Roll Hard
Bet you didn’t know the recipe for potion of cure light wounds was just “superglue,” did ya? See there? You learned something today.
This particular comic comes courtesy of Betrayal at House on the Hill. It’s an all-time favorite from undergrad, and I recently got to dust it off for some buddies from work. Just look at all those tiles and tokens and precariously balanced miniatures arranged like so many bowling pins upon the play surface. Add in a dice pool system and a couple bottles of wine, and you’ve got yourself analog pinball just waiting to happen.
I still insist that my banshee was in the Creaky Hallway, not the Junk Room. Grumble grumble.
No doubt you all have had this moment in your gaming careers as well. Errant dice have been known break minis, ding kitchen tables, and disappear into pocket dimensions of their own creation (or at least beneath the couch). The conventional wisdom is to invest in a dice tray. But in the heat of the moment, overly excited players jacked up on Mountain Dew and death saving throws will find a way to miss the tray. That’s when everyone goes scrambling.
“It went behind the fridge!”
“Well move the fridge then.”
“No! You might disturb the die! Someone get a flashlight so we know if Bob is dead!”
These shenanigans are occasionally hilarious, but they’re always disruptive. That in turn leads to house rules like “if it’s off the table it’s a reroll” or “if it touches a mini it’s an auto-fail.” These I deem harsh but fair penalties. And I know at least one one-armed dwarf who agrees.
So for today’s discussion, let’s talk about the very serious issue of “roll hards.” How do you dissuade these players from their polyhedral hulk-outs? What items do you use to protect your table’s precious rosewood finish? And have you ever lost a die in the cracks of space and time, only to find it again in the laundry hamper several years later? If so, tell us all about it down in the comments!
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With my groups mostly online nowadays, using online rollers prevents the dice from knocking over the minis or rolling behind the fridge.
Of course, when you all decide to have dndbeyond roll 100d100 at the same time to see what it sounds like, browser crashes have been known to happen… not everybody’s computer can handle processing 200 virtual d10s and the accompanying physics.
Every time my computer crashes, I just imagine it saying, “Stop all the downloadin!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eA3XCvrK90
How do you break minis with errant dice? Yes, we have metal dice at our table, and yes, our minis have a habit of losing arms, but I don’t recall the two ever having casual relation. Worst we usually get when metal rolls too well is a light dent in the table, or in plastic dice that flew too close to their betters.
I’ve had an already flimsy mini get knocked off the table by a dice roll and forcibly disarmed. Depending on the source material of the mini (like the resin or pewter or whatever polymer?), I think some are bendy and some are brittle and time/material fatigue comes for us all.
My Lord of The Rings cooperative game has two options: Play as Frodo, or play as Frodo’s ankles.
http://dailyworkerplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Knizia-LotR-640×480.jpg
Flimsy freakin’ minis….
It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to roll dem bones, but we always had a rule – no metal dice – for this exact reason. I once went and bought a sturdy dice tray, and a solid metal die, thinking the tray would protect the table beneath. No such luck; it still dinged the surface but it also unexpectedly caused the tray to do its best air hockey puck impression which proceeded to annihilate the game space… I’m not allowed to use that die anymore
Were you like… shooting craps with your dice tray? Trying to bounce off the back wall?
Not intentionally, but those oversized 40mm dice have some serious inertial mass when they’re solid steel!
Fair cop. My brother-in-law has been slowly getting me the complete set of Crystal Gem themed dice over the past several birthdays/holidays. Amethyst has caused no end of furniture damage.
there are many different types of rollers, from those that roll hard, to those that drop, to those that prefer to gently place the die down like a child whose just gone to sleep… and of course the cheaters too, but no matter how you roll, the table rule that I have always gone by is that the dice must stay ON the table, and there must always be a verification of your results from another at the table.
Of course, not everyone believes in this simple and basic concept, but that being said, I roll metal dice, and have always been respectful of the table surface (even if it is not a nice dinning room oak), so I roll in a tray (it is a decent sized tray. About 10 inches across, round, and a nice wood itself).
As to the loss of a die, I once dropped a die while rolling it about in my hand like one of those zen balls. I looked down, and it had bounced into another dimension!
I searched and searched and searched some more, tearing my room apart, until there was no other place it could have gone. Not under anything, not out a door, not into another home across the street, no… it was just gone.
Until one day I was moving a curtain and the errant die had returned from its journey into the astral sea and beyond, a changed die, a new die, a die no longer beheld by mortal limits…
I SEARCHED that curtain! And also, how the HELL did it get up in the curtain?!
Yeah, physical dice are just the best 🙂
One of my favorite physical dice rituals is the “balance test.”
“It’s cocked!”
“No it isn’t!”
“Let’s see if we can balance another die on top of it. If it stays on, it isn’t cocked.”
Suddenly you’re playing D&D&Jenga.
As a lover of mini painting, I feel this comic deeply. Luckily I’m usually the DM, so I can set strict ‘no rolling on the game mat’ rules. Metal dice also get an ‘only roll in a dice box’ rule.
Next time I get an IRL group together, I’m going to try and institute my “smaller table on top of a large table” setup. No reason to roll on the map when you’ve got 100% of the table space at your disposal.
Yahtzee cup !! the best for rolling a couple of dice, just shake well and invert onto the table then lift the cup up slowly for dramatic purpose.
Unless you’re using massive numbers of dice for damage, and even then it works fairly well if you don’t do too many at once
Let’s see, your 15d6 fireball does *shake 5xd6* 16 plus *shake 5xd6* 12 plus *shake 5xd6* 24, I think the kobold is dead, might wanna work on that panic casting a bit…
I do love me some mini-d6s clattering merrily around. I just hate when they spontaneously stack on top of themselves with this method.
That’s why you give the cup a last side-to-side shake before lifting it 😉
And ‘rolling’ like that onto a sturdy piece of felt or something similar doesn’t hurt anything except the orc you’re blasting’s feelings.
We used to play ‘liar’s dice’ which came with a felt lined box and hinged lid that was perfect for rolling (and carrying) dice in, the peering in as you raised the lid after a good shake was always like opening a treasure chest 🙂
Is that dice color based on one from your collection(s)?
Also, it could have been worse, Cleric. That could have been a solid metal dice. Those things are hefty and can be used for murder. Supposedly.
Also, that dungeon needs a more coffee table look.
Laurel is a proper dice goblin so… probably. I do not know the true bounds of her collection.
Does this mean Cleric has the construct/Android (dwarf-like subtype) template? Or the Golem Grafter archetype?
So that’s how he knew how to heal Street Samurai! https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/embellishment
Analog dice? What is this, 1999?
More seriously, we kept having dice roll off the table and land cocked on the carpet. So to resolve this (and other!) issues, I instituted ‘The Bowl of Truth,’ which was just a stoneware bowl that wasn’t too shallow.
The ringing the dice made bothered by friends, but it ended ALL dice based disruptions.
> Analog dice? What is this, 1999?
You wish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75jd6Kf0CNU
Also, I demand pics of the bowl of truth!
“How do you dissuade these players from their polyhedral hulk-outs?”
Not a problem now days. My group relies on VTTs (to the chagrin of some of us). But in the ole days before the great plague, we used two incantations to protect our glass tables.
Incantation #1: “You breaketh, you buyeth.”
Incantation #2: “If it lands on the floor, it doest not count.”
But if those incantations failed, there was always…
“If you slameth those dice one more time, and I’ll banish thee from my domain!”
Was anyone actually expelled from the table for this biz?
Nope. We’re all middle-aged adults. It never got that bad.
Rule 1 of rolling dice: If it’s off the table it doesn’t count.
Rule 1.1 for frequent offenders: If it’s off the table it’s a 1.
I’ve been very happy with my dice trays lately. Rolling on red velvet is bloody luxurious!
I have seen a d20 rolled hard enough that about a quarter of its faces sheared off when it came off the table and hit concrete. It was a dark day indeed.
So like… How did you defeat the entity trapped inside?
A hammer. Dice spirits are weak to bludgeoning weapons.
As one comedian to another: nice.
My Sunday gamenight host bought everyone dice trays and we spent a weekend customizing our own, just so he could enforce, “If it lands outside your tray, reroll.” He was VERY serious about protecting his rosewood, and one of our players has a bad habit of rolling hard enough to bounce it out of the box.
…Maybe I’ll recommend the “If it lands outside the box more than once, it’s a crit fail.” He’d probably like that.
Relevant comic: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/consequences
I made a dice tower using plastic canvas and yarn. It works ok. But it’s a little lopsided on the inside and the dice will get stuck every now and then. I’ll be more careful the next time I make one.
You’ve seen my dice tower. I hope yours has a larger hole at the top. Getting the dice in is weirdly hard for folks, lol.
I have a cheap plastic dice tower that came with a weird off-the-shelf dice game (Yahtzee-minus-the-fun) and can handle 90% of my dice (some get stuck). My son has a collapsible wood & plexiglass number that works much better.
So what do we use most of the time? Our cupped hands, elbows, whatever to keep the dice in the vicinity of the tray or kitchen table. If we’re traveling: frisbees.
The real test will be the new sets of bespoke dice we just received: mine have tiny pencils and passages from my book inside, my son’s have music from the high school musical he’s currently appearing in (Hunchback), and my wife’s have latte-cup-shaped charms and coffee grounds. No idea if they’ll fit in the dice towers, and the crystal edges have a +5 keen enchantment.
Meh, she wanted a new kitchen table, anyway…
I use these huge Hirst Arts dice towers I built whenever the Handbook goes to conventions.
“Step right up, folks! Crit for free merch!”
You would not believe how often I’ve seen the dice jump backstop and go clattering across the aisle.
Took me a moment to realize that this was Cleric’s mini rather than Cleric’s arm being a magical prosthetic.
THE WORLDS ARE MERGING!
The last time I hosted a session at home, I lost a d4 from one of my sets. I was a bit bummed because it was from the dice I got with my first D&D stuff when 4E was still the shiny new thing, but dice don’t live forever. I looked everywhere around the dining room table and dumped all the dice out of their bag a couple times to make sure I wasn’t overlooking it, but it just wasn’t there. Months later, I was playing at my apartment 2.5 hours away. I got out that bag and dumped the dice out, and there was the d4. It was the damnedest thing.
Yo, I was bloody SURE this story was gonna end with, “And then the doctor had to yank my missing d4 out of my foot.”
it’s been too long since I’ve done any gaming in person, it’s all been online for at least 3 or 4 years, and before that playing with miniatures wasn’t common in my local group, still think we had a reroll dice that went of the table rule, though in more than one occasion the floor was the table, and given the game was often exalted, that was a lot of dice
If the dice go through the floor, you may be a hungry ghost.
I always think the dice roll better physically. For some reason, I always feel online rolls are always lower.