d20 Dice Randomness Test: Chessex vs GameScience
Do Your Dice Roll True? The founder of GameScience, Lou Zocchi, has long claimed that GameScience dice roll more true than other gaming dice. In a well-known GenCon video Zocchi explained why GameScience dice should roll more true. His logic is that due to how dice are made, traditional RPG dice are actually put through a process similar to a rock tumbler as part of the painting and polishing, and this process causes the dice to have rounded edges. In theory the uneven rounding gives the dice an inconsistent shape that favors certain sides. GameScience dice are not put through this process, which is why...
Recycled Dice
Recycled Dice? I was at the ACD Game Fair this past weekend, a trade show held by one of the largest gaming distributors, and while I was there I had a chance to talk with Aaron Witten of Game Station who I know from years back. Game Station bought out GameScience a while back and Aaron was talking about some of the GameScience plans. Among them was the introduction of recycled dice. These dice will be GameScience precision dice made of recycled plastic and packaged in biodegradable packaging. This is not, however, post-consumer waste recycled product, but instead is recycling unused plastic...
World Building
I’ve been spending far more time than I should lately reading about the Pellatarrum setting over at Lurking Rhythmically. It’s a D&D (or Pathfinder) setting that throws off some of the standard fantasy setting tropes; after all almost all settings are really just variations of a Tolkien-esque western European fantasy world. While Pellatarrum has the familiar fantasy races — dwarves and elves and orcs — so that it’s familiar enough for RPG gamers, the world itself is startling different. It reminds me in some ways of the feeling I had when reading the Prince of Nothing series (which was a kind of eastern...
History of Dice
Dice is all we do here at Awesome Dice, and as often as we talk about the bad old days of coloring in dice with crayons from the Dungeons & Dragons boxed set, that was actually very recently in the history of dice. As it turns out, dice date back about as long as human civilization does, with the earliest dice found in Egyptian tombs and archeological digs in ancient Sumeria. Above is a brief timeline of the history of dice along with a map showing you where the historical events took place. Below we’ll talk about some of the...
The Cthulu Formula
My extended group of gamer friends are getting together for our annual RPG excess this coming weekend — sort of like a house con, with 3-4 games running per slot and 30+ people invading my house for a weekend. I’m only running one game this year, a Call of Cthulhu one-shot, which I have yet to write. I know the premise of the game, and I know how it’s going to end (not necessarily with everyone dead, depending) but I don’t yet know how I’m getting there. However, over the years of running Call of Cthulhu games, I’ve developed the generic Cthulhu...
D&D and the Probability Curve
Back when I worked at FFG I spent a lot of time with a lot of talented game designers (and even had one as a roommate). Talking with designers a lot infected me somewhat with their way of thinking about game mechanics — they look at them very abstractly, and pick them apart. They literally categorize mechanics into what kinds of mechanics are fun, which add strategy, and which just add complexity without depth. Heck, they even categorize fun into different kinds of fun. A friend and I have been messing around with RPG mechanics for a while now, and...