Yudhishthira’s Dice

In a previous post I talked about why I like character sheets, the good things they add to game, and the reasons I like to have fancy ones. The thing that I didn’t add, that I should have, was that I’m a little fetishistic around my games and game stuff. Fancy sheets are just part of it, I also have character binders that keep all my characters in good order, with all their fancy sheets and any game artifacts safely stowed between covers that are usually themselves decorated with full color art — some of which was even made just for the binder by professional artist friends of mine. My game cards all have nifty card boxes, from the Elmore tin for the Dragonlance Saga or the X-Men for the Marvel Saga, or the special old west style poker deck cover I found for the cards I play Dust Devils with.

Most of these I can justify, in one small way or another. They really don’t cost that much money, don’t take that long to put together, and just kind of sit there and look pretty when I’m not doing anything with them.

But of all the fetishistic elements in my gaming repertoire the longest lasting, most prevalent, and probably most expensive (with the exception of the books themselves) hast to be my dice. I can try to explain this one away too, but my words sound hollow even to my own ears. Certainly I GM a lot, and even to this day often have to supply the dice for a whole table full of people. (”Have to” as in “twist my rubber arm and make me buy more dice oh please no.”) I’ve also bot lots of boxed sets that came with their own dice, and so that explains some of it. But lets be honest: none of that explains the joy I take in my dice, the size of my dice collection, or the fact that my wife and I have been known to buy each other dice for Christmas. It’s nothing but a sickness. A joyful sickness.

Here then are some of the symptoms of my sickness.

This is the d20 that came with my first D&D boxed set. He’s something around 27 years old at this point. The markings all over him are from where I used to bite and chew on him when he was traitorous and didn’t roll well enough:

These are the dice that I got Mo for Christmas:

And these those that she got me for my birthday the next year:

These are the dice we gave out as table-gifts to the gamers at our wedding (including ourselves). It’s worth noting that we aren’t allowed to use them in games where we’re competitive against each other, and that the one time when I had a GM use one of them against me in a game it resulted in my 1st level character killing a 9th level character without being touched. Bitches can’t use my wedding dice against me:

This is our Bowl O Dice. This is our generic and ugly dice, none of the pretty or special ones go in here:

These are the dice I got from one of the Sirens of Treasure Island:

The ugly brothers, the butt-ugliest dice I’ve ever owned:

In addition to those pictured I also have official Dream Pod 9 dice, Fudge dice in their original containers, Changeling, Wraith, and Werewolf dice, and many more. It is, however, worth noting that we don’t have any of those $100 gem dice. I would make this a moral victory, but the truth is its more that I just don’t have any of them yet. Some day I will have the ruby dice.

But the real reason I know this thing is a sickness and out of control? I’m doing a journal post about my dice. Really.

Those of you who know Mo and I know that we’re crazy mad about character sheets and such. This applies to both traditional character sheets, where one person has all the info about their personal character recorded, and some of the new-style and fringe character sheets — things like Polaris, Breaking the Ice, and Crime and Punishment’s sheets where all the characters, the setting, and whatever else is on one sheet shared by everyone at the table. We’ve long been fans of the idea that a well designed sheet helps get you into the space of the game, from form following function, making mechanics and options clearly visible and graphically memorable, and from the mood of the sheet evoking something of the tone of the game or the character.

Because of all this we mostly design our own character sheets. Because of our slick cosmopolitan sensibilities we then print them on a color laser printer, and put them in protective sheets and write all over the plastic covers with grease pen so we don’t mar the sheet itself until its time to update the character.

Recently we’ve been playing lots of Dogs and similar games where the character sheet changes so fast that either you end up printing a new sheet every game and/or your cover becomes such a mess of grease pen markings that its illegible. In order to deal with this Mo came up with an ingenious solution where we make a sheet with a cut out area. You print the nice looking part of the sheet then cut out the cut out (duh), and mount it on a piece of card stock by taping or gluing the edges. You then can put a sheet of paper in between the sheet and the stock, and not your character attributes in pencil there. That way when you update rapidly its easy to erase and change, or to just switch out sheets of blank paper, but you still get the pretty of the character sheet.

Anyway, here are some of the sample sheets that we’ve done in the past. Hopefully they show how I’ve tried to evoke mood and tone through the sheet. They aren’t consistent in that, as its something that only slowly coalesced in my mind, but the increase in form and function should be visible.

- Rock N Roll: Truth and Justice

- Pagan Shore: Heroquest / Pagan Shore (generic, these we used when we played with Mo’s mom and filled them out by hand. The problems we had doing so lead me to the design of the next sheet for a game with first time HQ palyers….)

- Arjuna: Heroquest / Conan pregen character

- Bahamut: Mutants and Masterminds 1st ed

- Dagan: Midnight

- Morgan: Unknown Armies.

- Katya: The White Rose, aka Spitfire: Godlike

- Amalkau: Wushu

Edit to add:

- Chase: Dogs in the Vineyard. This is one of the “Cut Out Sheets” I was talking about, printed on cardstock, the white cut out, then backed and glued to other cardstock so that a half sheet of normal paper can be snugly slid in between.