Goodman Games

Machpants wrote:I still want a full set of matching dice. Not too much to ask?

I don't think it's too much to ask for. If you find a matching set, let us know.

I'm using a die-roller app in the meantime, but nothing beats the sound of rollin' polyhedrons on the table.

Is there a downloadable app for the zocchi dice?

There is this, which is web-based by Purple Sorcerer: http://purplesorcerer.com/roller.htm

And an Android App called Weird Dices, which I can't seem to find. He's on these forums though.

reverenddak wrote:There is this, which is web-based by Purple Sorcerer: http://purplesorcerer.com/roller.htm

And an Android App called Weird Dices, which I can't seem to find. He's on these forums though.

Thanks, but that presupposes an Internet connection, whereas I was hoping for something I could use even when one isn't available. This is part of the "answer the objection" I'd like to have prepped for Free RPG Day. The unusual dice are hard to come by (here in Toronto, at least), and I want to make sure that interested parties can roll the bones in some way, shape, or form when I'm running the game.

RC

EDIT: I guess I could supply chits.......

Raven_Crowking wrote:

reverenddak wrote:There is this, which is web-based by Purple Sorcerer: http://purplesorcerer.com/roller.htm

And an Android App called Weird Dices, which I can't seem to find. He's on these forums though.

Thanks, but that presupposes an Internet connection, whereas I was hoping for something I could use even when one isn't available. This is part of the "answer the objection" I'd like to have prepped for Free RPG Day. The unusual dice are hard to come by (here in Toronto, at least), and I want to make sure that interested parties can roll the bones in some way, shape, or form when I'm running the game.

RC

EDIT: I guess I could supply chits.......

Yeah, that'd be an issue. What platform? (OS, tablet?) Some old dice roller programs support customization, you can roll pretty much any random number.

reverenddak wrote:

Raven_Crowking wrote:

reverenddak wrote:There is this, which is web-based by Purple Sorcerer: http://purplesorcerer.com/roller.htm

And an Android App called Weird Dices, which I can't seem to find. He's on these forums though.

Thanks, but that presupposes an Internet connection, whereas I was hoping for something I could use even when one isn't available. This is part of the "answer the objection" I'd like to have prepped for Free RPG Day. The unusual dice are hard to come by (here in Toronto, at least), and I want to make sure that interested parties can roll the bones in some way, shape, or form when I'm running the game.

RC

EDIT: I guess I could supply chits.......

Yeah, that'd be an issue. What platform? (OS, tablet?) Some old dice roller programs support customization, you can roll pretty much any random number.

Well, I use Windows 7, but there are a lot of folks out there who might have an ipad or iphone with them when they show up. And, you're right about some of the old die rollers, too.....

BTW, I need to send you an email later about Crawl!, as I've failed to pre-order ($1200 in unexpected bills broke my back!) and I really want to make sure I get them all.

RC

A note about coloring your dice:

non-tumbled dice (E.G. Game science dice) still have a coating of non stick lubricant on them. You need to gently wash them with warm soap and water to remove it. at which point any substance you wish to color it with will hold better. Sharpies will actually mark instead of acting like dry erase markers. Its listed on their site but its kind of hard to find.

If you don't know what I mean by a non-tumbled dice there is a video you can watch on the gamescience home page that will explain it.

Besides everyone knows dice are coated with badluck when their pulled from the mold. you have to wash that stuff off.

Mintaro wrote:Besides everyone knows dice are coated with badluck when their pulled from the mold. you have to wash that stuff off.

haha, yup.

Does anyone know what markers they use in the pre-inked zocchi dice? It looks like a paint and looks really good compared to the ones I hand-inked with an Ultra-fine Sharpie.

Mintaro wrote:A note about coloring your dice:

non-tumbled dice (E.G. Game science dice) still have a coating of non stick lubricant on them. You need to gently wash them with warm soap and water to remove it. at which point any substance you wish to color it with will hold better. Sharpies will actually mark instead of acting like dry erase markers. Its listed on their site but its kind of hard to find.

If you don't know what I mean by a non-tumbled dice there is a video you can watch on the gamescience home page that will explain it.

Besides everyone knows dice are coated with badluck when their pulled from the mold. you have to wash that stuff off.

Wish I'd read this post earlier. My glow-in-the-dark green set hadn't gotten that much wear before I had to start reinking them with my black sharpie. Now I wonder if I should wash them clean and start over.

Pretty much anything cast from a mold that you'd like to apply pigment to needs to be washed. Miniatures, dice, sculptures, etc.

For folks like me in the UK and Europe, getting hold of Gamescience precision dice can be a very costly endeavour, especially if you order direct from Gamestation (they wanted to charge me over $30 P&P to send some dice, effectively doubling the cost of my order!). Sadly, ordering from the few stockists here in the UK is also difficult and stupidly expensive (a single d7 from thediceshoponline, for instance, is £4.95, which is $8.00 in the US).

Fortunately, I found a very reliable, easy to deal with seller on Ebay, comiclair, who managed to order me a Pyrope Garnet recycled 12-dice set and a couple other dice too, and still managed to send them to me with a P&P cost under half what Gamestation wanted to charge me. Can't praise the guy's willingness to help and service highly enough.

Hope that helps out some folks hereabouts.

Colin

Karaptis wrote:I always was a chessex fan, they probably can't legally manufacture zocchi sets.

More's the pity. Given the godawful scratches and gouge lines I've seen in Gamescience d24s (and to a lesser extent, d14s and d16s too) lately, I feel Chessex would do a better job quality-wise. Add in very patchy cutting from the sprues, and I'd move away from Gamescience in a second if someone like Chessex offered decent quality multi-sets. Hell, it's not like getting precision d30s was all that easy, for one thing, and Gamescience doesn't make them anyway. Boasting precision is great, but if your dice is badly scratched and/or gouged *and* has a pretty bad, hard-to-remove sprue protrusion, are your dice really going to be any less biased than a tumbled dice that lacks such marring? Can't say I'm convinced. I have some older Gamescience dice sets which didn't have such problems, but the sets I've purchased lately show a real quality drop (including one with a bubble in it).

Colin

RAD Colin wrote:

Karaptis wrote:I always was a chessex fan, they probably can't legally manufacture zocchi sets.

More's the pity. Given the godawful scratches and gouge lines I've seen in Gamescience d24s (and to a lesser extent, d14s and d16s too) lately, I feel Chessex would do a better job quality-wise. Add in very patchy cutting from the sprues, and I'd move away from Gamescience in a second if someone like Chessex offered decent quality multi-sets. Hell, it's not like getting precision d30s was all that easy, for one thing, and Gamescience doesn't make them anyway. Boasting precision is great, but if your dice is badly scratched and/or gouged *and* has a pretty bad, hard-to-remove sprue protrusion, are your dice really going to be any less biased than a tumbled dice that lacks such marring? Can't say I'm convinced. I have some older Gamescience dice sets which didn't have such problems, but the sets I've purchased lately show a real quality drop (including one with a bubble in it).

Colin

I had the exact same concerns about the dice being labeled precision. I had to do a bunch of work to get them to look decent. Like you I wonder if they are really any better than tumbled dice.

I'll jump on this wagon too, I tried a set of precision for normal DnD and dropped them after a handful of sessions. They don't roll nicely at all. My hamfisted attempts to remove sprues made it no worse or better.

I bought a set of glow-in-the-dark Zocchi dice from Game Science and found myself more than frustrated at the numerous imperfections while I was coloring in the numbers. Hopefully, we can get some official DCC dice that are high quality.

Our group just pitched in together to buy a set of "community" of funky dice, just the "zoochi pack", with a d30 from koplow. It seems to be working out pretty well so far, the only wizard in the party so far is the only one who has regularly used the d24 and d30 because of merciful magic.

Honestly I always just thought that dice were dice and that owning precision dice was more of a "something you own if your a hardcore D&D gamer" thing, I mean I usually use whatever dice I've pulled out of my bag and notice fairly random rolls. So in the form of the normal set of dice if it isn't broken why fix it?

However, if or when GG comes out with a full set of dice for DCC i'd totally buy it.

I will mention the video on their site again. The guy is a bit nutty in it, but it has some very blatant visuals showing the difference between his precision dice and the dice you tend to find everywhere else.

As a quick summary, all your dice are egg shaped. You might not be able to see it, but they are. The point of the high precision dice is that they lack polishing, which means they have all the scratches, gouges, and spurs that come with that lack of polishing.

Now don't get me wrong, I'd much rather purchase high precision dice without the blemishes, and filing down the spur (while easy) can be a little annoying. But you have to imagine that the rise in dice cost that would come with a 0% rate of errors in the mold (which is to say the occasional air bubble which causes those scratches and gouges). Not to mention the cost of paying some one else to file each die by hand. You'd be looking at like 50 bucks for a standard set.

Also the more your dice rolls (meaning the longer it tumbles around the table) the worse the die. Dice are supposed to have sharp crisp edges that cause them to loose energy very quickly. Ensuring a swift and precise stop. If you can get your hands on a pair of Casino dice you will see what I mean (or heck go to a casino and play a Dice based game of chance). The randomness of the die roll should come primarily from the shaking action of your hand.

Also as a point of interest my Gamescience d20 gives me (personally) a far greater mix of numbers than any other die I own. Take a look at your dice and you probably know which ones are "lucky" and which ones are bad. The "lucky" ones are deemed so because they give an inordinate amount of high numbers to low numbers. Well my High precision d20 has had days where its rolled 6 crits in a 4 hour period; and days where its rolled nothing above a 10 in a full session (almost killed me the monster).

Trust me when I say the scuffs are worth the trouble. Go to the local store and pick up a metal nail file and some Emery Boards. Use the Metal file to get the spurs down low, and finish off with the emery board. The resulting die (even with its scuffs) will still be a far more accurate die than anything that has been through a rock tumbler.

It is a good job that I love DCC rpg so much otherwise I would have given up over the dice issue.

I bought a full set of Gamescience dice, with the Zocchi dice too and a big Koplow d30.

The d24 was a shambles. What a mess. It had horrible gouges in it. Disgrace.
The d12 was also a wreck with massive trenches and defects.
The d16 was badly scratched too.
The pre-painted ink came off my hands after only a few uses.

Now... I understand about the accuracy thing. But I wouldn't buy a new car in the condition that Gamescience send their dice out in and they charge a premium price for doing less don't forget!

So... I suggest, Koplow or other versions for things like d24, d30 etc
The d7 is great if expensive, no problems.
I should forget about matching dice. It isn't going to happen.
You might consider d6s that are renumbered for the d3 and d10s renumbered for d5s
Just buy what you need for now to get gaming.
If you want to ink them, wash them and then either cheap soft crayon or fine paint pen which I suggest doing twice, it is a bit messy and requires a steady hand so don't do after a big night out.

I threw the offending dice in the bin after a few days, they really annoyed me. It cost me a lot of money to get set up.

Still... Play DCC RPG because it is BETTER than the rest of the D&D style games, period.

Raven_Crowking wrote:The unusual dice are hard to come by (here in Toronto, at least), and I want to make sure that interested parties can roll the bones in some way, shape, or form when I'm running the game.

I think the owner of Sci-Fi world has a distributor, but you'd have to make a special request for odd dice. I already scoured Hairy T's North, but I haven't checked their down town store yet.

I bit the bullet and now own 3 sets of Zocchi dice. I got pre-inked for the second two sets, since they weren't that expensive and I didn't want to mess with the mess of inking them. This will tide my group over for a while. If there's enough demand, hopefully a snazzier dice alternative will come along. If not, well, they're just dice. They generate numbers. After all, the play's the thing, not the dice.

I recently bought:









For the gem dice, I just got the 5-piece sets. No D30 yet. I also think matching the topaz to the orange will do nicely, and the Zocchi-dice will stand apart from them. I probably should have gone with the Moonstone or Saphire color to match the blue.

Once I have them in hand, I will post impressions.

Mintaro wrote:I will mention the video on their site again. The guy is a bit nutty in it, but it has some very blatant visuals showing the difference between his precision dice and the dice you tend to find everywhere else.

Trust me when I say the scuffs are worth the trouble. Go to the local store and pick up a metal nail file and some Emery Boards. Use the Metal file to get the spurs down low, and finish off with the emery board. The resulting die (even with its scuffs) will still be a far more accurate die than anything that has been through a rock tumbler.

You missed my point completely in your rush to try and educate people.

1) Seen the vids, know the rhyme and reason, am not a newbie to GS dice at all.
2) I own multiple older GS standard sets. In fact *all* of my dice are precision dice. They are not as shoddy as the newly produced sets. Quality in production or quality control appears to have dropped dramatically.
3) This is especially true of the d24 and to a lesser extent the d16 and d14 too. They are all badly scratched/gouged, and have terrible sprue remnants.
These are not mere *scuffs*. These are not the normal sprue remnants either, which I'm used to filing down. I'm talking about spiraling scratches and gouges across multiple faces. I'm talking about several scratches across several faces. I'm talking about gouges where they cut part of the dice out when they cut it from the sprue.
4) I've even seen standard GS polyhedrals, newer ones, that have real issues: concave surfaces, gouges, bubbles.

My key question was this:
If the dice is gouged/scratched badly on several faces (unbalancing the dice) and has a sprue remnant that's more difficult to remove without damaging the dice (which can also unbalance and bias the dice), is the dice really going to be any more *precise* than a tumbled dice? I'd be hard pressed to say "Yes."

Given what you pay, I feel like you're taking a crap-shoot buying GS dice these days, and frankly, that's not acceptable to me. If they're manufactured and checked correctly (reduced remnant, no concaves surfaces, no bubbles, no cracks/gouges/scratches), they're absolutely fantastic. Unfortunately, that *if* seems to have become much more of an issue than it was previously.

I haven't got any Koplow dice; what're folks thoughts on 'em?

Colin

The Koplow D30, although huge, seems to be as good as dice get. No complaints.

Galadrin wrote:

Raven_Crowking wrote:The unusual dice are hard to come by (here in Toronto, at least), and I want to make sure that interested parties can roll the bones in some way, shape, or form when I'm running the game.

I think the owner of Sci-Fi world has a distributor, but you'd have to make a special request for odd dice. I already scoured Hairy T's North, but I haven't checked their down town store yet.

I have; no go for the odder dice.

Do they not make the 12-die GS sets in opaque?
The precision dice in simple opaque colors
look like the dice that came with my Holmes box set in 1978.