I’m almost done with my Gen Con Seminar prep, I should be done by Tuesday and come back with meatier fare soon after. Here’s another content light post!
I started reading a pretty good webcomic called Weregeek (thanks Sandrinnad!).
In one strip, the author addresses the Dice Fetish trope were one player freaks out when another player reaches for his dice as shown here:
I’ve never seen this happen but I guess it’s a trope because it does happen in certain groups.
My questions to you then is: What are your group’s dice fetish? What’s this Dice etiquette about? I don’t want to get killed at Gen Con or anything.
Here’s a few of ours:
- I buy a new set of Dice whenever I start a new campaign.
- Math stores all his dice in the same butt-ugly pencil case he’s been using for 20 years! 15 years ago, we would officially start the game by zipping open the bag and dumping all dice on the table… we should start doing that more.
- Bad rolling d20s are periodically retired for the evening.
- PM has put his d20 in a Microwave and seriously threatened it on multiple occasions
Your turn!
A good friend of mine was seriously paranoid about her dice in the way shown above. I hadn’t heard of any other dice rituals or paranoia.
Rafes last blog post..Uncle Figgy’s Guide to Roleplaying
I’ve run into the “Don’t touch the dice” thing before, on occasion. It does seem to be somewhat common.
More common are the dice-related superstitions. “I always roll high with this one.” Generally that results from a short streak of good rolls, which is remembered, although on occasion it turns out to really be a biased die.
I’ve also had more than one player who would only roll dice of a certain color. (I myself tend to use all purple dice, but that’s so that I can keep straight which are mine once they’re scattered all over the table — I rarely run into anyone else who uses purple, so it usually works well.)
Then there are the house rules regarding dice — what do you do when they land tilted against a book or bounce onto the floor?
Ninetails last blog post..4e Monk project update
“Dice that fall off the floor don’t count”
Dice that land on the side are covered by the Narrative relativity Imperative… i.e. if you really needed a high roll and the skewed die shows a high roll, it usually get accepted. If not… re-roll.
🙂
We used to game on the second floor of a hay barn outside a pub. Great place, and surprisingly warm too thanks to all the straw ‘n’ stuff. Problem was that the floor had a load of holes in it, all of which seemed to magnetically attract any dice that rolled off the table. Each time one went flying we all dived for it (futilely) only to see the offending polyhedron bounce through a hole into the floor below.
These were the days when we played a lot of Traveller and HERO system, meaning we lost a LOT of d6s to the Holes In The Floor. The rule was simple: him who lost has to go find it while the game continued. If it’s mid-combat we just rule that the character got knocked out or somethin’. When the player returned (usually covered head-to-foot in straw and gawd knows what else) he rejoined the game.
Since then, if anything takes a player away from the gametable (nowadays usually a spouse, call from work or a child), we say they’ve “rolled a straw dice”. We oldies know EXACTLY what that means!
I know this hasn’t got much to do with your blogpost, but it tugged the memory enough to share 🙂
We used to game in a buddies basement where he had a woodworking shop. On numerous occasions dice were put in a vice and crushed when they failed to perform. Shattering a D20 leaves shards everywhere.
I also used to buy new dice every year at gen con, my previous dice were sent into lake Michigan or honored in other ways. Since I haven’t been to Gen Con since it moved to Indianapolis I purge my dice on random occasions when I find new ones i like, or when I start a new campaign from time to time.
I am partially in the “don’t use my dice camp”. I rarely let others use my dice and I NEVER use anyone else’s dice, EVER under and circumstances, but I don’t think I am crazy about it or anything, as long as they don’t find the bodies….
I always buy new dice for a campaign. That is part of my trek to GenCon, is to load up on new dice before the next round of campaigns start. I have some dice that are 5-6 years old, that I wont touch again, because the campaign is over.
The one that my group came up with, was the competitor die. One of my players declared one day that in order to keep his d20 rolling well, he would have to roll another d20 along with it, but never use the roll from it. By rolling the dice together, the one that counted competed with the inert die, and thus rolled better.
We had one player dunk one of his Warhammer 40K d6’s in paint, as an example to the rest of the set. The same guy also obliterated one of the dice from the set with a hammer, as further example to the rest of the set, to get back on track.
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Should we start a flicker group for destroyed Dice…
There probably is one already.
@ChattyDM – you’re welcome! I’m glad you’re enjoying it 😀
hmmmm….
– most people I know have dice they’ll lend and dice that they won’t….
– my husband had a set he’d only use for important sessions and rolls – they always seemed to roll exactly what he needed (high when he needed high, low when he needed low). He never used them DMing though, which we really appreciated 🙂
– I often like my dice set to relate to the character or the game in some way (dominant colour of the game or colours associated with the character)
– I definitely like to prime my dice by sitting them with the highest number up 😀 preferably in groups made up of the same dice type 🙂 (but that depends on what dice the system uses)
I’m not nearly as bad as the guy in that comic, but I’ve got a few weird dice rituals.
– Any dice I plan on using must be left with the highest number up (20, 12, 10, whatever). This is because it helps the dice get used to this position.
– Specific dice for specific characters/rolls. If my new paladin uses a greatsword, I buy two new d6’s in a color scheme appropriate for the character. I don’t use the same d20 I use for DMing that I do when I’m playing.
– As has been said above, if a die is rolling consistently bad, it gets retired for the evening.
Wow, just looked at Sandrinnad’s comment above. Go Team Color-Coded High Number Up!
Kavondes last blog post..No Post-Session Report tonight.
In my group NO ONE really used anyone elses dice. I don’t think anyone ever tried and got yelled at or anything like that, we just didn’t try. Although I Don’t want anyone touching mine. I like how you have to buy a new set for each new campaign. Makes me feel better as a dice junkie myself.
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When I decided to start DMing I got a new set of dice just for it. They have their own tin (they came that way) and as much as possible they are stored with the highest number up.
I roll all of my dice of the same kind (all d20s, all d12s, and so on) before each session to figure out who’ll be lucky for now. If it fails me, it gets rebuked and replaced with the next one down the line.
All of my numerical dice (including the DM dice) are red. At first this was just to differentiate my dice and to match my Pretty Pink Dice Bag (TM) (it was originally one of those gift bags for soap and such); then I got a white and black die from the D&D 4th Edition Worldwide Game Day, rolled it at least ten times and it refused to roll less than 5 – so it’s probably fate.
I decide various things using a pair of emotion-die; they’re white d6s with blue faces ranging from “very happy” to “angry”. If they contradict, plot decides.
I let people use my dice generally, just not the dice in the tin.
Dice that fall on the floor don’t count; dice that don’t properly land because they’re cocked against an obstruction don’t count either. If they properly land anyway, plot decides.
My group really didn’t have any. We were all good at math so we understood statistical clustering and the independence of random unconnected events.
Several of us were packrats and collectors so there were multiple sets of “enough dice plus spares for everyone to have a complete set of dice even if they forgot their own” and since none of us were picky about personal dice (beyond making sure we got them back at the end of a game, we never had anyone bothered by sharing dice. (Everyone bought dice, but if you forgot them that was okay. You’d just borrow some from Matt or Dan or Me or John or Brad. Dan had enough that everyone could have a full set of Fuzion damage Dice (13 or 14 d6 is the top before moving to Mega Damage scales.)
Generally, we won’t share dice. There is a pool of common dice if someone comes to play without their own set, but we’re pretty much like the comic about our own dice.
Personally, I tend to align my dice, especially if playing shadowrun i’ll have my entire 36 dice-block aligned with the 6s face up and all the same way.
I think we’re a bit ritualistic, but not quite superstitious about it all.
Wow this is so informative!
I never imagined so many fetishes/rituals existed..
I’m still laughing about the microwave.
I make sure I’m using the die I keep rolling low as my monster die. I also yell out party foul every time one goes on the floor – though no one is drinking so I’m not sure why I do that!
We just dump out several sets of die in the middle and people grab the ones they want to roll when it’s time. We might switch out which ones we roll depending on how the rolls are going. We have sets but we usually roll from different sets…a blue d20 with the black d4 and the green d10 etc. I have to roll the bright orange d8. Okay I guess I’m a bigger freak about the die than I realized.
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We’re actually pretty accepting of letting anyone use each other’s dice, though we definitely try and make sure that dice don’t get mixed. (It is pretty annoying to have a d20 you like lost to someone else’s pile.)
However, there are dice that have a mysticism about them. Danny’s “Battletech Dice” are a prime example. They’re a set of d6’s so named because they usually scored headshots in Battletech (thus taking some of the strategy out of the game.) I think they are the reason that we tend to do point buy instead of rolling stats nowadays.
I wrote a paper in college for Anthropology classifying gamers as a sub-culture- and their superstitions about dice was prime evidence.
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I use different colored d20s depending on which system I’m playing in and I’ve got another d20 I use solely for DMing…as long as I don’t mix them up, they roll well for me, sometimes to my players dismay…
I’ve used the same set of silver dice for 6 years now…lost the d20, but that got replaced by the 4 others which I acquired through unknown means…they are the only dice I use, but I don’t have a problem letting others use them…they only roll well for me, though…
That is, with the exception of my lucky d6s, which tend to purge bad karma out of dice rolled alongside them…4d6 (2 commandeered from the LotR edition of Risk) that have never given below 11 when rolling stats…golly, I love those things…
My group doesn’t have any dice superstitions. We pretty much share and share alike. I have had friends in the past who subscribed to the “torture low rollers to set the example for the others” technique.
As far as dice rulings…Dice off the table are re-rolled, Leaners are re-rolled also.
As far as dice superstitions go, I love the commentary to this epsiode of Darths & Droids. The comic itself doesn’t mention much about dice superstitions, but the commentary has some good stuff.
http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0099.html
As a DM, I couldn’t care less about how my dice are set up. However, as soon as I’m in the player’s seat, I find myself bargaining with the dice constantly, not to mention threatening them (they know I’m a softy though, so it usually gets back to bargaining pretty quickly).
My group has no problem sharing damage dice, but nobody uses another person’s d20.
I bring dice for my group. They have the plain single-colour d20s and aren’t allowed to touch my nice swirly ones. Well, one of them’s allowed to use his favourite if he hits me between the eyes with it from over the table but that’s a different story…
Since I bought my new convertible tablet, I’ve eschewed the physical dice for electronic die rollers. At first I used dicetool from rptools.net, but the past couple sessions of 4E, I’ve moved to Asmor.com’s DiceChucker.
I still bought my annual set of die at GenCon last year, but I might skip it this year. I also brought out the dice to demonstrate D&D to my wife and step-son.
Ahhh… dice superstitions. My very first D&D group was awesome and using all their various dice, they pretty much always had dice for me to use and nobody ever had any problem with it. I’m pretty much the same way except for my pretty dice. It was my first set of dice that I bought for myself, so NO ONE is allowed to touch them except for me. One of my friends tried to use the d20 as a counter for his health during a game of Magic and I freaked out, lol. I also have a set of dice that I DON’T use. It was a gift from my ex on our 1-month anniversary, and I swear to you that since we broke up they never roll high for me anymore. They’re fine with other people, but seem to hate me. Ah well, lol.
Hmm. Well, in general I don’t care about people using my dice, so long as they ask /before/ they grab them. Which is the same consideration I want for my books or pencils really :P. I tend to have 2 to 4 d20s out and if one seems to be rolling pool I swap to another for awhile. I’m aware of statistics, and that it doesn’t really matter over a long enough time line but still… gotta change the mojo.
The only real ritual I’ve observed in my group is one guy who once he dumps out his dice that he is using will play a game with them as follows. Roll the dice, take any that rolled max and set them aside. Roll the left over ones again, if any rolled max put them with the first pool of max dice, if none rolled max remove one max die. Repeat until all dice are maxed, or you run out of “max dice” in your pool. He seems happy when he wins, and not happy when he looses… I’m not entirely sure what the point of the ritual is.
When I first started playing a few years ago, I used an old (but clean!) sock of mine to hold my dice. I’d just knot the end to keep them from falling out. The people I played with thought that I should get a ‘real’ dice bag, but I didn’t want to, I like the uniqueness of the sock. Eventually, I got a drawstring bag that could be mistaken for a dice bag, and I started using that–but the dice I regularly use are still inside my sock, inside the dice bag!
I still use the same sock to store my dice. it’s gotten a little longer over the years, but that just makes it easier to knot after the game 🙂
I have 4 sets of polyhedral dice – my DMing dice, my Playing dice and then 2 sets of extras for when I need more dice for a roll or to loan out. I tend not to loan out my Playing dice since I have other sets for loan, and I never loan out my DMing dice. I also don’t use the 2 main sets for opposing purposes – The few times that i have used DMing dice to play or Playing dice to DM, they always roll poorly.
I also have some special dice for use in certain games – for Rolemaster (which i haven’t played in about 15 years) I have a set of percentile 20 siders (numbered 1-0 twice) that i use instead of regular 10 siders, and I have a set of retired casino 6 siders that i use only for chargen.
To Michael Phillips: I’m studying to be a mathematician specializing in probability, so I know they’re random…in theory. But manufacturing is always imperfect so that’s always going to be within some amount of error, and taking advantage of that error is my idea of a good time. (For example, certain materials can eventually warp the tiniest bit due to gravity and such – I think this is where the ‘store dice on their high roll’ idea comes from.) Besides, I’m looking for short-term runs which is why I check up on my dice every session.
And there’s nothing wrong with a little superstition now and then when the fate of your beloved characters is invested in little plastic polyhedra.
My old group had an obscene number of dice, which also doubled as stand-ins for mapping encounters on the floor/table. As such, they all got mixed pretty thoroughly, and no one seemed to mind after a while. The exception was d20s. There always seemed to be fewer, and they were prized not only for their rarity, but also for their mass. This latter was due to an old habit where if the action slowed down someone would flip off the lights and blind dice throwing would ensue. D20s hurt the most. It wasn’t uncommon to find missing dice under every book and shelf in the room where we played. Folks bought glow-in-the-dark sets for just such occasions.
Sadly, the fun went out of it when one guy went out and bought a d30 the size of a golf ball and a giant Plexiglas d6.
Ha! Gaming related injuries!
I’m with justaguy regarding permission. Asking first is just polite, and I like to get them back at the end of game. My whole group seems to subscribe to this. I also don’t like people to get dice from my box themselves. Not sure why. My group also tends to “retire” dice for the day if they aren’t rolling well. Understanding probability doesn’t really affect this.
I also have one special set of dice. The first dice I ever bought, a pair of D10s I got for MERP. I only ever use them for GMing, and woe betide any who try to touch them.
My dice are mostly purple, but I have a couple random colored d20s that I picked up when my purple ones were misbehaving.
My claim to fame is the dice penguin:
http://geeksdreamgirl.com/2008/03/04/dice-bag-i-dont-need-no-stinkin-dice-bag/
Geek’s Dream Girls last blog post..I have a LAIR!
AH!…the penguin reminds me…I had forgotten the Porcelain Hamburger I keep me dice inside of…the top is hinged to the bottom and I’ll occasionally use it to talk to my dice when they’re being naughty…
You’d think I’d have remembered something like that…though, it has been awhile since I’ve had to scold me dice…
Hello.
My name is Graham. And I have a Dice Fetish.
I don’t have any strange rituals, though when I’m bored at the table I will occasionally place them highest number up. No ritual involved in it, just idle hands.
No, I just really like dice.
I have two sets of “player” dice. If someone needs dice, they can ask and borrow them (taking without asking is just kinda rude, no matter what you’re dealing with, though if someone just grabs a die for a roll, who cares). These are dark (black with speckles of green or blue).
I have a set of DM dice. These are red. They didn’t start as DM dice, but I bought them once I had started DMing, and haven’t used them for anything else. Since I got them, I haven’t used my player dice for DMing.
I have a bunch of extra d6’s. Important in a 3e game. These are role-independent.
And I have a new set of dice. My 4e dice. I bought them after game day, and will be using them in 4e. I won’t be playing 4e for a couple months, however. They haven’t been removed from their box, and won’t be until my first 4e game. These are also dark, and will be player dice.
And I don’t have enough dice. 4 sets plus extra d6’s, yet not nearly enough.
I will change dice when one is rolling poorly. I will be sure to roll on a hard surface whenever possible.
And then… then there are these guys.
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20060609a
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20060908a
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20061020a
3 articles, done by WotC a while ago. The first is WotC staffers, the second is letters from players. The third is small and at the bottom of the article, but is awesome.
So yeah, there are a lot of people with really weird dice habits.
Dice? What are those?
Seriously, my dice have always hated me. Ok, maybe not *me*, but certain characters I’ve had. I had a barbarian with some kick ass skills, but because of The Dice, it seemed like he could never fight his way out of a paper bag. One of my Kindred, on the other hand, has always made some astounding rolls which earned him the nickname of Mr. Lucky.
In the couple of years I’ve gone to GenCon, I’ve found myself collecting dice and then wondering why the hell I was doing that – considering I don’t play tabletop anymore and our style of pbp gaming has very little call for dice rolls.
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@Kavonde: totally! because how else do the dice know what to roll or who to roll it for?! 😀
though I suspect what really shows my dice fetish is the sheer number of them 😀 and that I always carry at least one with me (just in case 🙂 )
I don’t think my group has any particular rituals per se. We don’t generally share dice unless someone is painfully short on them, and nowadays we play over the internet, so it’s less possible anyway.
There is a tremendous aversion to electronic dice rolling. Although many players seem to roll in the 16-20 range a lot more often since we stopped being able to see their rolls.
Buddha, one of the players, will often wing a d20 across the room when he fails an important check, and I don’t really recall him often trying to recover said die. It’s just dead to him.
I have a pair of simple, single-color treasure dice; d10s for D&D 3.5 treasure tables. One is yellow with black numbers, the other black with yellow numbers. My players used to sincerely hope that I had not planned out a treasure every time I DMed. These dice would consistently roll the most insane things ever for treasure. Any other time and they were all ones and twos, but at one point, someone got a sword with a total enchantment of +8 around level five or six due to these things. The specifics there might be a little off, but the idea is correct.
This is a fun comment section to read.
Dadamhs last blog post..Skipping Time
There is nothing too extreme in my group, but I’ll mention a few. I usually line up the dice by size (d4, d6, etc.), but just to make it faster to roll. I have a little obsessive compulsive disorder, so everything needs to be in it’s place and easily accessible. I own several sets of dice, so loaning is not a problem, as long as my currently used dice are the same color.
One guy in our group had two large bags of dice. His ‘loaner’ bag, full of random dice, and ‘his’ bag, full of black dice with difficult-to-read numbers that no one was allowed to touch. He always seemed to roll well, too. He also made a ritual of dumping them out from a generous height onto the table, resulting in at least a few falling off.
Another guy had a dice for every type of roll. One for attack rolls, proficiency checks (2E), saving throws, etc. He also had back-ups incase a new type of roll was needed. I have no idea how he could remember them all, but he did.
Most others I know have their own set and a loaner set, and they are not too picky about letting others use them.
I have one thought for some of you – What do you do with your old dice if you replace them yearly at a convention, or at the start of a new campaign? If I did that’ I would have 30+ sets! Might I suggest giving them to newbies that don’t own dice yet, either in a gaming group, convention, or hobby store? It could perk their interest, adding another gamer to the world from the generosity they received from one.
I use a different d20 for each character that matches their personality.
After my turn, I will reroll each die until I get a 1 and then leave it face up. My theory is that I’ll roll 1s less in game since my last roll (out of game) is always a one.
Well, when I first started playing D&D, I didn’t have my own dice, so I used some of the DM’s ‘house dice’ – he had his own that he didn’t let anyone touch, and everyone else sort of had the same concept – you don’t touch someone else’s dice. Years later, when I started running a campaign for my fiancé and a couple of friends, there was only one other person besides me that had any dice at all – and he is vehemently opposed to anyone touching any of his dice, even to move them out of the way, or use them as ‘counters’, so I had to get over that taboo real quick so that people could roll. Now that everyone has their own dice, it no longer really matters to me, but I’ve had the same dice for years now, and don’t throw away, or destroy any that ‘fail to perform’. That seems like a big waste of money to me.
First, a warm and hearty welcome to all newcomers that stopped and commented here. I had no idea I’d get so many cool responses on such a post… (Thanks for keeping things entertaining while I’m doing other stuff… I’ll be back soon!)
I accumulate older dice sets in a large clear plastic box and I dip in them whenever I need to roll multiple dice. Your suggestion is definitively a good one and I would consider doing it in the next Montreal Con I attend.
My mom just started a small business: handmade cloth toys for infants. She made my 3 month-old son a set of soft building blocks. She has no higher education to speak of, but on a whim she wondered if it was possible to make a “block” with pentagonal sides. She played with the idea for a couple of days and generated a perfect little dodecahedron. When she presented it to my son, I got to tell her that she’d reinvented a basic Platonic solid and busted out my old dice to illustrate. She was so tickled (who wouldn’t be to find out they’re basically a closet geometric genius 🙂 ) that she now makes all five solids, with little numbers on them if requested. From now on, I can say my son got his first dice set at three months old.
His dice fetish? Chewing on them.
Your son wins the Super Secret Bacon prize!
Not many win it. It’s Chatty’s secret order of Super Minions… Shhh.
I think my best dice story is that my old roommate and I taught our cat how to roll dice. My first campaign that I DMed we all let the cat roll the dice for us. It’s a little weird to look back and realize that the fate of all the PCs and NPCs rested solely on a little gray fuzzball of a kitten. lol
mmmmm… bacon. Does anyone have bacon colored dice? I could see that.
I’ve not got a dice fetish, well, maybe a mild one. In one campaign, I play a druid with an animal companion and a cohort, so I have to bring 3 sets with me, color-coded for each character. I also have a convention set (all bigger than 1″, so I will have to work at losing them), a traveling set, and a DM set (all the loose ones I’ve collected). I also keep a mug full of only d6, for my board-wargaming.
I’ve known people to punish ‘bad’ dice by putting them in the freezer, and women to reward ‘good’ dice with a visit to an occupied bra.
That has got to be the weirdest thing I read all day! Are we now assuming that dice are male (or lesbians?)
No wonder chattydm.net ranks #1 for Dice Fetish on Google…
I don’t really have a dice fetish, but I do have a ritual that started when I started DMing.
I don’t roll dice without a roll of masking tape. I set the roll of masking tape in front of me and line up one of each of my dice around the edge. I always place them highest side up, and I always place my d20 closest to me. Then, when I need to roll a die, I just knock it into the hole in the middle. That way, it never bounces off the table, never bounces into a crack or rolls where I don’t want it to. I’ll pull the die back up and set it on the edge with whatever I rolled last in case I need to repeat something to a player. My players have actually asked for their own rolls of masking tape now.
At my last game, I discovered I roll better when I roll at the minis (preferably knocking into them). 🙂
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I also perform the common ritual of aligning all of my dice in a neat pattern with the highest number on top during a game, but with an added twist: I do it on top of a small laminated prayer card depicting St. Michael the Archangel slaying a demon. “Mike” lives in the dice bag between games, where he can help train the dice to perform well in the noble cause of killing bad guys. Occasionally, he gets passed around the table so that other players who have been getting a series of bad rolls can roll their dice on top of the card and pick up some of Mike’s evil-smiting mojo.
Yup, we sure could use more Smiting Angels around our table!
Good one Cat!
I tend to switch dice if I am rolling badly with them. A friend of mine claims that washing your dice makes a difference as the oils from you fingers can cause issues with your dice.