00zim00
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Post by 00zim00 on Jul 14, 2015 11:43:55 GMT
Hey all, new here and first post . Thought I would join because I had one question/request. I have been looking, unsuccessfully, to find helpful information about the most important yet wildly forgotten element in any game, the dice! Was just curious if there was any good craft vids with any good ideas on how to make custom dice easily. I know dice are relatively cheap everywhere(Well, not so much in Australia where I am), but I just like the idea of having some dice with a unique design that better fits my personality or dice that match the game/world we might be playing in. I know the main issue with doing this might be that you have unbalanced dice but I cant imagine it making a huge difference if you don't go overboard. Thanks for reading and for any tips or advice you may give
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Post by daveyjones on Jul 14, 2015 12:57:40 GMT
it depends. depending on how many sides you want you can get these blank indented dice: blankdice.co.uk/6_Sided_indented_dice/10/blankdice.co.uk/8_sided_indented_dice/17/you can print out stickers for them, and the D6 come in all colours of the rainbow. the D6 come with a game i have called '1st and goal' and they made me stick the stickers myself. but it works well enough. or you can get all kinds of blank dice without indentations. but i think any stickers will wear off quickly. you could engrave them with a dremel, but i doubt youll get good results without proper engraving equipment. or if you can do 3d modelling there is shapeways: www.shapeways.com/search?q=dice
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00zim00
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Posts: 3
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Post by 00zim00 on Jul 14, 2015 16:21:16 GMT
it depends. depending on how many sides you want you can get these blank indented dice: blankdice.co.uk/6_Sided_indented_dice/10/blankdice.co.uk/8_sided_indented_dice/17/you can print out stickers for them, and the D6 come in all colours of the rainbow. the D6 come with a game i have called '1st and goal' and they made me stick the stickers myself. but it works well enough. or you can get all kinds of blank dice without indentations. but i think any stickers will wear off quickly. you could engrave them with a dremel, but i doubt youll get good results without proper engraving equipment. or if you can do 3d modelling there is shapeways: www.shapeways.com/search?q=diceThanks for the reply The blank die may be good to use as a base as I was thinking of something more creative then a sticker. I was thinking more along the lines off adding designs to the dice though engraving or hot glu, painting them, the quick dry sculpting putty or other things. I actually thought of an idea for custom dice, which has sorta already been done in some form, using some of those small gears like what DM Scotty uses in a few of his YouTube Vids and making something like the two lower right sets in the picture below. I guess I basically answered my own question, besides wanting to see something similar on the DM Craft. Im just more curious if there are actually any user created work with videos anywhere. That I could check out for inspiration or techniques that they used to get detail onto such a small object that isnt just 3d printed. Unless im the only one, and everyone is just contempt with store brought dice
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Post by DnDPaladin on Jul 14, 2015 17:06:47 GMT
beware... on my table i wouldn'T allow custom made dices... simply because of the unbalancement in them. heck even regular bought dices have small unbalancing so i cannot imagine a custom made dice. which i did create using wood when i was younger. i'd simply cut a wooden block and simply burn (my mother had a burning tool) the numbers.
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Post by dragon722 on Jul 14, 2015 22:29:13 GMT
beware... on my table i wouldn'T allow custom made dices... simply because of the unbalancement in them. heck even regular bought dices have small unbalancing so i cannot imagine a custom made dice. which i did create using wood when i was younger. i'd simply cut a wooden block and simply burn (my mother had a burning tool) the numbers. If the dice rolled randomly and rolled all the numbers. I would not see why you would not allow them? Then of course I would wanna play with them too lol
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Post by DnDPaladin on Jul 15, 2015 2:04:23 GMT
dragon... its not a question of rolling all the numbers... you have to roll a dice about 100 times to "start" testing it. note all numbers that rolled. and overall... for the dice to be balanced... it has to roll up every numbers about 5 times each. but 100 is still too low to determine that. its a start but it should really be 10k times to get real results.
what people do not understand is... even regular dices are unbalanced cause of the numbers. after all, removing parts of the dice to make numbers is actually unbalancing the dice. its all a question of weight. how that weight is thrown around. the more weight on one side, the more frequently it will end up flat on that side. thats why cheaters dices are just weighted in dices.
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sotf
Advice Guru
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Post by sotf on Jul 15, 2015 2:41:11 GMT
beware... on my table i wouldn'T allow custom made dices... simply because of the unbalancement in them. heck even regular bought dices have small unbalancing so i cannot imagine a custom made dice. which i did create using wood when i was younger. i'd simply cut a wooden block and simply burn (my mother had a burning tool) the numbers. The question becomes one of what defines a custom die. The sticker ones are pretty much self balancing, it's the normal die with a sticker on all the faces, and should, theoretically, be more balanced than a lot of the classic die types. And you're liable to need a doctor to remove the die from some sensitive areas if one of the people playing spent money on some of the custom theme dice sets out there which can run quite a bit. The bronze set that I bought were nearly $100 as it was, and they've only gone up in price since I got those...
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Post by daveyjones on Jul 15, 2015 9:28:28 GMT
lol custom dice would just make me paranoid that i might be hurting my luck with it
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Post by DnDPaladin on Jul 15, 2015 16:19:47 GMT
sotf, what do you take me for... teachers take it away type ? i would never touch anybodies dices. i'd simply not allow him to use said dices if i think they might be too unbalanced. i have a box full of dices... i literally bought 10 sets of dices. i have dices for everyone if need be. i've allowed custom dices at my table more then once. but they were all bought from companies. none were hand made by the players. i'm more inclined to trust a big company who manufactures with heavy machinery then what a player can create by his own hand.
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sotf
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Post by sotf on Jul 15, 2015 23:09:43 GMT
sotf, what do you take me for... teachers take it away type ? i would never touch anybodies dices. i'd simply not allow him to use said dices if i think they might be too unbalanced. i have a box full of dices... i literally bought 10 sets of dices. i have dices for everyone if need be. i've allowed custom dices at my table more then once. but they were all bought from companies. none were hand made by the players. i'm more inclined to trust a big company who manufactures with heavy machinery then what a player can create by his own hand. Most of the custom dice are made by larger companies. The ones I've got are by shapeways in metal (I believe it's THIS SET) which creates the issue there. Someone spent a LOT of money on a custom set, and if you have zero proof that it's imbalanced and refuse it's use, well, you're the one who will, with good cause, come off as an ass. And something like the sticker dice still way exactly the same as a normal dice if you've got a full set of stickers. The places would have closed down a while back if they were imbalanced
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Post by runningwolf on Jul 16, 2015 0:20:47 GMT
DnDPaladin had the same concern I would. Not that anyone would intentionally cheat but most manufactured dice (from a company) has a better balance to it than what could be made home made. And even within the manufactured dice companies there would be different tolerances from company to company.... I've got a few sets of d6 from Chesex I use for myself. I also have a set from the Dollar Tree which I don;t exactly trust but have for loaners if someone needs some extra dice.
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Post by DnDPaladin on Jul 16, 2015 3:14:14 GMT
sotf, as i said, im not stupid either. and if i pass for an ass, then so be it. i preffer to pass for an ass then have a guy who roll above 10 every single time he throws. and believe me.... i have seen players, lots of them, and most of them believe in cheating th erandom system and making themselves rolls better. that includes, ways of rolling, special dices, toying with them to chip them off a bit on each corner in order to make them roll better.
tell yourself that much when playing with people... people do not like random shit. why do you think in casinos that they leave the players with a fake way of toying with the machine. thats because people are like that and i've seen much more then my fair share of players who thought i roll good cause i roll in a certain way. and unfortunately... i've been prooven often that it really does work. when someone comes in with custom dices made specially for himself... im very aware that the dices aren't just for show.
out of my 5 players right now. there is one, that rolls below 10... about once in 20 rolls. he takes my dices so i can't say they are bad. but at the same time, this alone should proove you that these things do happens and these things, unfortunately... screws a dice game a lot.
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sotf
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Post by sotf on Jul 16, 2015 6:52:55 GMT
sotf, as i said, im not stupid either. and if i pass for an ass, then so be it. i preffer to pass for an ass then have a guy who roll above 10 every single time he throws. and believe me.... i have seen players, lots of them, and most of them believe in cheating th erandom system and making themselves rolls better. that includes, ways of rolling, special dices, toying with them to chip them off a bit on each corner in order to make them roll better. tell yourself that much when playing with people... people do not like random shit. why do you think in casinos that they leave the players with a fake way of toying with the machine. thats because people are like that and i've seen much more then my fair share of players who thought i roll good cause i roll in a certain way. and unfortunately... i've been prooven often that it really does work. when someone comes in with custom dices made specially for himself... im very aware that the dices aren't just for show. out of my 5 players right now. there is one, that rolls below 10... about once in 20 rolls. he takes my dices so i can't say they are bad. but at the same time, this alone should prove you that these things do happens and these things, unfortunately... screws a dice game a lot. The problem is that if you straight up ban custom dice, you end up with other issues. You're taking a problem with a clear solution, in banning weighted dice, and spreading the issue out, in hitting custom dice with it. I have one friend who actually made his own dice set entirely, using a technique involving milk plastics and a set of ice cube molds that used to be available online that had a full set of shapes for the standard 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20, & percentile dice and then he rubbed them up with charcoal to make the numbers easily visible...never really noticed anything off with their rolling there, but we really didn't care because that was a pretty fun thing to see in play. And he was pretty damned proud of his scratch built dice. Those aren't the things you want to bring the hammer on, unless it is problematic in other ways. Things like that are more of the kicking kittens because your allergic to cats... Now, weighted dice or straight up cheaters dice are things you watch out for and can actually be something you can deal with heavily, well, the easiest way to handle them is to take note of it and when an enemy makes a special roll against the party, make them roll for you...occasionally using other players to do it as well and you've also got a situation where the players won't accuse you of fudging things either for or against them, and if someone is using weighted dice or cheating, well, the problem tends to work itself out because then it's hitting the other players as well, not to mention that they're hurting themselves as much as helping at that point.
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Post by DnDPaladin on Jul 16, 2015 16:20:29 GMT
sotf. what you are bringing here is the problem of "friends" basically you dont care about the dice rolling or not, what you care about is to not lose a friend. thats not the same thing at all and i've seen that kind of stuff happen all the time. reality being with 5+ people around a table, you all dont have the same mentality, some will like some aspect of your game as a DM and some will like others. but all liking the same stuff is hard to come by. the perfect group do not exists.
you just cannot please everyone. at your table perhaps you all play without a care, but at mine, we do care. being a DM isn't funny man. we toy with a lot of things including players trying hard to do what the game isn'T designed for. i'm pretty ok with crafting dices and whatever the guy wants. but saying yes to all who crated dices just opens up the door to quite unfair stuff.
my goal is to stay fair for everyone. everyones has a chance at making their experience better. but i dont want the system we playing on to become a burden on someone. just because someone else wants to abuse certain part of it. taking your friend as an exemple, i'd allow the dices if they look ok. but tell yourself that i will count the rolls, i will test the dices as we go and if they pose a problem i'll explain to him that.
you should see my sheet of rolls that were done during a night of playing... lots of crits in it. if i follow it, most of the dices we have isn'T even balanced. add to that, the fact that some players seems much more luckier then other. aka the player who never rolls below 10. you get yourself a pretty unbalanced game. thats why i love electronic stuff... if well programmed, those things cannot be unfair.
this is why, if i could... i would remove randomness entirely from the equation. but alas i can't... all systes uses Dices because players love the sound they make. and it seems players play th egames for that sole purpose.
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Post by DnDPaladin on Jul 17, 2015 16:10:50 GMT
wow, haven't thoguht of this.. but heres what i found to test the weight of your dices. aka if your dices are correct or not. much better then testing the numbers and randomness...
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sotf
Advice Guru
Posts: 1,084
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Post by sotf on Jul 18, 2015 2:34:15 GMT
The thing that video shows is that there are a lot of dice that come off balanced, which is different than a loaded die. And all of those are due to improper manufacture there that throws it off.
Of course, at the same time any grooved die would likely have a higher chance for higher results due to the numbering, but it wouldn't be that big of one...though noticable anyway.
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Post by daveyjones on Jul 18, 2015 8:47:29 GMT
i don't think it would be noticeable at all. suspended in salt like that the only dice that won't sway to one side are the ones that are truly 100% balanced.
this will show you which ones are not perfect, but it doesn't say much about how far off they are. and it takes more then a minor imbalance to sway a dice in any direction. don't forget, it has to overcome the inertia and momentum of the die itself in order to have an effect.
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Post by skunkape on Jul 20, 2015 19:47:31 GMT
Those are some cool looking dice images you posted 00zim00, thanks for doing it!
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Post by Deleted on Jul 21, 2015 1:50:43 GMT
You know, in all honesty, after years and years of gaming, my favourite dice are just the ones I find easiest to read at a glance. If they roll badly, I just keep on rolling until I pass through the statistical slump and they start to roll high again. One major factor in dice rolling I see so often overlooked, is that they get tossed across a tiny part of the table after being shaken briefly and tossed by your hand. Calculate the forces involved, the angles, the various textures and drag/roll resistances, the variable rebounds and you know what? It doesn't matter, unless you are rolling a dice designed to cheat with. Lets say you do an average rate per 1000 rolls... great, now add other dice, some gaming miniatures, the bowl of Cheetos, the wet patch from spilled soda, your character sheet, a bit of cat hair, throwing it off the table because you are excited, then insisting the crit counts even if it came to rest under the sofa..
You get my meaning here? So outside of blatant balance issues, small variations are not going to matter.
Shapeways is excellent by the way, I use them and have no reservations recommending the service.
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Post by DnDPaladin on Jul 21, 2015 16:49:02 GMT
AJ, even with all that, i have been proven often times that one can still control his rolls. the only constant is that they can't garantee for sure that they will get exactly the number they want. not a d20 at it. too many faces and the faces are smaller then everything else.
i also found out a few years ago that your D20 dices number arrangements make a difference. certain company just put the numbers aside each others. just in case someone uses the dice to count stuff. like in magic the gathering. their D20 have the numbers in a linear pattern and not randomly set. some companies also follow a pattern for their numbers. like 20 at the top, 7 at the opposite position. and thus because of the way the dice is made. it changes lots of the stuff around. and because of those thing, certain players will start gauging their strenght when throwing, they will start gauging how much roll it will do. and they will try to avoid the stuff on the table.
consider it that way... like the roulette... you may say the wind, the air and the bearings in it can affect it, but still all that is really required to control is the rotation and the strenght with with you spin it. this is why i preffer my dice tower... at least i am making sure it rolls a certain way and that this certain way is truly random.
but i agree that a little bit of unbalance is not the end of day. but when someone starts getting 20s like a mad men during a night session... im starting to wonder about his dices. exemple again, of the kid never roling below 10 each one of the times he rolled the dice. when you consider he crits like 30% of the times as well... you start wondering about his luck or his dices.
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