Here's a trick for making paper dice

[dagobahdave]

Before this occurred to me, I thought paper dice were pointless. They're too light and they don't roll well, and they don't last a long time.

The answer is to fill them with unpopped popcorn, lentils, or some other dry grain that doesn't spoil. Fill them 3/4 of the way. (Shake them before you glue the last tab shut. They should make a nice rattling sound.)

Surprisingly, I've been using the same cardstock dice for a month without any major wear. They don't seem to be lop-sided or anything. They're about as good as any plastic dice I own, and I can make as many copies as I want.

Making custom dice is awesome if you're designing your own games. Being able to control the distribution of numbers (or words, or symbols, or whatever) on your gaming dice will let you do some really cool stuff.

Just something I thought I'd pass along! If you have any paper dice tricks, share them! Or else! Exclamation points!

[Satrek]

Thanks, that's good to know. One would think that the dice would be sloppy and off with such a fill, but the more I think about it the more I believe that they might actually have a big advantage for small/crowded tables - they shoudln't rull/jump too far, thus reducing the numbers of players lost unter the sofa in search for their dice... Just guessing, though, I don't have any handy .

[dagobahdave]

Yeah, it's true that they don't roll very far. But they just beg to be shaken (and shaken well), so you don't need them to tumble all over the table.

With plastic dice, I'm always throwing them off the table. Paper dice with ballast do seem to stay put a lot better.

[Satrek]

I can see it already, the new game of the season: Hazard Dicing - played on any table littered with candles, bowls of sticky beverages and - for the daring - puddles of burning oil. Not the one who rolls highest wins, but the one who can roll longest...

Looking at what I just wrote all I can say is TGIF .

[kiladecus]

AWESOME idea, DAVE!

I had requested some scatter dice on a different forum MONTHS ago, and everyone said it was stupid and pointless...

Now, I can see the idea having NEW life breathed into it!

BTW, what I was looking for was dice that had the basic 1-5, BUT having an arrow on it, facing upwards. The "6" would have an "X", crosshair, or exposion on it.

The premise behind it is, you roll ONE die and it deviates THAT many inches in the direction that arrow is pointing. The "6" results in a "HIT." (Maybe have the 1 and the 6 be "HITS." I dunno).

I would like to have SEVERAL of these dice (similar to Dave's style) that looks like they are metal, with chipped paint, or whatever, and each one has a different color (or shape for those color-blind folks, like one of the guys in my gaming group), so that way, if you are firing SEVERAL artillery weapons at one time, you can drop ONE die for each, and there you have it. Just assign a die color/shape for each weapon.

OK... does that seem like a good idea to anyone else?

If you wanted to make a set of these, Dave, if you can post them and sell them... let me know! I would BUY a set as soon as they hit the market!

[cowboyleland]

Cool idea Kil, you could even customise the dice depending on the skill of your artillery crews. BTW when D&D first came out we made our own paper polyhedral dice. We decided that the fair way to "roll" was to spin the dice in the air.