-precision. I may well be wrong, but I’m not sure that there’s much of a market for expensive dice that are expensive purely because they’re precision-made. I mean, Sheldon Cooper would probably love them, but how many guys like him are there out there?
The quality is certainly ok, for the most part–just not great. Though crappy stuff is out there! I have a bag-'o-dice that I got from a friend who was moving, which he originally bought by the pound on eBay. On most of the D20ies, the number opposite the 19 is… a 7. Only the D6es actually got the opposite face sums right!
No doubt about that–it’s more the principle of the matter, for nitpicky people like myself. And there’s something to be said about manipulating high-quality objects, even if the performance is not measurably different.
A fair number, I suspect–but as said, maybe not enough to get the volumes high enough for the manufacturing to be cheap.
You’re absolutely right about the exotic material stuff. A friend of mine asked if I could help getting a set made for his wife, since they were selling for $200+ in some exotic wood that I’ve forgotten. I don’t work in wood, though.
If you haven’t seen it yet, you might want to check out the rest of Dice Lab’s stuff. I’m tempted by the combo d2/d3/d4’s. You can’t actually buy them from that website, but they link to a site that does actually sell them.
That site also sells the Go First Dice, a set of four d12’s where any die in the set has an equal chance of beating any other die in the set, and none of them have the same numbers, so there are no ties. Uses: just what it says on the tin.
I actually did run this test in my wayward youth. Around age 12, I did it by rolling the die 10,000 times and counting up the frequencies. (I was really bored). In high school, I learned the necessary math to do it right.
My results were that the rounded-edge dice are not measurably worse than dice with sharper edges as whole, but I did find some individual dice were skewed, perhaps because of a manufacturing flaw of some sort. Even those weren’t so skewed that there’d be much advantage, but enough of a difference that “lucky dice” might be more than psychological.
Chronos mentions the d100… that was just plain stupid design that could have been fixed by smoothing out the “equator” and by randomly scattering the numbers instead of grouping them.
Dice Lab reckons that for a die to be fair and to adjust for possible flaws in the manufacturing process, it’s better to balance the sum of the vertices where possible.
Geek Chic - we have one of those tables in the basement. It may be the most expensive piece of furniture I own - and most of the house is Ethan Allen.
Its really nice. We had it designed custom for the gaming group so it fits everyone from 6’2" and 300 pound guys to my 5’2" 110 pound daughter. Getting the legroom to height ratio on that was tough.
The d12 in my first set of dice had the 11, 10, 9, 8, and 7 all clustered around the 12 (with complements on opposing faces). What that meant was that, if you were trying a trick roll and targeting the 12, if you were a little bit off, you’d still be rolling above average. And even with my mediocre Dex score, I found that I could indeed do just that, with a bit of effort.
Of course, it’s irrelevant now, because I hardly ever have any reason to roll a d12, and on those few occasions where I do, I use one I made myself (a rhombic dodecahedron, because I like that shape). And of course, on all the dice I make, I do in fact try to arrange the numbers in a relatively balanced manner (though I’m sure mine aren’t as perfectly balanced as that).
I haven’t done PnP for 15+ years, but is this a solution in search of a problem or what? I see that’s sort of addressed in the article, but it will only be cool until someone invents a D150 or something (no, no 6 minute abs!). Anyway, aren’t most games either primarily D20 or percentile?
I had an original D&D box (not even AD&D) that had awful cheap plastic dice with painted on numbers and uneven bits. All bright colors (no D10).
That could work out OK. It would certainly have helped the old d100 which put high and low on the poles and middle values around the equator. If you felt for the seam and rolled it right, you could really skew your odds of success. I banned them in my games pretty darn quick. (On the other hand, I still owned three of them just because… well, I had to.)
Those might be a type of d20 called a “spindown” die. They were created for use in games like Magic: the Gathering, where they’re used as counters (i.e., to count down how much life you have remaining), rather than for generating random numbers. To make stepping down one life point at a time easier, similar values are clustered together – i.e., 20 is next to 19, which is next to 18, etc. Here’s an example of what a spindown d20 looks like.
They don’t at all follow the normal protocol of spreading out the high numbers (or the low numbers), nor do the opposite sides sum to 21. As such, it’s possible for a player to use such a die to cheat – rather than rolling it, you drop it in a certain way, and if you get good at it, you can pretty reliably land the die on one of the higher numbers. Due to this, “spindowns” aren’t allowed for use in some organized RPG campaigns.
There’s also a lot of games that use d6s, often buckets of them (my 4th ed Shadowrun dwarf can roll 30 d6s to soak damage, it gets a bit cumbersome). Or custom dice that only work for that game. Never seen a system yet that used a d120 and I’ve played a lot of different PnP games.
Nor have I; I’m reasonably certain it exists only because someone thought, “this’d be soooo cool!”
It reminds me of when Zocchi and Gamescience brought out the d30 in the 1980s (another die with no apparent use); they actually sold a little booklet with random charts for D&D that you could use in conjunction with the die.
Knights of the Dinner Table had a feature where they asked people to come up with uses for such items as the d14. If I recall, it was mostly tables of random shit you could roll for.
