Hey all, Sam and David here.
Today is going to be a delightful and chaotic post. What a way to end the month of February. Dice are a staple in a large number of tabletop games, and we have each amassed quite a collection. So I thought it would be fun to talk about some of our favorite sets of dice and the companies that make them for this week’s post.
And I’m going to go ahead and let David go first…because even though I’m sure his photo isn’t quite ALL of his dice, I have a lot more to show off.
David
You would be correct in not assuming this is all my dice. There are some in various places around the house as well. Rolling physical dice is my most favorite part of any game I play that lets me use them. TTRPGs are a main one of course but a lot of other games use just dice, such as Zombie Dice, or classic Yahtzee.
I would consider myself a dice goblin since I like to collect all the “click clack math rocks”.
I have my favorites that I use depending on what I’m playing. If I am DMing a session i like to include my slime green dice (the bunch of d6s in the bottom left are what they look like) when I mean business. I tend to rotate between dice sets that I don’t use often when DMing as well so that all of them get some love.
As a player my dice selection will be determined by the character I will be playing. An example would be for my OC Bernhardt I tend to choose purples and pinks and anything sparkly for his entertainment background. For my OC Mikey I choose ones that have chaotic swirls of multiple colors for this little chaos gremlin. For my OC Thuldris I actually tended to use my metal dice or my ones that have little gears inside since she is an Artificer at heart.
When not playing TTRPGs I like to choose my “boring” basic colors to play with because you got to show all the dice some love from time to time. Oh and mind the d4s as you walk by.
Sam
I am a dice hoarder. I will go ahead and freely admit that I love collecting dice, and being able to have a bunch of dice that I can use with various characters or when in various moods. It also means that I have a lot of dice bags, because I need someplace to store my dice. Oh, and I have a few different dice trays as well.
And…oh darn…I just realized that I didn’t pull out all of my dice to show off. I have a dice bag filled with my miniature dice sets as well…if I find them, then I’ll do a special post on my Twitter and Instagram (@SamRushingBooks) to show the little cuties off.
I knew I was in for a ridiculous post when I started pulling out all of my dice containers. From the first photo, you can see that I have a lot of bags and boxes just filled with dice. Yes, I know I have a dice problem, and no, I have no plans to curb that particular habit. I buy dice when I see ones that speak to me (and when I have the money to add them to my collection).
The second photo is everything from my blue Bailey’s Bag of Holding. For the record, the bag is so full that the drawstring doesn’t exactly keep the bag safely closed. Which is definitely a sign that I need to get another bag, because I just keep getting more dice. I remember a few years ago I sorted all of the dice out by set so I could see how many of each color I have. I should probably do that again before the next Gen Con, just in case there’s any color gaps.
The third photo is a bunch of sets I got from Misty Mountain Gaming, and Q Workshop, and Chessex Lab Dice, and a cool stone mini set I picked up from Gen Con (and sadly can’t remember who I got them from). The Chessex Lab Dice were ones I picked up last year at Gen Con. Most of the Misty Mountain sets I picked up at various conventions across America last year…because sometimes retail therapy is the only thing to make you feel better.
Okay, these photos feature some of my special dice collections. So there’s dice from Everything Dice, Dispel Dice, FanRoll (Formerly Metallic Dice Games), Critical Role Dice, and PolyHero Dice.
So…the Everything Dice are the ones in the middle of the first photo…and these are not all of my dice, because I am waiting for my Kickstarter rewards to be shipped out. The Kickstarter rewards will be my first dice from this company that are the high quality ones. I usually buy from the discounted dice section, which feature the B and C grade dice…which are still completely beautiful, but don’t meet the quality standards they have. It’s why I would definitely recommend Everything Dice, because their dice are absolutely stunning.
The Fanroll set is the green liquid core set in the tin in the first photo, and it was my first liquid core set, and I picked it up at Gen Con last year. And there’s three sets from Dispel Dice here, and I have another set coming from their recently completed Elemental Dice Kickstarter.
Obviously I don’t have all of the Critical Role dice sets. There are dice sets for pretty much every one of the main characters from the first two campaigns. Right now I have Scanlan, Vex, Percy, Keyleth, and Pike from Campaign 1, and Caduceus and Yasha from Campaign 1. Plus I have the Vox Machina D20 set, the Wildemount Set, the Wildemount D20, and the original Critical Role set plus the 2017 live show variant. I plan to get the ones I don’t own yet, but that will be a little bit of a process.
The final photo are the fun/weirdo sets from PolyHero. I have a couple wizard sets, a couple rogue sets, and quite a few cleric sets. I think my favorites are the wizard hat D20, because it takes a while to land (It’s really fun for death saving throws), and the lock pick D20 because it is so super fun to roll, which is actually spinning it and then locking the roll into place.
These last two photos are dice I don’t have with my general collection because they’ve been pulled out for the campaigns I’m in…or was in until recently. Some dice become so linked to the character that I can’t just use them for anything.
The photo on the left is/was for my Aasimar Grave Cleric Mercy, who I absolutely loved playing. She had been growing a lot, and her dice collection was evidence of that. All her life Mercy had only been able to see black, white, and all the shades of gray in between, and that was how her dice started off (aside from that gold set because that is my “cleric” set). Depending on her mood at that current point in the campaign, the primary dice of a session might be the darker side of the spectrum or the lighter. But as she began to bond with others and learn more about herself, her companions, and the world around her, she started to see the world a bit differently. And to represent this world view, and to highlight that in dream/vision/communions with her deity she was sometimes given flashes of color, the dice collection started to shift and other colors started to creep in. I would have loved to see what the full campaign dice palate looked like, but the group stopped meeting regularly when David and I moved, and at the beginning of this year the group decided to just vote us out. And frankly, I’m still devastated about that decision.
The photo on the left is for a new character/campaign that we’re starting in our new home, with some of the new friends we’ve made. We only played one intro to TTRPGs session (while traveling from Iowa to Massachusetts for a convention), but everyone wants to turn it into a campaign. My character for this one is Calamity, an Elf Cleric, and aesthetically with her, I just felt that purples and blacks went with how I saw her in my mind. Obviously, this is the starting selection. I fully expect some dice to leave the collection and for others to join as we get more into the campaign and the characters and the story. So, perhaps down the line I’ll share another post, and we can see how Calamity has changed via the dice I use to play her.
If you’d like to show off your own dice collection, tag us on Twitter or Instagram so we can be sure to see them. David’s social media handle is @freestateofgeek and Sam’s is @SamRushingBooks. We’d love to interact with you on Twitter, Instagram, or at Free State of Geek on Facebook.
That is all from us for today. Thank you so much for stopping by, and we’ll be back soon with more geeky content.
Free State of Geek 