Pointless trinkets were harder to make and less available back in the old days. They wouldn’t be able to just go off to a Wal-Mart and buy something gaudy to keep around the house, they’d need good reason to manufacture something with such precision and intricacy. That would seem to point to something that has meaning and wasn’t just a useless bauble. At least that’s how I see it
You filled it with bones and rolled it across the tables. The bones fell out and then the old crone gave you the omens you rolled.
This thread is filling me with an angsty sense of my own mortality. It makes me sad to realize that I’m not going to be alive in 2000 years to see a discussion just like this one about, say, this. (“Clearly it’s a child’s toy.” “No, no, it’s related to the worship of the ancient Cthulu, God of Networking and Nerds.” “The barbarians used to cut off children’s foreskins, didn’t they? Perhaps it’s a medical device or teaching tool…”)
In ancient Rome there were a lot of assassinations and poisonings and what not, and this kind of die was useful for trying to make a saving throw.
‘An object of ritual purpose’ is archaeologists’ way of saying “We don’t know”.
Any explanation for these dodecahedrons that involves them being thrown or rolled, without the expectation of breakage (i.e. holy hand grenade=single throw), has to be false. Even rolling these objects across a table would risk snapping off the corner balls in fairly short order.
Maybe that’s the game; see how many little balls you can break off. 
If it was played on a less solid surface (like dirt) they might actually help it roll by gripping the ground.
So you think it’s a marriage simulator?
By Jupiter, you’ve nailed it!
^Like
Seems like the side with the largest hole is undecorated, and I guess wouldn’t normally be showing when it was being used for whatever it was being used.
More for the Standard Bearer theory, if that hole accommodates a post or staff.
Maybe, but I think it’s modern bias to interpret these as dies. The bronze version of these objects wouldn’t have been particularly cheap, especially given the complexity of manufacture. I don’t think this is an object designed to be thrown, unless it’s a weapon of some non-trivial kind.
From the site the OP cited ’
A Roman dodecahedron is a small hollow object made of bronze or stone’
A stone one would have been too fragile to throw - even on dirt…
Looks like the Roman equivalent of the VegeMatic.
Is bronze really that fragile? Because those knobs don’t look like they’d snap off to me.
They vary significantly in size (about a thumb to about a palm).
They can be held in the hand, and easily manipulated.
They are not ornate, but are marked with precision.
They are made of durable materials.
The holes are of different sizes; this is unlikely to be caused by poor measuring, as indicated by the concentric circles and shape itself.
They sound like some kind of tool to me.
The different size holes suggest some type of sorter, but I can’t figure out how that would work.
I don’t think the knobs are stands - pegs would have been easier and better; I think the knobs are for some type of string.
And they have 12 sides; not only is that not easy to design, but 12 is a very useful number in measuring systems, as it can be divided into and by so many smaller numbers (2,3,4,6).
This is looking more like an instrument to me.
Most were found in Germany and France … I forget my history, did the Roman culture spread to Germany, or were they just conquerers?
I would like to know:
how even are the sides?
are the relative sizes of the holes fairly consistent?
do any of the knobs show greater signs of wear?
what kinds of sites have they been found at? Towns, fortifications, fields, likely battle sites?
They look like they were used to measure something, and probably by merchants or soldiers. The variety of sizes suggests merchants to me.
They would be used to measure something that would be fed through the larger hole and measured at the smaller hole, something stiff that would not slip through the holes on the sides …
Oh. I just described something for measuring a spaghetti serving. That can’t be right.
My snark aside, lets go with this, but not for simple dinner table spaghetti. What if it could have been used as a quick hand-held tool to measure and ensure the uniformity of a merchants bundle of some stalked commodity like wheat or some such? It could be to determine actual vs estimated shipping quantities on the fly or even give a rough idea fo how much tax to charge.
Jewelry ring sizer.
They do to me - not necessarily weak, but probably brittle and susceptible to snapping off if the item was dropped or thrown.
I’m seriously going to make one of these and have a play. I have a very strong conviction that I will be able to divine the purpose of these by handling one.
Coin clipping was a big problem in the time of the Roman Empire - could these be coin gauges?