Dice-collecting

And now that I have a new dice box, my mail-ordered Chessex Pound-o-Dice arrived this afternoon!

Not that there is anything wrong with having spare dice on hand, especially if you do a lot of game demos and tend to have shrinkage in your dice inventory; but I was a tad skeptical about just what sorts of dice would come in the potluck mix. I imagined these would be the "unpopular" styles that inevitably turn up in the "cursed dice" loaner bucket at the game shop. Boy was I pleasantly surprised.

Before I go on, I must mention that my set was the "premium" Pound-O-Dice, which Chessex made temporarily available because their usual stocks of ordinary pounds-o-dice had run out. Unlike the normal pound of factory-second assorted dice, the premium deal gets you (for the same price as the usual deal) a pound of factory-firsts, but the styles are all out of current production. The normal Pound-o-Dice should be returning to availablenessity (according to the enclosed note in my bag) in November 2008.

Here is a breakdown of what values of dice came in my particular mix.

• 31 d20s
• 31 d10s
• 5 d10s "double zero"
• 7 d12s
• 8 d4s
• 2 d8s
• 11 d6s "pips"
• 1 d6 "numbers"

In addition to the above dice, each set comes with a special factory-firsts envelope of speckly dice that can only be gotten in the Pound-O-Dice.

That's 102 dice..all full-sized and in a nice variety of styles. Now as the Chessex site states, the Pound-0-Dice is made of factory seconds and the assortment will likely be scantt on the lighter dice like d4s and d8s.

Of course, Garish and I both got "pick of the litter" before putting the rest into the communal dice box. Here's my picks.

Three matched d6s like this just SCREAMED "character dice" to me.

This was the only one of this style...but again, it's made of pure pretty.

And these were the closest thing I found to my swirl dice. I call 'em "blurple swurl"

Ahh yes..the d12..the barbarian's best friend. When you're rolling up your hit-dice..or hitting your dungeonmaster with your greataxe, who says you can't be pretty while doing so.

Then there's Garish's picks, since this was his idea.

The lighting here does not do these justice.

It's a shame this was the only one and is, according to the enclosed note, out of production...else Garish would be ordering more to fill out a complete set.

OH... and while we're on the subject of dice, here are some others (NOT by Chessex) I picked up a few years back.

These are what you should be using when you roll for the attitudes of NPCs. But these dice really work. Each single dot, dash or symbol represents a pip. For instance, the one in the middle with the party-hat is a 6..the one with glasses to the left is a 2, and happyface on the right is a 4.

Anyway, tomorrow night is our next scheduled game-night for Swords & Wizardry, so I get to give these dice and my new box a proper try-out. Hopefully these rookies will do well and keep my character from being eaten by a purple worm.