Withdrawn from Circulation

Different gaming groups have their own peculiar customs around dice. I generally play with the same retinue of twelve or so people, and we have what I think is an unusual practice: although individuals buy dice, we freely mix our dice into one communal pool during every session, and then divide them up indiscriminately at the end of the night. Occasionally someone will buy new dice to replenish the stock but no one really has special, personal dice that only they use exclusively. At least not for very long: eventually all dice are merged into the One Pool.

In every other group I’ve read about, people seem to maintain their own dice. I understand that some gamers are so superstitious they would never let another player even touch their “lucky” dice.

Personally, I prefer plain old, primary color, opaque dice. My fellow players occasionally mock my ugly, opaque dice, and I’m probably guilty as charged: I think translucent gem dice look perfectly fine, and I’ve been given a couple of very nice sets of metal dice, but time and again I reach for the basic, colored dice.

Within our communal dice pool are the remnants of some of the first dice sets I ever bought. My very first polyhedrals came with my Moldvay Basic Set. I believe I also picked up a set of Dragon Dice at a Mr. Paperback in Bangor. (Grognardia had a nice retrospective on this product a few years ago.) Both sets of dice had to have the numbers colored in with crayons. And I ordered a third set out of the mail-in catalog of the Dungeon Hobby Shop from Lake Geneva. (Those were a particularly crummy set.)

I couldn’t say how many sets of dice I have bought since then. Easily dozens. Almost every time I move a piece of furniture in my house I seem to find a straggler or two. 

But the years have not been kind to my three original sets of dice. A few have gone missing over the years. And TSR dice never had a particularly good reputation for durability. But nevertheless I’ve kept my original dice in the communal pool out of nostalgia, even though they are so beat up and ugly now that not even I use them anymore. (And I can’t imagine how biased those poor dice must be.)

But as I was looking at these tired old soldiers a few weeks ago, I decided it was high time to withdraw them from circulation. I still can’t bear to throw them away, so they will enjoy a well-earned retirement in my office desk. And now their watch has ended!