Gamescience pound of dice report!

I think my distribution is similar or identical to Martin Ralya​​’s breakdown. Here’s a rough overview of what I got:

21x d4s. They’re all the clipped-points style. One of them is oversized! There’s nearly a complete set of oversized standard polyhedrals in the bag, just missing a d10 and a d6. This assortment is making me lust for an oversized set.

10x d6es. Ehh…They’re okay. Numbers not pips, and I’m a pips partisan. Three of them have custom “1”s.

10x d8s. One oversized! One glittery. Four opaque, and one of them is really cheap/soft with clipped corners.

27x d10s but lots of face variety. Since they’re uninked, it’s hard to eyeball what all is in there. Three 10-50s, four 00-40 (?), a couple 10-00, six 1-5s, and two blanks. Blanks! I have no idea what to do with them but they’re pretty. The rest are standard, with one glittery one. You can get close to a complete glittery set!

21x d12s, one of them oversized. They all look standard. No glitter, this is the missing link.

31x d20s, two of them oversized. Two glittery ones and they’re unreadable without ink. The majority (15, so a plurality I guess) are of the 1-10/+1-+10 style, 9 are the (0-9)x2 style (never got the point, just roll a d10), and the last 8 are standard d20s. There are a couple glow in the dark ones! Again, a set I didn’t know I needed but I sure do now.

9x itty bitty d20s, all different colors, all ‘dorbs and all in the 0-9 style whyyyyy.

A complete polyhedral set in kind of a tiger eye style. Quite beautiful.

And a selection of dWTFs: two d24s, four d16s, a d14 (with the days of the week above the numbers!), a three sided “rock paper scissors” die (?), and an extremely clever d5 that doesn’t look like it should produce an even distribution but maybe it does? Looks like a fat triangle, and sure enough it lands on an edge as often as not.

Some really weird dice in there!

0 thoughts on “Gamescience pound of dice report!”

  1. Dollars to donuts, you’ll find some 10-sided d5s, d10s number 00-40 or 10-50, and d6s that top out at 5 in your mix.

    I’m with you on wanting an oversized set. I came close in my assortment, too!

  2. D10s aren’t a platonic solid, and were a later innovation in polyhedral dice. The 0-9 D20s were the original D10, and early D20s actually only came in that style. If you wanted to generate a 1-20 result, you rolled one of those along with a D6. (1-3 for 1-10 result, 4-6 for an 11-20 result)

  3. Huh. I had no idea! Shows what I know about DCC.

    I purchased a couple of the d3’s a few years ago just because they looked neat and, as you mention, have Rock-Paper-Scissors indicators. I figured it was a novelty and could be useful for the odd roll in AD&D, if I ever broke that workhorse out again.

  4. Ed McW yeah but that hasn’t been true since like 1990 or something. Is there still a need/demand? I mean there must be, right? The colonel wouldn’t make them if there wasn’t. Who’s buying/using the 0-9 dice?!

  5. Apparently, some people also feel that D10s don’t roll well enough to be an effective randomizer, and therefore prefer the 0-9 D20s.

  6. Weirdly, I wrote my second comment without seeing your reply, but it totally looks like a direct response to your comment.
    #precognitionisaterribleburden

  7. Ed McW careful there. The Game Sciecen dude (I forget his name) has been pretty vocal about how stupid gamers are if they think a die that “rolls well” is better. A die should roll as little as possible on the table to lower the effect of gravity that will make it stop at its lowest centre. Hence the sharp edges. To try to force the die to stop earlier. 🙂

  8. As a practical matter, playing on a crowded table in a coffee shop, the fact that GS dice stop sooner, on average, is one of the things I love about them.

  9. Check that d8 with the clipped corners. I bet it’s numbered 1-4 twice. They used to market it with its own ads as “a d4 that rolls”.

  10. I really want some of the dWTFs now. I have no current use for them, but hey, more and different weirdo dice.

    Hm, how easy are these things to get hold of in the UK? I shall investigate!

  11. Paul Mitchener​ There’s a UK site, The Dice Shop Online, that has a pretty good stock of GS dice. Not the pound, of course, but lots of individual dice.

  12. Noah Tucker They can of course be used as d10s. Or you can colour the two sets differently (so that Blue 5 is actually 15 and Blue 0 is actually 20, whereas Red 0 is really 10 and Red 5 is… Standing by?), to create a d20 that is marginally more balanced than a regular one (two digits = more material carved away on half of the sides). Also rolling two of these they’re easier to use as d100s than regular d20s.

  13. Paul Mitchener I’m already thinking hard about those d24s! Hours in the day are obvious; there are other 24s out there on the tip of my tongue, too.

    The d5 is neat and so weird. And we typically have 5 players on board game night. Finally the long nightmare of not knowing who goes first will come to an end.

  14. Double 0-9 were the predominant 20s of my earliest D&D days and of my collection still the ones I have the most feels for. Haven’t rolled d20s in a long time but if I were to need one, I’d instinctively reach for the double 0-9. Mine were relatively easy to read and we only colored one set of 0-9, usually red and those were the high side.

  15. 11yo Paul never thought to use two different crayon colors. :-\

    As soon as I’ve got time travel dialed in I’ll go back and change that. But then this thread will never happen and I’ll never invent time travel!

  16. Good news Paul, you actually do invent time travel. You just swung by, checked out my old d20s, but said it was still kind of lame and wasn’t going to bother going back to teach 11yo you any of it. You also told me not to tell but, what’s the worst that can happen?

  17. What’s up with the 00-40 and 50-90 dice? I have plenty of 10-00 d10s around, for percentile rolls, but I can’t quite figure the use of those…

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