Back then, the game was Dungeons and Dragons and I spent a good few weeks worth of my allowance to buy myself my first set of dice.
I think I bought two sets back then, or was given extra dice. I forget. But basically these dice were (to my memory) the first gaming dice I ever had. They were to join me from Basic to Master to Expert set, then eventually after a brief stint with Top Secret, Marvel Super Heroes and Star Frontiers, a leap to Companion then the gold-covered Immortals set.
I remember eventually begging for my friends for more dice and got these remnants to keep. My first batch of crystal dice which back then was like the MOSTAWESOMETHINGEVER. I started using these dice whenever critical hits were rolled for extra damage. They just seemed cooler that way.
Of course, getting enthralled with cool dice meant looking for more cool dice. And around that time, I found tiny shops that sold them individually. I forget how much dice costed back then. All I know is, I wanted more! MORE! (on a side note,you can see how these dice look more worn down than the others. Heheheh!)
What could be better than Crystal...
...GLITTERS! Hahaha! And these two golden glittery dice were probably the gayest dice I ever had. Back then, mind you, I still had no inkling that I wasn't straight. But man, these dice definitely caught my eye in a way directly opposite of how Liberace turned me off.
More individual dice followed. Yes, the games were pretty much deeply immersed in Dungeons and Dragons. From the boxed sets, 2nd edition quickly followed. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons as well as Forgotten Realms were soon to become our staple games. Dragonlance was a close option, but given the only one who knew the game enough to run it was the guy who really wanted to play in it, we never got to play it in the end.
My next foray into buying dice would soon come thanks to White Wolf Gaming Studio's Storyteller System. The idea of playing a game wholly with the use of d10s was absurd and just so crazy that I had to get my own set.
And another. With these green d10s being the dice I would use for a very long time. Around this time, the usual gaming shops started to close. Here in Manila, the gaming shops closed up and a few comic shops remained willing to cater to gaming. So I made the most of the closing shops and raided their bins.
I gathered all the black d10s I could in hopes of creating a set of ten. Like I said, White Wolf had me by the balls by then. I wanted to have moody dark dice!
But given the real decline of options, I started to just grab whatever dice I could find. Matching them or creating sets no longer seemed as vital an option. Nor a requirement. Having dice was!
There was admittedly a joy to seeing the basic red dice of before. It just had a cool quality to seeing dice of that shade.
This (and I think there's a second one but it got mixed with the others above) are my marble green Vampire dice. I honestly cannot recall where I got them. I think there was a convention in Los Angeles (Strategicon) where I ran Vampire and at the end of the game, one of my players handed it to me to keep claiming it was the best game he ever had. But then again, I might be recalling a happy dream rather than a real event. But yeah, these dice are very pretty.
It was only a matter of time until I hunted for shiny crystal d10s. I blame getting really into EXALTED for this. A pity I couldn't find full dice sets...
At this point, even most comic shops STOPPED carrying role-playing game stuff. And the few hobby shops that did started to focus on either Magic Cards, or miniature games. Dice was a dying commodity. And I started to just grab whatever I could find. It sounds sad, but its true.
This set of whites are from a bunch of different board games just like the earlier three above. I think these whites were from either an Nuclear War boardgame, Cluedo, and maybe even a few other board games.
These Crystal set of weirdly sized d6s were found in a bookstore. They were sold as a set. I think they were intended for gambling games. But hey, I wanted dice.
Such as these very TINY dice. So tiny you can line all these up on a single finger. I don't think we'd ever use them in a game, but they just seemed to fun to have.
I found these.. uh... dice in another bookstore. The faces are 4, 8,16,32 and 64. Why? I have no idea. What for? Don't ask me. I just wanted to have new dice that day.
These were another odd find. A whole set of d12s. I have no idea what games out there use a whole set of d12s, but the bookstore had them so I got them.
A good friend then gave me this as a gift. My own set of official New World of Darkness d10s. They came with this lovely velvet pouch bag to boot. After this gift, I realized, "That's it I am going to buy dice when I want nice dice."
Chessex. Oh Chessex. You would be earning a lot from me in the months to come. (And that's only because I've yet to dive into purchasing from online shops... just cause I know I will have trouble NOT purchasing once I start! I mean, look at Kickstarter. I just supported one project.. and now I have over twelve projects that I backed... tsk tsk!) These d6s are smaller than the usual, but I felt it might be good to have a lot for our Houses of the Blooded games.
It is not as awesome as having ACTUAL Houses of the Blooded dice though! This I got for being a backer to John Wick's Houses of the Blooded Wilderness book. They came with the book, the patch, and a batch of Style Points too!
Remember my lament of not finding a complete set of shiny Crystal dice? Well, to celebrate the upcoming 3rd edition of Exalted, I decided to snag myself a set of golden d10s.
The color won me over. This set of d6s has green for the body and gold for the numbers. They just look very beautiful and remind me of Robotech/Orguss for some reason. Sighs.
This silvery-purple set of dice is my latest full set since my Dungeons and Dragons days. It is interesting how the d4s are approached differently now (they used to be "read the base" and now its "read the top") and I am kind of irked with the way the d10s force you to read it in multiples of ten. But they're still nice dice. They weren't my first choice though. The set I really wanted (a fiery gold and red one) was the set of dice my boss liked, so I opted to let him get those instead and kept this (which I originally intended for him.) Its okay. They're still my babies.
Then you get these dice. The Chinese faces are just lovely to look at. I'll probably commit racial sacrilege by using these to run Blood and Honor games (Japan setting) but I clearly need to look for more Wuxia games that use d6s.
Finally, we have these dice which were a hoot that we found at Paradigm Infinitum in Midpoint Orchard, Singapore. The faces show happy, sad, angry, and indifferent faces and should be a cool fast way to generate an NPC's mood on the first meeting. I just like how quirky they look.
So yeah. That seems like a LOT of dice, doesn't it? Many non-gamer friends look at me oddly when I happily talk about buying dice. So far, the easiest way to explain it was this way: It's like shoes for women. You can never have enough. Sometimes you want to buy them to fit a mood you have. Other times you want to buy them cause they're pretty. Or cute. Or nice. The point is, you can never have too many.
I've lost a lot of dice in the many years that have passed too. That includes dice like these fuzzy dice I used to have for conventions (I used to go around dressed up like some weird 8-bit inspired character, and challenged people to "Fight" by having them roll against me. Each time they rolled higher, I lost a heart. Any time they removed all three hearts, I gave them a pouch of crystals. It was fun! And introduced a lot of people who never gamed to the idea that dice and an imagined challenge can be awesome.)
And I am still anticipating getting myself some Fate dice... and others.
Oh dice.
I do enjoy non-dice based games like Castle Falkenstein or Psychosis and I do have plans to expanding my horizons to games like Amber, but you will never ever convince me to stop having more dice.
Dice is love.
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