Hi,

I'm new here & not sure if this is the right forum for this question, but it seems as appropriate as any.

My game uses customized d20s. I've tried permanent markers, paint pens, Dremel routing, spraying matte finish...and I'm not happy with any of it. Suggestions?

tia,
Lee

Hey Lee,

Are you starting with blank d20's? If so, the method I used to create dice for my game, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil might work for you. Although I can see it being awfully painstaking. I was doing fewer sides, of a larger size.

Check out my thread about making the dice here.

Paul

but I will need to do LOTS of cutting, given that my basic dice mechanic calls for rolling 3 custom 20-sided dice. Yes, the dice start blank. Each die has 8 blank sides, but that's still A LOT labels to be cutting out. Just 2 dice sets will give me 72 labels to cut, 3 sets would be 108. Maybe I'll bite the bullet and do it, though, if there are no other suggestions.

Thanks,
Lee

Hey Lee,

Are you putting symbols, or numbers on the dice? If numbers, what are the numeric distributions?

Paul

Is the expense of getting them custom made by a dice company an option, or no? Might be the coolest way to go.

OTOH, have you considered using a palm pilot or even a laptop? Does it have to be dice? Give me the distributions and I can create an app that will randomize them for you.

Cards might be another option. Lots of extra neat things you can do with that.

Mike

Paul,

I'm putting numbers on the dice. There's one each of +1, -1, +2, -2,
.... +6, -6. That leaves 8 blank sides.

You roll 3 of these dice and sum them up. If all 3 dice are
positive or negative, you open-end.

Lee

Mike Holmes wrote: Is the expense of getting them custom made by a dice company an option, or no? Might be the coolest way to go.

OTOH, have you considered using a palm pilot or even a laptop? Does it have to be dice? Give me the distributions and I can create an app that will randomize them for you.

Cards might be another option. Lots of extra neat things you can do with that.

Mike

Hey Lee,

If all 3 dice are positive or negative, you open-end.

Meaning you reroll all three dice and incorporate the result into your previous sum? Doesn't this play out pretty chaotic? You can actually undercut what might be a nice strong result with the second roll.

Paul

Paul Czege wrote: Hey Lee,

If all 3 dice are positive or negative, you open-end.

Meaning you reroll all three dice and incorporate the result into your previous sum? Doesn't this play out pretty chaotic? You can actually undercut what might be a nice strong result with the second roll.

Paul

Wouldn't it be simpler to roll a d6 and add it or subtract it as appropriate (adding another roll with each six)? Paul's got a point. It's really dissapointing to roll an "open-ender" and then not have it continue to go in the direction it was intentionally heading.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: Wouldn't it be simpler to roll a d6 and add it or subtract it as appropriate (adding another roll with each six)? Paul's got a point. It's really dissapointing to roll an "open-ender" and then not have it continue to go in the direction it was intentionally heading.

Mike

Hey Lee,

Okay, I'm pretty damn curious about your funky dice. What happens in the game if the very first roll of the three dice is all blanks?

Paull

Hey Lee,

Okay...here's a possible solution, somewhat higher handling time, no dice customization. Get yourself some of these FUDGE dice. They're d6's with two pluses, two minuses and two blank sides. They come in lots of different colors. Match them up in pairs with standard d10's of the same color. So each roll in your game is now six dice, three of them different colored FUDGE dice, and three of them d10's that match the colors of the FUDGE ones.

When a player's roll hits the table, he first discards any colored pair where the result on the d10 is greater than 6. These are the eight blanks from your customized d20. For the pairs remaining, apply the positive or negative value from the FUDGE die to the d10 and sum the result. If the FUDGE die is blank, reroll it until you get a positive or negative value.

Same exact spread as your customized d20. Thank you....I'll be here all week!!!

Paul

Paul,

That's a very clever way to handle it, but it is more search time that I'm willing to spring for.

How I use the die rolls is for skill resolution. Skills are rated roughly as follows:

0 Clueless
5 Apprentice
10 Inexperienced Professional
15 Intermediate Professional
20 Expert
25 Master
30 Grandmaster
....
The player rolls dice, sums them up, adds to his skill level, and tells the GM the total. The GM then waves his hands in the air, and dictates the result from on high. Blatantly Sim in intent, and (I hope) in practice.

So, if the rolls are all 0, then the character gives a completely average performance for their skill level.

And different numbers and kinds of dice may be rolled for events which the GM deems to have more or less random factors/performance variation. In fact, the other kind of die I use for low-variance tasks is a modified FUDGE die...mark one of the "+"s to "++" (or +2), and one of the "-"s to "--".

From a thread in the Alyria forum:

Jürgen Mayer wrote: Dice stickers? No, no, no! I want the real thing, I want my custom Alyria dice, even if that means that you'll be eating Instant Ramen for one year. Have you forgotten my near death experience when trying to make my own moon dice?

Seriously, have you checked how much custom dice will cost you? I suggest checking out Koplow Games, a company who produces all kinds of funky custom dice, their website isn't exactly stylish or complete, but their dice are nice: http://www.koplowgames.com dicekoplow@aol.com

Highlighting (e.g. coloring in or marking with dots) sides of already numbered d20s should be easier than putting your own numbers on a blank die. So consider getting some d20s numbered 0-9 twice (I still see these for sale occasionally so I imagine they're still manufactured), in white if possible, and marking one set of sides 1-6 with a color code meaning positive, the other set of sides 1-6 with a color code meaning negative. The color codes also make it immediately visually obvious which dice to add and subtract ("add all red sides, then subtract all yellow sides"), and when open ended rolls are to be made or continued.

- Walt

wfreitag wrote: Highlighting (e.g. coloring in or marking with dots) sides of already numbered d20s should be easier than putting your own numbers on a blank die. So consider getting some d20s numbered 0-9 twice (I still see these for sale occasionally so I imagine they're still manufactured), in white if possible, and marking one set of sides 1-6 with a color code meaning positive, the other set of sides 1-6 with a color code meaning negative. The color codes also make it immediately visually obvious which dice to add and subtract ("add all red sides, then subtract all yellow sides"), and when open ended rolls are to be made or continued.

- Walt

If yo uare highlighting, just make the 7-0 sides black. That will make them unreadable, as the numbers are in black (usually). Then go with red for negative (which is intuitive as it's the accounting color for negative, and leave the positive numbers in white.

I thought you had tried this already given the methods you mentioned, or I would have suggested it right off. The only problem is that marker tends to come off after a while requiring touchups.

BTW, if you wanted to use Paul's method, you could just use fudce dice and d6s in pairs. If the Fudge die of the pair comes up zero, the pair is discarded. Else you get positive or negative one through six. This has a slightly different distribution, but it might be better than what you had originally, and you don't have to find the old d10s. Another cool thing about this is that you can encode more information into the different pairs if you like.

Mike

I got a reply from Koplow. The minimum print run is 10,000 dice, which would be $2470 + shipping. Can't see coughing up that much dough for a vanity item. The only way I'd consider it is if I thought I might be able to sell some of the dice to recoup my costs, but I just can't see that happening on a worthwhile scale.

FWIW, heavy weekend playtesting has convinced me that the dice, as is, still have too high a variance. I will be experimenting with similar dice with the +6 and -6 removed, which I think may be about right.

Thanks for the input,
Lee

What sort of probabilities are you looking for? If you let us know what you wanted, we could probably come up wit a die convention that would suit. I am almost certain that I could reproduce the curves you are attempting to emulate using less dice or more common dice, etc.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: What sort of probabilities are you looking for? If you let us know what you wanted, we could probably come up wit a die convention that would suit. I am almost certain that I could reproduce the curves you are attempting to emulate using less dice or more common dice, etc.

Mike

Hmm. Right off the bat, looking at this, I'd go with one +d10 and one -d10. That is roll two different colored D10s, and subtract on from the other. Roll any ten again and add it to the appropriate side. Not a bell, but not bad approximation for only two dice. Then have something special happen on 00 (task is interrupted by act of god, for example, or automatic spectacular success if you like such).

Here's the distribution. The chance for a 19 or higher is actually 1.6% total for all results.

[code]0 9.00%
1 8.00%
2 7.10%
3 6.20%
4 5.30%
5 4.40%
6 3.50%
7 2.60%
8 1.70%
9 0.80%
10 0.90%
11 0.90%
12 0.80%
13 0.70%
14 0.60%
15 0.50%
16 0.40%
17 0.30%
18 0.20%
19 0.10%
20 0.00%[/code]

The chance to get over ten is about five percent, so this is less than you're original seven, but higher than your later system.

For a more weighted center, go with the same system with a third die. The "neutral" die replaces the lower of the positive or negative dice if it is higher than that die. This skews things towards the center, uses only three standard d10s, gives you a bell, and has the following distribution:

[code]0 16.20%
1 10.09%
2 7.96%
3 6.11%
4 4.54%
5 3.25%
6 2.24%
7 1.51%
8 1.06%
9 0.89%
10 0.81%
11 0.64%
12 0.49%
13 0.36%
14 0.25%
15 0.16%
16 0.09%
17 0.04%
18 0.01%
19 0.00%[/code]

Which looks very much like what you're going for.

Mike

That looks good, but I think the handling time will be too large for my present gaming group. I will give it a test run with a couple of my players, though.

My current group is 7 players, and at least 5 of them have never taken calculus, just to give a feel for the level of math skills. We play once every 3-4 weeks, and the campaign has called for very few skill rolls so far. Given these parameters, I think that the handling time for your method would be much larger than I am willing to tolerate. It would have worked well for my college gaming group (gamed every week, everyone with math SATs over 700).

thanks,
Lee

Lee Short wrote: That looks good, but I think the handling time will be too large for my present gaming group. I will give it a test run with a couple of my players, though.

IME, any method which differentiates between the dice requires a notable amount of extra time to make the differentiation itself. By the time I have figured out which is the + die and which is the - die, I could have already added together 3 small numbers. Being colorblind certainly doesn't help here, and YMMV.

Given that half of the die results on my dice are 0, and that only 1 in 40 rolls are open-ended, the processing really goes very quickly -- even for people who don't use the method regularly.

I will, however, include your method in my game as an alternative for those without old-style d20's.

Hmm. Hadn't thought about the colorblind aspect.

Still you can just do like most people do in such situations, and roll them one at a time. So yo drop the plus die, then the minus die, then the neutral die. While you are dropping the neutral die, you locate the smaller of the other two, and if the neutral die comes up higher, you replace. Easy enough, it seems to me.

You seem to be willing to go a long way to eliminate handling time if you are willing to modify normal dice just to get certain circumstances where there are lots of "zero" results on the die.

If you were willing to markup your dice, you could just pen in minuses on the minus die and plusses on the plus die. That way at least you don't have to hunt down the old style d10s.

But, hey, like you say, YMMV.

Mike

Well, it helps that I've already got at least 15 of those old style d20's :-).

I'm planning on using paint pens -- gold for +, red for -; those colors are easy for me to see.