Magic Dice

So, Scalzi's taking a long break and Whatever will become the playing ground of plenty of guest bloggers. Kate Baker showed us her dice and asked about ours, which is actually a great trick to break the ice, isn't it?
Unlike the topic of game systems, dice are a safe conversational subject. And the answers can tell you plenty about a person, game system, and preferred game play. You've got your mixed bag D'ers, 20-D'ers, 10-D'ers, 6-D'ers, even no D'ers.
Just by showing your dice, you're telling something about the game system you use.
And it got me thinking how there's two kinds of people in anything, even in rpg-dicing. You have those who do the cold math of risk calculation and you have those who always end up blaming the dice. Some of us believe in statistics (well, duh, you only had 12% chance to succeed in that roll) and some of us simply love the un-randomness of random.

I'm firmly in the latter pack, because dice are dice, and even if you have 4% chance of fumbling that one roll, you've got plenty enough chances to succeed, and plenty of chances to fumble again in the next. Trust me.

So as a player, you cannot but end up developing fetish excuses, like "Cold Dice Always Fail", or "Rolls on Soft Surfaces Always Succeed". In this animistic view, dice live up in a metalevel of roleplaying, become part of a character and characters on their own. It leads to buying new dice when you change characters*, and punishing them when they act up. Threaten them that they will be replaced.

Which is not an idle threat in my case. Over the course of 18 years, I've gotten quite the collection, and they all have stories. Going back over my most recent dice history, we have:

Manon de Brissot, daughter of a colonial landowner with noble roots, should have been a princess to be married off. But despite her parents efforts, she never lived up to that, the tomboy. Her dice were the classical rounded d6, in pink pearl with black pips, and mauve marble with black pips for the damage she dealt (and boy did she deal damage).

Sandre de Brissot, little brother of Manon, though with certainty a little indiscretion of her mom's with tonton Sevestre, a blond pirate and cursed adventurer,n and not the fruit of de Brissot's loins. Sandre was into forbidden knowledge, alchemy, magic and demons, and ended up a brilliant strategic in the army too. Sharp edged, dark purple with gold marble and golden integer. Always dancing with the devil, he was.

Aron (a.k.a. Captain Lonny, that's what you get for having Asian blood and teaming up with a damned redneck) had rounded d6 of metallic coloured plastic, which were lighter than normal, which irked me somehow so I ended up not liking them. The two damage dice of real metal with blue dots, however, I loved to bits. I'm thinking of getting more. Eventually I started using the red marble dice with gold pips I bought for the current game for Aron too.

So currently Yaroslava works with dark red marbled with gold pips for regular throws, Sandre's magic dice for powers, and the two heavy damage dice for punching people's lights out.

Hmmmm, all this talk about dice has made me want to shop for some new ones...


*I should add here that we usually spend around 3 to 4 years immersed in one world, and sometimes manage to stick to one character. I can see that if you play short story-arcs and often switch world your dice might just remain tools, simple as is, or as an extension of you, the player, personally.