I might need some more dice.  What do you think?

I come from the old school of role-playing gamers.  I got my start in the mid-70’s with Dungeons and Dragons and branched out enough that through the early 90’s I could honestly say I had played every tabletop RPG on the market.*

And with great numbers of games came great numbers of dice.  Dice by the set.  Dice by the handful.  Dice by the bag.  I’ve bought dice for new campaigns, dice that matched the colors of my alma mater (Cal), dice for travel, dice because I needed them, and dice because they looked cool.  From loaner sets to sets even my wife doesn’t get to roll, I still have every die I’ve ever bought, found or been given.

I have decrepit TSR dice from 1976; the d20 looks like a scuffed white marble, with yellow and black markings whose numerical values lost their legibility long ago.  I have dice a random gamer thrust into my hand at a DunDraCon in the early 80’s without explanation.  “Here, take them!” was all he said before he stormed off.  I have dice I’ve bought at flea markets and thrift stores because I couldn’t stand to see them abandoned.

I have sixteen-sided dice (not pictured – I didn’t feel like digging them up) that came with an obscure, mail-order-only science fiction game I picked up back in ’93 (Metascape – Guild Space.  Apparently it still exists!).  I have custom dice that came with out-of-print games I may never get to play again.

I have thirty-sided dice I bought for no other reason than that I found out they were available.  I invented tables just to use them.  I bought a one-hundred-sided die for the novelty of enjoying a die roll that lasts for minutes (that old TSR d20 doesn’t count, and neither does the d12 – they no longer produce usable results).

When I started playing FUDGE I knew I would need FUDGE dice.  I now have seven sets, including the gold set I saw at the last Pacificon and bought “because they were on sale.”  I bought dice over Thanksgiving because I “forgot” to pack any when I flew down to the Bay Area.

I rarely leave a convention without new dice.  Heck, I have trouble getting out of Powell’s without at least looking at the dice, even when I’m not there for game books.

These days I could roll dice on my phone or tablet, and I have the apps to do it, but as I learned with the Dragonbone dice wands in the 80’s, nothing could replace the feel of dice shaking in my cupped hands, the look and sound of them bouncing and clacking on a table (or in my dice tower), the excitement of that first look at the results.

My baseball cards are long gone, but my dice remain.  What about you?  What do you collect?

*I’m not sure anyone can make that claim anymore, given the number of independents and free online games.

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