Quote from: Benoist;632030Take an X-acto knife. Place the blade horizontally, resting on one of the faces with the clip thing. Gently cut the clip crap off as you move the blade towards it. Go on the other face, place the blade horizontally, parallel to it, and do the same thing towards the clip. Repeat as necessary, until you have a nice clean angle in line with the faces.

Wouldn't that then ruin the Scientific Precision?

RPGPundit

Bah! All you Doubting Thomases will be left behind at the Dice Rapture™. :hand:

Quote from: RPGPundit;632805Wouldn't that then ruin the Scientific Precision?

RPGPundit

I don't know about "scientific precision", but you can do it properly and in fact, eliminate the problem of these little bits of plastic sticking out, which I guess would establish more precision if they were problematic in the first place.

Quote from: Melan;632809Bah! All you Doubting Thomases will be left behind at the Dice Rapture™. :hand:

:rotfl:

You owe me a monitor wipe.

Quote from: Melan;632809Bah! All you Doubting Thomases will be left behind at the Dice Rapture™. :hand:

You win the thread!

I haven't done my own empirical testing on the randomness of my GameScience dice, I do love them because of their texture and colour.

Quote from: Benoist;632811I don't know about "scientific precision", but you can do it properly and in fact, eliminate the problem of these little bits of plastic sticking out, which I guess would establish more precision if they were problematic in the first place.

Maybe YOU could do it properly.. I'd probably end up with a half a die.

RPGPundit

Speaking of dice fetishism, I stumbled on this Kickstarter for "precision machined RPG dice". Your choice of 1 of 7 metals; precise to 'exact tolerances'; laser-etched markings.

Those are freaking ugly, and not in a good way.

Quote from: K Peterson;635560Speaking of dice fetishism, I stumbled on this Kickstarter for "precision machined RPG dice". Your choice of 1 of 7 metals; precise to 'exact tolerances'; laser-etched markings.

Those need polishing. But I could go for a bronze set ...

Magnesium dice? I guess those would be useful if you get lost while gaming in the woods and need to start a fire? Just be careful to shave off all sides evenly.

Quote from: Melan;635583Those are freaking ugly, and not in a good way.

I agree.

But they're making titanium dice. I love titanium.

It's a good thing I'm not working full time or I would be sorely tempted to waste the better part of $100 on titanium dice.

Although I do see that they're putting a coating on the dice, so that would likely negate titanium's silky texture.

re. Magnesium dice; it actually makes sense to me, one of the negative points about metal dice is how heavy they are, so I woudl prefer magnesium dice to pretty much any other metal aside from titanium or (uncoated) bronze.

Plus, I know at least one person who purposely uses a magnesium pencil sharpener for the potential firestarter aspect.

They look dumb. And I wonder just what level of "precision" they are.

Quote from: RPGPundit;635883They look dumb.

I don't think they're "dumb" or "ugly". They're certainly not pretty dice, but I expect that people would buy them because they're machined, precision dice not because they're sparkly pretties. I find casino dice to be pretty damn ugly, but they serve a purpose.

QuoteAnd I wonder just what level of "precision" they are.

The Kickstarter advertises them as being "machined from solid raw materials to exact tolerances down to .001 of an inch". By comparison:

• Casino dice "must be exact to a tolerance of .0005".
• Gamescience dice have been measured with a side to side variation of .002" to .006"

I don't know what the tolerance of Chessex dice (or any other manufacturer's smooth-sided dice) are. A Google search mentioned .0625, or worse. Probably worse.

Seeing how I never have cash money riding on RPGs I can't bring myself to give much of a fuck about pinpoint dice accuracy. So long as dice roll low about as often as they roll high over time (remember, even a perfect random number generator will throw mad streaks from time to time - having a coin come up heads ten times in a row is exactly as likely as any other series of head/tails results, after all) and the individual dice don't look obviously warped and uneven I consider them to be accurate enough for my purposes.

Where I think Gamescience fetishism falls down is that scientific generation of perfectly random numbers may be the functionalistic purpose of dice in an RPG, but that isn't the only reason we use dice - the form of dice is just as important as the function, which is why we don't just all use dicerolling apps on our phones these days (despite the fact that these have the potential to be just as fair, if not more so, than physical dice). The job of a die isn't just to generate numbers; it also needs to provide a satisfying tactile experience when I roll it, and ideally it should also look appealing.

I typically use a set of steel dice (which I usually roll on a book or something to avoid hurting people's tables) - they look fantastic and they're incredibly satisfying to roll. Most of the dice brands in the OP might not be as physically precise as the Gamescience dice, but the Gamescience dice look butt-ugly compared to the others and they've always felt cheap and dissatisfying to me when I've used them.

(Plus, if you're worried about it, you can just not roll the same dice consistently every time - if you randomly select a different D20 from your bag of Chessex dice every time then for the most part any bias in the results from physical variations will balance out, because you're not consistently rolling the same dice each time and the physical variations themselves are just as random.)

(Also, is it just me or are the second set of Koplow dice measured in the OP actually vastly more consistent than the two brands of Gamescience dice shown?)