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Dice Hoarders Anonymous

Ummm, hi. I’m Scormey, and I hoard dice.

Ever since I got into tabletop roleplaying, many years ago, I have been a bit of a “dice collector”. I’m sure we all know how that goes, telling ourselves that we are just interested in “collecting” set after set of those pretty little math-rocks, but in reality… I knew I really had a problem.

I’m a dice hoarder. I just didn’t want to stop. To be honest, I still don’t, although I have been better about my addiction lately. But I’ll get to that soon enough.

You see, I used to tell myself that buying new sets of dice was something good for me, something I needed to do, as both a player and frequent GameMaster. I needed many different dice, so I could switch them out when one set was rolling poorly and had to go into “Dice Jail” for a while. I needed new sets when I would accidentally lose one or two dice from a given set, because you can’t just bring incomplete sets with you to a game!

… and so it goes. I’m sure you all know the tale, from your own struggles.

This was always a manageable issue, until I discovered metal dice. You see, even when I played “Shadowrun”, or “World of Darkness”, both of which use large dice pools of d6 and d10, respectively, I was still able to manage my dice addiction, because I simply had so many sets to draw from. In fact, I was able to work through my dice hoarding when we tried the Fate system (specifically “Dresden Files RPG”) for a while, which uses specially-marked d6. If anything, this simply gave me an outlet for my hoarding, as I was able to focus on obtaining a vast collection of FATE dice for our use.

I justified it to myself as “We won’t be playing this long, so why should I expect the players to buy these new sets of dice?”… I saw it as being a good GM, not really accepting the truth of the situation.

But like I said, everything was fine, until the metal dice appeared. My Lovely Bride™ bought me a set of metal dice for Christmas one year, and I was so enamoured by them, that of course, I had to have more! Unfortunately, these sets were very expensive at the time, making it hard to justify buying more on a whim… So I found a way around it, by buying them for My Lovely Bride™, instead! Or for friends, or family, and so on.

I knew I had a problem, but that didn’t stop me.

I didn’t want to stop.

Of course, things only got worse when I discovered a source for relatively inexpensive metal dice, which only cost roughly twice as much as quality plastic dice! No, I’m not going to tell you where to look for them, so don’t ask… coughamazoncough… Anyway, as you might expect, this drove me to my lowest point.

I started to binge.

I hit rock bottom, when I stopped differentiating from buying the relatively inexpensive metal die sets, and the expensive ones. I just wanted metal dice, and I didn’t care what they cost me! A part of me knew I had to stop, but I didn’t want to!

It was the metal FATE dice that finally brought me to my senses. I have over a dozen full, four-die sets of plastic FATE dice, and I wanted to replace them. Fully replace them. Every single dice, plastic for metal!

Instead, I bought a single set of metal FATE dice, and that has been the last set of metal dice I have purchased. I have been clean for the last three months now, and it feels good!

I have all of my classic, plastic dice stored away in my office, and I only play with the metal dice now. If I need more, such as for a dice-pool type game like “Shadowrun”, I re-roll some dice, or borrow from My Lovely Bride™. I have not bought a single new dice set since then, and don’t plan to do so ever again, not even if I ‘need them’, such as for the Fantasy Flight “Star Wars” RPGs.

I simply won’t be playing those games.

I have enough dice. More than enough. Enough for twelve lifetimes worth of gaming.

Anyway, that’s my story. Thanks, I’m going to go jump on DriveThruRPG for a sec, and see if there are any new TTRPGs available this week. I have a hankering to buy something special…

Scormus
I'm the editor, publisher, and primary "talent" here at Scormey.com.
https://scormey.com

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