Hi, what's the max number of dice of each type you've used during a play session? I'm going to order dice for a group of 4, but I don't know what's required. So, I figure with a couple of answers from you guys who have played actively, I can take a max for each die type per person. Then multiply by 4?

Please advise. Thanks.

Are the other members of the group tossing in money for this purchase? I'm curious about your group's social contract behind game purchases. 

As for how much, for each person I'd go with one of those cubes of D6s (say about 10) per person, plus 4d4, 4d8, 4d10.

All told, say 40d6, 16d4, 16d8, 16d10.  That should be enough for each person to have their own stash of dice, with some slippage to lend one another dice for when they need extra.

Palmer wrote:
Hi, what's the max number of dice of each type you've used during a play session? I'm going to order dice for a group of 4, but I don't know what's required. So, I figure with a couple of answers from you guys who have played actively, I can take a max for each die type per person. Then multiply by 4?

Please advise. Thanks.

I seem to remember that players would pool all of their dice, but each player would contribute a passel of dice that they could easily identify and pull out from the pile by the end of the session.

I've got a big Dogs dice set that is something like 30-40d6 and 10d4, 10d8 and 10d10. We put them all in a bowl in the centre of the table for all of us to use. With me & 3 players it usually just about fits (more d4's are the main thing, IIRC), but any more players and there has to be some "dice wrangling".

We use two bowls, one just for d6 and one for all other dice.

We usualy play via Skype, so we have an infinite number of electronic dice at our disposal ;)

However, when it comes to face to face play - whoever I played with, we've been always experiencing a shortage of dice, sooner or later, and scribbling the numbers was needed. We tried out two methods to deal with the buckets of dice issue.

The first method involved using tokens for tracking the dice. We had copies of a sheet with areas for dice showing 1-10, and areas for Fallout dice of various sizes. We've been rolling only a few dice at a time, placing coins in the appropriate areas of the 1-10 chart, and then re-rolling the dice as needed. Handling was somewhat bothersome, but still better than with scribbling the numbers on paper.

The second method involved using cards instead of dice. It messed the probabilities a bit, but was close enough and pretty fast. We used it last time we had a chance to play DitV face to face, and I suppose it will be my default method.

Basically, I had four decks of cards, each with different back design - one for each type of die.

For d8s I mixed cards from Ace to 8 from two identical standard playing cards decks (64 cards alltogether, 8 of each value), and likewise, for d10s I mixed cards from Ace to 10 from two identical decks (80 cards alltogether, 8 of each value). For d4s and d6s I recycled a big pile of old trading card games - I printed a whole lot of small cards numbered 1-6 and placed them into the protectors. I had 40 cards in the d4s deck (10 of each value) and 90 cards in the d6s deck (15 of each value). Next time, I'll probably increase the number of d6s to 150 or so, as this was the only deck that diminished real fast in play, and in its case the changed probabilities were actually noticeable when it came to longer conflicts.

So, I had four decks of cards before me, and I've been dealing the cards as needed when players called in their traits. Then, it was easy to separate cards from different decks and reshuffle them, since they had four different back designs. It went quite smoothly (maybe even smoother than with big pools of dice).

Now, we had a pretty big showdown during that session, and after it was finished we counted about 100-150 cards in the discard pile. We had nearly 300 cards alltogether. I suppose I'd need about half that number of dice to play DitV comfortably, without worrying about the dice shortage. DitV is the only game I'm currently playing that requires so many dice, and I play face to face only occassionally - so for me at least, the card method is a cheap alternative to purchasing a mountain of dice.

I'd say you can do with much less. Only problem is fallout dice, but just note them seperately. For the other dice, traits and relations are brought into play along the way, so if you reuse dice used in raises and sees and fallout dice, then you're fine with something like 8d10, 8d8, 8d4 and a bunch of d6s. Sharing for all players.

Having conflicts with several players may also push the numbers, but I try to avoid that anyway. Go for 1-on-1 conflicts whenever you can.

/Frederik

I think Vincent should look into selling official DiTV dice.

I know I'd pay top dollar for a big "pound of dice" bag full of D4, D6, D8 and D10 dice with the Tree of Life symbol in place of the number 1.

I wonder if there's a dice company out there that can make dice in a "quilt pattern" like a Dog's coat?  Or maybe solid Western colors like "Sandstone" and "Blood" and "Cactus" and "Lead" might be easier to read.

I'm not sure what it costs to get custom dice made, or how many bags of dice Lumpley Games would have to sell before making a profit, but it sure would be swell to have some official Dog Dice!

Or would they be called Dog Bones?

Palmer wrote:
Hi, what's the max number of dice of each type you've used during a play session? I'm going to order dice for a group of 4, but I don't know what's required. So, I figure with a couple of answers from you guys who have played actively, I can take a max for each die type per person. Then multiply by 4?