I love dice.
It's a common affliction of gamers, but it's a particular thing for me. They're interestingly shaped, emblematic of my hobby, and modern ones are tiny works of art which appeal to even people like my non-gaming lovely and talented spouse (who has gotten me a great many of these over the years, because she knows what I like). I was recently asked about my dice collection, which has been accumulating for rather more years than I like to think, so here's a more or less historically guided tour.
Back in The Olden Days (tm) of the first tabletop roleplaying games, polyhedral dice weren't easily available, nor were they initially sold as gaming accessories. They were originally sold as scientific equipment, used by people like statisticians and mathematical researchers who needed to generate random numbers (there's a fascinating paper here on the history of dice as randomizers in scientific work; the dice we use owe a lot to the reconstruction of post-war Japan). And they weren't great dice. They were made with what was called "low impact plastic." They looked dull and cheap even then, and the soft plastic wore down with heavy use. That's OK for caltrop-like d4s, but numbers became had to read and d20 turned into golf balls. I only have a few from that early era.
These weren't used a lot, but even wear from rattling around in a dice bag for decades is visible. The numbers are also hard to read because you had to color them in yourself.
To the extent that you could get fancy with them, there were a few options, like size. Here are a couple of mini-d20s, one even in a translucent material. 18mm d20 for scale.
Eventually, better, more durable plastics came into use. You could get decent d6s by raiding a Yatzee or Monopoly set, but purpose-built polyhedrals improved. I believe this handful dates to the mid-late 80s.
Something worth pointing out is that these are all still platonic solids. For quite some time, we had d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20. d10s were a later development. So how did we do rolls of 1-10 or 1-100? By using d20s for multiple purposes. A lot of d20s were labeled not 1-20, but 0-9 twice (with 0 being read as 10 for d10 purposes) with a plus sign, like this one, or we might ink half the numbers. If used as a 0-9 digit for d10 or d100, you'd just read the digit. If used as a d20, the + indicates adding 10. 6 is a 6, but +6 is a 16.
And there were a modest number of exotics, like these teeny "hobbit" dice and larger wooden dice (11mm d6 for scale)
Novelty round dice were available. There are internal divisions in the spheres and a small weight which ends up more or less stabilizing the die on a result. And this early d10 is made of a translucent material with glitter. Super-fancy for its time.
Games started to have their own purpose-made dice. This barely legible example is a die which came from West End's 1986 Ghostbusters rpg. The painted-on rather than engraved ghost is nearly gone now.
These are some early "metal" dice, actually plastic with a metal plating, also from the mid-80s.
Retired casino dice were always ahead of the technology curve.
Manufacturers started experimenting with unusual shapes, beyond d10s. Here's a d14 and a d16.
Somebody invented a d30. Might seem useless by itself, but the manufacturer also published a book of d30-driven tables for encounters, treasure, and so on.
But the greatest novelty die of them all was the Zocchihedron, a physical d100. Operating on the same principle as those round d6s (hollow die with internal weight), you could theoretically make a roll of 1-100. In actual practice, it fell victim to the same "golf ball" issue as well-worn d20s and would typically keep rolling until it fell off the table and go until it hit the wall or a piece of furniture. In addition to being hard to use, the rolls are far less than perfectly random, and there are improvements to modern versions, but this is an original.
In years since then, RPGs in general and D&D in particular have become downright mainstream, so it's possible to get serviceable dice in a wide variety of colors cheaply. I've got a bunch of sets of them in this shadow box.
And the dice industry has gotten big enough that there are manufacturers and individual artisans cranking out a dizzying array of dice designs. Most are fancy plastic, usually polyurethane or epoxy resin.
The range of materials has expanded considerably since The Olden Days (tm). These are metal, mostly using zinc-heavy alloys.
These glow in the dark. The image below is the same set in the light.
My favorites, though, are mostly stone and glass. More expensive, so I don't have sets, but I love how they look and feel.
Finally, I've got a few wooden dice. It's not a common dice material, but they're another kind I quite like.
So, then, that's not the entire collection, but it's the great majority of it, and it keeps growing.
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