Sunday 14 February 2016

More dice!

One of my colleagues may have discovered I own quite a lot of dice. He may then have got himself more dice than he needed for Christmas, and decided the sensible thing to do would be to give the excess dice to me. This might mean I now have a drawer full of dice at work...

My dice collection has grown extensively since I last discussed it. I was pretty good with the dice my friend gave me: the prettiest have come home with me, and the rest are in my drawer waiting for me to find a use for them. Maybe by finding other people who want some, or maybe we can use them instead of cards for playing 'planning poker' now we've moved to an Agile/Scrum working method. Or maybe some other use entirely will arise.
 
And talking about dice is nice and easy because I don't need to worry about laws of narrative or telling a good story or anything else that, while enjoyable, involves more thinking than I have right now.
 
So, here's my complete Blood Bowl collection:
 
There's a griffin die you might just be able to see toward the top left - I thought I'd taken a better shot of it, but can't find it if I did. I must have picked this up by accident years ago and have been trying to track down it's owner since I found it in my collection. If anyone knows whose it is and can help me return it I'd be grateful!
 
My collection breaks down roughly as follows:

Blocking Dice
Nothing new here.
And these are from the Australian Open. I thought I had a set in a bone colour too, but it seems I was wrong. We've not actually been to the Australian Open: these were an ARBBL spot prize. I've met several Aussie players, though, between the 2 World Cups I've made it to, and if I ever make it to Aus/NZ, I'll definitely be looking to play some Blood Bowl while I'm there.

Misc Dice
Mostly d8's for scatters as explained before, also the injury dice. The d12 is useful at tournaments for determining which player on the pitch is affected by eg a thrown rock: the d16 is of less use because there's a max of 11 players and often at tournaments players aren't numbered, as most are resurrection rather than progression events. This one was a gift sent to make me smile.
 
NAF Dice
Also tokens. Dice for being a NAF member, tokens for making it to the NAF champs... Actually, the round one was for the Amsterdam World Cup. D16 for finding a numbered player on a full roster, eg for a thrown rock or to award MVP.
 
Halfling Dice
I talked about these before, but I still really like them. Halflings are a team I really enjoying playing with. I don't recommend them for a beginner, but they are fantastic if you're not expecting to win.
 
World Cup Dice
Given to me by various people at the Amsterdam and Lucca World Cups. There was another d6 which has progressed instead to my roleplay bag because - being a skull in a stetson for the 6 - it feels like a great Deadlands wild card die.
 
Local League Dice

Top photo includes Team Chaos (purple), Bubba Bowl (teddy bear), Exe-Bowl (black and gold), Chelmsford Bunker/Hawk'd dice (both from my friend Hawk), ARBBL (pumpkins), our own Exiles (black&white), and the Double Skulls podcast (luminous green). The bottom photo are Lutece dice - being French, they aren't particularly local, but I do have many of their dice so I wasn't sure where to include them. Was hoping to get to their tournament this year, but it clashes with a friend's wedding. Would like to one year, though - I hear good things, et j'aime l'opportunite de parler en Francais.
 
Traded Dice
I want to get some more Exiles dice made up, and some personal ones (with a Fern leaf or storm cloud symbol on the 6 - my NAF name being Tempest) so I can do more trades.

And on to the roleplay dice: 
 
I love my dice bag, a present from a friend at uni. The little pouch beneath it is the one that holds my haematite dice - you might be able to make them out in the picture, they're very small and a dark grey metal. The wooden frame encasing the felt flame is for rolling dice in: we did a £10 limit secret santa in our Pathfinder group, and this was hand made for me as I often sit at an angle that makes rolling dice on the table a bit awkward - and also because I'm anxious to use my haematite dice for fear of damaging them or the table. I'm thrilled with it.
 
I was surprised to realise that the entire extent of my percentile and d12 collections are those from sets. For percentiles, this is likely because I want the colour/style to match, or I'll just use two distinct d10's and roll one at a time or state which colour is tens and which units. For d12's, Husbit explained they're the least used dice: systems that use die type usually have 12 as a cap, so you'll have few if any stats that high, and whilst it is a damage die in D&D, he couldn't from the top of his head think of any weapon that used it.
 
I'm not sure how I've ended up with so many d4's and d8's, though. I mean, partly it's my work friend's fault because there were lots of pretty d4's and some pretty d8's (and no d12's at all, and only one percentile, with no matching d10), but I've still got more than I've ever had reason to use. I feel like I want to play a game that uses lots of d4's. Or maybe use them as a burglar deterrent...

 

 

4 comments:

  1. If you ever do make it to Australia, my wife and I would love to play bloodbowl against you.

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  2. The round token, next to the FAME token isn't from Amsterdam, it was the NAF gift, along with the red dice in the same picture, for 2015-2016 (new gifts are revealed in May each year).

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    1. Oh dear, I'm not sure where my Amsterdam coin is then

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