D&D: Your Dice Will be the Death of Me

In anticipation of the newest hardcover book to drop out of the Official Hopper, the rocket surgeons over at Hasbro have let us in on the newest Official Dice Set that is dropping alongside of the book. Here is a picture of that product.

It's nice, right? Good packaging, and clearly based on the last set to come out, which was the Avernus dice for last year's book. Red dice, for devils, and with a felt-lined box and with some bonus cards or a map or some other damn thing that no one cares about. But, whatever. This is fine, right?

So, why do I want to Thunderwave whoever is in charge of their dice program?

Let's back up a bit. Strap in. This is a dice rant.

I bought a Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition Starter box back around 2013, with the intention of playing with my niece. This set came with some dice, which was, you know, sorta expected. It came with these dice, right here.

These...six dice.

That's probably the first thing to jump out at you, and you'd be right. Shouldn't there be seven dice?

Yes. Yes, there should.

Then I noticed something else...something odd about the one ten-sided die they included. It was numbered 1 to 10, as opposed to 0 to 9.

At the time, I honestly thought this was a snafu. I mean, how could you be so stupid? I thought I'd gotten a bag pack of dice, but I didn't say anything about it, because I already had a shit-ton of dice and could have cared less. No worries.

Then fifth edition came out, and it was becoming clear that I would need the starter set for that, since it was going to be a fairly radical do-over. Also, other people in my life were expressing an interest in learning and I thought, "why not?" So I bought the Starter Set. This is the one you can still buy, is still available, and as far as I can tell, has the same dice. These dice, right here.

These...six dice.

Granted, they did manage to include a proper d10 and not a World of Darkness Storytelling d10, but come on! There's percentile dice rolls all throughout fifth edition! Why would you do that? Who hurt you as a child by throwing tens d10s at you?

To this very day, it makes no sense to me to include an incomplete set of dice in the game that you are using to hook new players.

But no matter! Pish Posh on your dice concerns, good sir! Fifth edition came out and promptly sprang back into prominence in a way that, I feel, is unprecedented in this day and age. A forty year old property satisfying multiple generations of fans with a mixture of nostalgia and innovation? Such a thing has not existed before and I suspect will not again. Truly lightning in a bottle.

In fact, things were going so well that they didn't try to do another dice set until 2017, as an accessory to the reworked Tomb of Horrors/Annihilation. This set of dice was interesting in that it was the first ever D&D dice set to include four d6 dice! I know! 2017! Why did it take them that long? Who the hell knows.

These dice were nice. They were a matte finish olive green, really unusual in style, and they felt really interesting. Some people didn't like the differently colored d20, most especially since it seemed to be made of glow-in-the-dark material, only, you know, it wasn't, and it didn't. It was an odd choice, I thought, but if you were reaching into the pile of dice for a saving through, you had no trouble picking the d20 out.

Here's when I first noticed something about the dice they were acquiring from China or wherever. The six and nine on most of their dice were mixed. Some of the sixes and nines were underlined, to better tell what number was showing at a glance. Some of the dice used a dot. Specifically the d20, the d10, and the d8.

I went back to my other freebie dice that I didn't pay for and saw that, yep, they too had this dot. I like the dot. I like it a lot. It's elegant, simple, and smart. Why were the d12 and d6 dice underlined? Why weren't they a matched set?

The more I thought about it, the more it bothered me. They could be a matched set. Hasbro could pay for a set of molds that are exclusively their dice, all with dots. Or, you know, all with underlines. I don't care. I just want them to match. But no matter, I am about to really lose my shit.

The Dragon Heist Dice came next, in late 2018. I won't bore you with a rehash of the coal-raking I already did for this set in an earlier review, but I am going to re-post the picture that shows all of the problems all at once. Okay, I can't stand it, let me also sum up:

1. Why is the d20 so much bigger than the other dice?
2. Why is the color scheme so muddy?
3. Why do I need a life counter?
4. And why is only one of the d20s bigger?

This release should be a master class in how to do it wrong.

But what do I know? These obviously sold well enough to warrant another dice set. This one comes to us from Ravnica, which is a Magic: The Gathering thing that I don't care anything about. That said, it didn't stop me from buying a set of the dice. Oh, brother.

While not nearly as problematic as the above set, it's not perfect, either. The color scheme is really interesting, and it looks pretty good, like ice. I'm guessing this is thematic to the world. Again, couldn't care less. We got 4d6, which is nice, but we're back to 1d20. In a game where rolling 2d20 is a major component. Right.


What did they include instead of a second, useful d20? I'm glad you asked.

We got this.

That's a single d10.

On its faces are the clan or guild symbols (I reiterate: don't care).

This is so you can randomly, um, roll a guild? Yeah? With a d10 that can shatter a windshield.

Don't believe me?

Here, I'll show you.

Same die, with a normal d10 for scale.

Now do you see?

I don't understand the thinking that went into this. This huge ass d10 with custom sides cost a lot of money to produce, starting with a from scratch mold that isn't good for anything else but this d10. How many times are they going to go back to press on this, I wonder? No, I don't wonder; I know the answer: ZERO times.

Now, consider this: for a fraction of the cost of making this d10, they could have put a second d20 in the set and stuck the landing.

Then, earlier this year, a miracle happened. The Essentials Set was released, and I bought a set. I did this because it had some extra and different stuff in it from the Starter Set, and the two boxes are kind of a package deal. But no matter. An amazing thing greeted me when I opened the box.

DICE! Simple, usable DICE! Translucent red with white numbers, easy to read, smart looking, and wait, what's this? Four d6s? AND 2 d20s?! Holy shit, it's a Christmas miracle! No weird dice, no tchotchkes, no gewgaws, no nonsense. Usable dice. Well, I thought to myself, maybe they finally figured out what they are doing up in...wherever they are.

When the Avernus Dice dropped, I thought long and hard about picking up a set. And maybe I still will. I noticed, right away, that all of the nonsense was in the extra items, like the demon cards and the felt lined box. Not in the dice. 2d20? Check. 4d6? Check. Reasonable. And look at those d6s, too. Those big, chunky numbers that you can clearly see in the package.

Granted, it really makes the underline stand out, and thus the dots versus underlines battle continues in my head, and probably no one else's, but that's my personal damage to bear and I do so with the help of booze.

Now, I'm a Rick and Morty fan, but I didn't know for the longest time if I wanted their intro to D&D set. I don't need it at this point. Then I look over at my shelf and realize that I've become a collector again, despite my best efforts, and I got a boxed set. Know what it came with? Yeah! Dice!

And these dice, while ugly as hell, followed the model of the Essentials kit! Four d6! Chunky d6 numbers! 2d20! More of these ugly dice to love. I won't complain about them, because at this point, I'm just glad you get the right amount and combination of dice and they are all usable.

Until yesterday. Until this showed up. Here we fucking go again.

If I live to be a thousand years old, I will not understand their dice philosophy. Why are the two d20 dice so big? Huh? As in, not so big that someone won’t be tempted to roll both of them at a clutch moment in the game, but definitely big enough to bounce out of the dice tray and go skittering across the floor and come to a stop right under the refrigerator in the kitchen. Why would you DO that?

You have a nice color, watery in theme, reasonably inked, the correct number of needed dice (because in the past, you didn’t think we needed two d10, or you included one d10 numbered 1 to 10 instead of 0 to 9)...and then someone walked into the room and said “Oooh, we should totally made the most frequently used dice in the game way bigger than the other dice in the set.” Probably the exact same person that said, “You know what this dice set needs? A clicker!” Or that said, “Have we considered a clan die that’s so big you would need a trebuchet to roll it?”

Find THAT person and fire them. I don't know who it is and I don't care. This set of dice is retail thirty bucks. THIRTY BUCKS! They are getting more expensive, but they aren't getting any more useful. A box that doubles as a dice tray? Flash cards? What the hell?

I can't make Hasbro do anything, obviously. I should be able to just walk away from all of this; if I swallowed one of my dice a day for the rest of my life, they'd be putting a bag full of dice on my chest at my funeral. That's how many damn dice I have. I don't need these dice. That I kinda want them anyway is currently tempered by the notion that I'll drop both of the d20 into my Oddities Jar and never use them, thus sidelining the rest of the dice because now I don't have a matched set. At least I could ditch the guild die from the Ravnica set and still use the rest of them.

Yes, this IS the shit I think about. And it's the shit that bothers me so much that I'd write this post about it.

Hasbro: stop trying to be clever with the dice. You have a style that is unique right now: put dots on all of the dice. Leave the d6s alone if you want; they are cool because they are so big. Make a standard set: 1 d4, 4d6, 2d8, 2d10, 1d12, 2d20. Make it in some sort of normal color. Black with red numbers. Red with white numbers. Matte finish. Whatever. Go nuts. But make that your evergreen set of dice that you always have on sale, with a branded dice pouch, for $19.95. When new books come out, you do the same damn set in interesting plastic that is evocative of the milieu. That's it. Screw the boxes, the tins, the cards, the clickers, and those giant-ass stunt dice. Give us something we can use.