These Are My Dice

There are many dice like them, but these are my dice.

I don’t think that Gamers are any more superstitious than any other group but I have noticed that Gamers have very strong ties with their dice. It’s like any ritual a sports fan goes through before watching The Big Game or that lucky vest a hunter wears when they are sitting out in their blind. Does reciting that age old ditty or making sure your lucky tchotchke is on hand really increase the odds that good things will happen? Probably not…but you never know for certain. It seems almost Neanderthal to believe in crossed fingers and prayers to the traffic gods to keep that light green until you clear the intersection, but you do it anyway. In the end, the lizard part of your brain would feel much better if you would just go get the cheese hat and put it on.

DON’T TOUCH MY DICE!! This isn’t one of my “things” but I have known enough people who do have this as their “thing” that I’ve learned to never touch before asking. Crossing that dice barrier can be really tricky to recover from if you are playing with someone who has a “Don’t touch. Ever” policy.

Anybody BUT the GM can borrow my dice Yeeeeeah…I’m not saying that I’ll never let a GM touch my dice but I have been known to place that set of dice aside for a while until they “cool off”. What? Do you know how many times I’ve had a set of GM touched dice roll poorly when they came back?

You will sit over there until you have learned you lesson, young die! Occasionally a die has to have a time out to think about how its been rolling. As a corollary, this sometimes leads to chucking the ill behaving die across the room so the rest of the lot can…

See what happened to that die? The rest of you will straighten up and fly right or I’ll do the same to the next one that rolls like that! I’ve seen it done.

The more the merrier! I’ve heard say you can game with only one set of dice but if you bring two you can trade off when one set starts getting tired. It’s like football; you want to have your second string team fresh and ready for the field.

All together now… Is it just me or does it feel weird to randomly pick dice from all your different sets to make up your working set of dice? Hey, if they weren’t supposed to be used together than they wouldn’t have been made all matchy. Besides, I personally think a set of dice works better together as a team than a random drawing of dice. I also believe plaids and paisleys should never be worn together. It’s just common sense.

Priming the dice or wasting that roll? This is two sides of the same coin. Some people will roll their dice until they land on a good number and then leave them that way. The theory being that the die now knows the target number and will be more inclined to roll that way. Other people believe that rolling a die like that will run down that die’s energy and it won’t be inclined to roll well.

This is how we roll. I have seen many different complicated methods of shaking a die before the actual roll. What works best? I think only the dice really know that answer. I will say that I whole heartedly agree that designating an “in bounds” space for a die’s landing zone and only rolling at the time you need to roll keeps the game from going pear shaped. Then again I played with a habitual die fudger so that might just be my learned quirk.

This is my favorite set of dice. They don’t roll any better or worse than any of my (many) other sets but they make me smile. Something about the unattractive combination of color reminds me of those big blocky multi-colored crayons you used to get in kindergarten and that just brightens my day. Awww yeah, ugly dice.

How about you? Got any particular dice habits?

-JQuirk