Dice filled with Dice!

My dice collection has grown!

When I saw these, I knew I would have to have one!



Games Workshop introduced these dice within dice packages recently. Someone should have thought of this long ago!

I bought a set of the black ones. At $6 it was pricey for some dice - but over priced is a hallmark of Games Workshop.

Of course, I tried rolling the full thing; I don't advise it. It is a fairly cheap plastic case, I doubt it will stand up to much torture. However, it did roll better unloaded than loaded. I think it might make a decent dice cup in a pinch.

However, as the catalog listing says, it can be used as a turn counter. I think this would be it's best secondary use, after keeping your dice tidy in your game bag. It's third use will be making your friends say "What a dork! He spent $6 for $2 worth of dice!"

Dice Shopping

As many of you are aware, I'm a dice collector. One of the most fun portions of the hobby for me are the shiny, colored bits of plastic and other materials. I loves me some dice!

A friend of a friend put together a Vampire game and I was invited. I couldn't make it due to a cold, but that's another story.

I have in the past had trouble playing Vampire and other World of Darkness games. Why? Not enough dice! Specifically, d10s. The Storyteller game system is d10 based. For whatever reason, I'm always short on d10s.

A few years ago, someone wanted to play Vampire. I raided my Black & White dice set and came up with ... four d10s. Sure, I could have gotten away with just one, just lots of re-rolling. But, it's better to have some extras.

At this point, dice were rare in this town. Wizard's of the Coast had just closed down their gaming shops. When WotC opened their shops, they drove most of the little mom & pop shops out of business and there were no shops on-line. I finally went to Barnes and Noble - I found a set of brown dice branded for Werewolf. That was the one and only set of dice they had. I just couldn't buy brown dice - I have a color coordination thing about dice. I'm a freak, yes.

I finally managed to find ten d10s in speckled blue. They were okay, but they were not my thing. They have sat on a shelf for years and I will probably donate them to the group once I get to play with them.

So, with this recent game, I looked around my dice again. I still have the blue d10s. I think I have fewer d10s in my Black & White set now than then. I then broke into my Purple set. How many d10s do I have? Five. Five!

Actually, I had 10, but they were matched sets of d10s and dTENS (numbered 10 to 00). So, either I was going to have to buy more d10s for one of my sets or .... !

I bought a ring a while back, it was delivered in a small, velvet drawstring bag. The smallest dice bag ever! In my Purple set, I have some mini (12mm) pearl dice. They are so cool, tiny and easy to carry and use. It occurred to me, I bet they make d10s in this size!



Of course they do! Good luck finding them!

My search began at an online dice shop that I found a while back and fell in love with: Advancing Hordes. They had a beautiful little shop and I loved their set up. However, by the time I had found them online, Uncle's Games had begun opening stores in the area, and they usually have a decent selection of dice. If you click on the AH link you will see the first stumbling block in my quest for the mini dice - Advancing Hordes is gone. I never bought a thing from them and now I almost feel responsible. I wish it hadn't been so.

As much as I regret the loss of a store I never shopped at, I still didn't have the dice. I went scouting around the Internet. I quickly remembered Dice Pool. They had the pearl minis! Yea! They didn't have the purple d10s! D'oh! I nearly bought the white ones and called it good.

I spent a whole night looking all over the place and came up snake eyes. The next day, I called Uncle's to see if they had any in stock. They didn't. Could they order for me - I had a number from the manufacturer's catalog (I just LOVE the Internet!). They said they would try to get something from their distributor and give me a call back.

Time passed. No call from Uncle's and it had been nearly two weeks. The game finally had a first date and I hadn't caught my cold yet so I wanted to have the dice before the game. I called Uncle's, but, to coin a phrase, no dice! They were just too rare to get from their distributors.

On a whim, I rechecked Dice Pool. They claimed to get new inventory about once a week. They had them!! I was hoping to buy 20, fill that little bag. They only had one set - so I bought another set of polyhedrals.

The dice arrived very quickly. I was totally impressed. Lots of email confirmations to let me know everything was going well - from order to shipping. In short, Dice Pool was great to work with and I would totally buy from them again.

I now have a bonsai dice set! It's very cool! I'll get a pic of it up soon.

For my birthday, I want metal dice!


Editorial Update:

I decided to alert DicePool that I had done a blog post about my satisfaction with their service. This is the email I recieved in return:

Date: Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 11:55 AM
Subject: Re: A Question About dicepool.com


Jericho,

I've been meaning to reply to your email, but we've been really busy.

Thanks for your positive feedback. Right now we're in the middle of
relaunching our store with a new set of features. We're down right
now, but we'll be back today or tomorrow. I just wanted to let you
know that if you or anyone else need dice that we're out of stock or
low on, let us know. We can even make special orders if you need
larger quantities that we normally stock, or we can tell you when the
dice you're looking for are back on our shelves.

Jack
dicepool.com

Dice Stacking?

Okay, I know we have been on a dice kick for a while with only a brief interruption, but I just had to show these off!







Do that the next time someone wants you to roll 4d6!!!

Too much time on Ebay!

We've been on a dice kick for a few posts. We'll cover other topics soon, I swear.

Now, I've shown you most of my dice collection. So, I guess that makes me a dice collector - but not like this guy!

Kevin Cook has held the Guinness Book record for the largest dice collection. He has just about every die you can imagine. Dice made of stone, bone, metal, precious stones, one of a kind prototypes, Roman era dice and just about everything else.

So, now I know what happened to all the dice I lost!

Dice Part 2 ...

I want to make this a regular segment! I love dice! I want to see pictures of your dice. Please take a (really good) picture of your collection. Put it up somewhere I can have a look at it, a web site, MySpace, LJ, Yahoo Briefcase or whatever. Leave a comment below telling us where to find the picture and a little about your collection. I'll put the best pictures here on the site.

Today, we'll be looking at my new Purple collection.



No die in this collection is more than 5 years old. The collection started with the mini-dice. I bought this set several years ago as I was about to start gaming with a new group. I had never met them, ran into one of them on-line somehow. They invited me to play D&D.

I bought a (very) used 2nd edition DMG and PH. All I had was those two books and a notebook. Normally when I go gaming, I'm the GM, and I arrive with ten books, a huge bag of dice and pencils and paper for everyone. So, since I had such a small load, I thought a new set of tiny dice would be great. I was right. It was easy having just the dice I needed.

Unfortunately, the group and I differed on gaming styles. Week one, we wrote up characters for D&D. Week two, we began to set up characters for a game system one of the players was writing, but instead we watched Dogma. Week three, they decided they wanted to play Mage - I went out and bought more used books. We didn't get through character creation before a couple of guys in the group started fighting. Old friends! I don't remember week four - I may not have gone over. And, well, that was that. I like character creation as much as the next player - but then I like to PLAY those characters.

This dice set has something of a curse in that direction. This set grew up about a year ago. A friend decided to run the Serenity role playing game. I took my wife (a non-gamer) to several different game shops, looking for the book, hoping to avoid the wait for delivery. No book. However, as I said last post, I like to buy a little something if I go into a game shop. By the time I was done, I had two sets of polyhedrals, three sets of d6s and a dice bag - all from different stores. In the end, I bought the book from Amazon, paid $13 less than cover, paid no shipping and it arrived in about three days. And we all wonder why the Friendly Local Game Shop is vanishing from the landscape?

I got prop crazy with that game. I found a site with prop Serenity money. So, I printed out hundreds of thousands of credits - in color no less! Then we decided that we needed coins to represent what was traded outside the Federation. So I went on a quest for plastic coins. In the end, I had a zip-top freezer bag filled with silver Mardi Gras "throws" and gold Chinese New Year throws from two different on-line stores and some gold "pirate chest filler" coins from a local party store.

That group got together twice. I showed up with a character fully written up with pages of back story. I was the only one. The rest of the group began writing. The next time we got together, the rest of the group was still writing. This was the week I showed up with the printed cash and a couple of cheap poker sets (for the poker chips) - we also decided that week we should have the coins. We got in about an hour of gaming, maybe.

In the year since, that group hasn't figured out how to get back together. I still have the zip-top bag of coins. I think I may take them out this coming Marti Gras and throw them at random people. Might as well get some fun out of them ...

Dice!

The title of the site is Dusty Dice, right? So, I thought I'd show off my dusty collection! I've always thought of myself as something of a collector. Being a dice collector was the inspiration for the site's name.

Anyway, we'll start off with my "Black and White" set.



These are my second oldest set of dice. My oldest set are the multiple colored, old school dice that came with my D&D boxes. Those dice are still buried in my stuff at my parent's place. Maybe someday I'll find a way to show those off here.

The Black and White set was slowly collected between 1988 to just a few years ago. I have probably lost more dice than I have retained. Where do all the dice we gamers lose end up???

I always felt that if I walked into a game store - I had to buy something. Even if it was just a single die. So, I made it easy on myself. Everyone sells black and white dice.

Why two bags? I had been using a subset of this collection for gaming, those went into the purple bag. The black bag is a bag I bought in the early 90's to support my collecting habit. These dice would completely fill one of those bags.

On top of the bags we have some over sized d6s and a huge d20. That d20 is about the size of a racket ball. Those are all fairly new. Just to the right of those is a d34. Why a d34? Why not? I bought it at a game shop in West Seattle not long after moving out here, probably '97 or so. It serves no purpose.

To the right of that is four d30s. One of those is actually smoke, not black, white or clear. I have a set of translucent smoke mini-dice that didn't get into the picture. If you have clear dice in a black and white set, you can have trans-black, too, right?

To the right of that are some pipped d10s - don't see those too often. A pair of blank dice to the right of that. Those are fun to use with a dry erase marker or if you are using a GM screen, and you want your players to think you rolled for something when you didn't, they make a good noise. Plus, they make your players worry about your sanity.

Speaking of worrying your players ... I play a lot of GURPS, usually as the GM. If you are GMing a game where you use a lot of d6s, buy some with skulls on them. In GURPS, a 3 is a critical success. Nothing like rolling three skulls and smiling at the player you just turned into paste!

Just to the left of the skulls are some d3s. These do have a use. I have used them often. I found those in a Milton Bradley board game I bought on the clearance rack about the time Top Gun was in the theaters (the game was jet fighter based) - the game sucked by the dice have been useful.

Between the d20s and d12s is a spherical d6. I used to have three of those. It works, it's a little hard to read. I keep it around more as a funny than anything else. Below that is one of those old school d6s, I bought it in the very late 80s. It still has the white crayon I wiped over the numbers to "paint" them - very old school! Those old school dice are very popular again.

Speaking of old school, to the right is a white d10x10, aka a Deckaider. That was the first Deckaider on the market. It, too, still has the black crayon I rubbed on it. That die has gotten a lot of use. I was so happy when this die came out, no more having to declare which die was the 10s and which was the 1s. This die is still on the market, albeit with ink.

Just below that are six off-white pipped d6s. They are actually light green - they glow in the dark. I bought them a few Halloweens back for a laugh.

I'm just amazed by how many dice I have bought and only these few remain. Oh well! Just means I need to buy more!

Next time I'll show off my Purples!