An interesting variation on my design:
As others have said, crystal dice/barrel dice/cylinder dice/whatever have been relatively common in tabletop gaming for years:
ā¦but gamers do love our novelty dice, and this one is pretty cool. Iād get one if I regularly played anything that required d3s specifically. Iāve already got one awesome-but-useless die (a quarter-pound golf-ball-sized solid metal d20 named Tablecrusherāno oneās ever let me play with it) and I should probably leave it at that.
(The real problem with barrel dice is that the high-numbered ones are basically cylinders, and are prone to rolling and rolling right off the table. Anything up to a d8 or so works all right, though.)
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Okay, who let the hobbit in the party?
No no, a real wizards uses d4!
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Yes, but itās to create a conventional cube die with 1,1,2,2,3,3 or to substract 3 from 4,5, or 6ā¦
A 3D printed die, that no-one can be sure of the balance of? I canāt see them being popular in gaming communities.
And its not like no-one has made a D3 before, eitherā¦ http://www.dicecollector.net/JM/D3.HTM
Personally, I love A, D and E.
I spent the day yesterday taking some out-of-town work colleagues to the Field Museum (among other places). While we were in the Egyptian section I told them a bit about the Oriental Museum, which we wouldnāt get to that day. So now today, when I see this thread, I canāt help but think about the archeologists of the future who will someday dig up all our gaming dice and then try to piece together what sort of games they could have possibly been used for. Or, conversely, maybe we have now solved the answer for what games the ancient civilizations in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent were playing.
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Based on what archaeologists say now, my guess would be something something religious ritual.
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I doubt theyāre worse than the common tumbler-smoothed plastics that 95% of the gaming community already uses. Look up one of Lou Zocchiās dice-construction rants sometimeāthereās a reason Vegas dice all have sharp edges.
Nah.
A poor sport would point out how versatile number wheels with clicky pointers can be. Want two equal possibilities? You got it! Want two possibilities where one is 60% and the other 40%? You got it! Want three equal possibilities? How about three possibilities 25%, 32%, and 43%? Fuck yeah! Itās a goddamn wheel! You can see the ratios! The thing itself can be a pie chart for its own probabilities! Circles are madness! MADNESS!!! Is a number wheel a two dimensional thing that operates in one dimension? Maybe!! I donāt know, ask someone better at math definitions.
Quick, get rid of all the Chick tracts!
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Yeah, because when I played D&D as a kid there is no way we had some dice that had werenāt quite perfectly balanced.
More importantly if someone in your party or gaming group is super concerned about balance to the point of being irritating about it, heās not the sort of person Iād be bothering to play with.
My solution would be a little solar-charged Arduino box with a heat-sensitive button as the random number seed. Throw it in a 3D-printed box and it out-geeks anything in this thread, IMOā¦ naturally, itād be called The Whole Box & Dice.
I liked @spazmodius93 's point about number wheels, thoughā¦ you can get little touchscreens for Arduinos, but thatās a whole lot more code, and a little solar cell probably wouldnāt cut itā¦
I think the design is slightly flawed. I would expect the numbers to be fine on the face for even sided dice, but for odd sided dice the numbers really need to be marked on the edges in some way. In the metallic example above it looks like the dice is resting on 1 with no easy way to distinguish between 4 and 5 on top.
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