OK, I kid......but what I'm leading up to is the simple fact that I'm a dice snob. I have a ton of dice and I have purchased a wide array of dice.....I do have some cool ones in my collection, but......BUT I generally only game with one brand of dice: Gamescience.
I do believe dice can be lucky or unlucky and in general I am superstitious when it comes to my dice. I have lucky charms and once I even had my dice cursed and had to do a lot to remove said curse. Now I *know* that most of these beliefs are probably BS and most of my experience in the matter is anecdotal. I also know that run-of-the-mill dice have their flaws. When I was taking Statistics in college I did a few stat experiments where I rolled all of my then-normal (ie. not Gamescience) a few hundred times and recorded the results. Sure enough, my "lucky" dice had an abnormally high distribution and the "unlucky" dice had an abnormally low distribution.
Now I used to run into "Col." Lou Zocchi pretty much every year I went to Origins. Great guy, will talk your ear off for 20' and you'll enjoy most every second of it. He'll gladly go over his spiel about how Gamescience dice roll true compared to "regular" dice, and I believe every bit of it. Everything jives with my personal experience and when I replicated my stats experience I got a pretty equal distribution of numbers, not unlike the experiment done over at the Awesome Dice blog.
Somewhere in my house I have a metric butt-ton of GS dice from when I played HackMaster 4th Edition. I needed a LOT of d4's and d6's for my DS Invoker, between penetration dice and the fact that I just did a lot of dice-worth of damage. My current dice set, pictured below, is what I've been using for the last couple years.....mostly because those other dice are MIA, most likely in a box somewhere.
You'll note that I have basically two sets of green dice, four different d10's and a couple d30's. One set of green dice was a gift for my birthday (maybe my 40th?) from Barbara Blackburn. Anyone who knows Barb, except for Ken Whitman, knows she's a freakin sweetheart, so I'm using the hell out of those dice. I bought the second set because I rolled a lot of pairs of dice for the new HackMaster game....which is why I also have the four extra d10's, so I can roll a d 1,000 (red, orange, yellow, & blue).
Now those d30's...those are near and dear to me for sure. Some of you might know I do some d30 stuff. I have a few d30's, but not like these. I'm not quite sure how the whole Gamescience company sale from Lou to whoever owns it now went down...I heard he got it back at some points, but I really don't know squat about it. I just remember that Lou was selling older dice he had made and Gamescience had a separate dice selling booth at the con. Anyway, I went to Lou to buy more dice that I didn't need and I wanted some more d30's. Unfortunately he was all out, not just of his convention stock, but everything he had & would ever have. The live dungeon folks had come through and bought him out. I was pretty bummed, but not much I could do.....I BSed with the Colonel for a while and wished him well.
Two days later as I'm walking the hall seeing if I could find any last-day-of-the-con deals, Zocchi stops me at his booth. While he was packing up he happened to find two.....2! more d30's. These were no-kidding his last two d30's. The green-ish one was a normal dice, but the yellow....the yellow was very old, one of his earliest designs. Instead of being numbered 1-30 it is number 1-10 three times, with one set having a "-" and one a "+".
Most of my dice are inked with a permanent marker, but the d30's are "inked" "old-school" using a black china pen, which is essentially an adult art crayon.
So what's the current status of Gamescience? Who's running it right now, and why can't they manage to keep any kind of consistent product in stock? All they ever seem to have is a small smattering of some random stuff.
ReplyDeleteThey are having issues with the age of the molds. Currently the molds they are using are the originals. They mold layout was not designed with flow patterns, etc... Its being ran by the general manager and he doesn't want to send out bad dice.
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