New goodies have landed in the DnD Geek Shop in the form of fancy dice. We’ve had deliveries of glow in the dark dice, LED dice and liquid dice, which all come in a variety of different colours and sizes. Whilst these dice have the novelty factor and will undoubtedly impress and enthral your fellow Geeks, we decided to put them to the test to decide who would be crowned Lord of the Dice.
Glow in the Dark Dice
Tired of losing your dice behind the sofa? Or simply enjoy a game of DnD in the dark? If so, these dice are for you. Each full set of dice comes in a variety of neon colours and some with a two-tone ombré effect. A typical D20 die weighs in at a respectable 6g with a ‘Rollocity Rating’™* of 8.6.
Liquid Dice
If swirly patterns and glitter are more your thing, why not try a liquid die? Also coming in a variety of colours, these FABULOUS glitterballs weigh in at a slightly heavier 8g for the D20 die which, unfortunately, is the only shape it comes in. The more angled vertices do impact the rolling experience on more delicate hands, causing these dice to come in with a ‘Rollocity Rating’™ of 6.4.
LED Dice
If you’re more a fan of having the element of surprise, then these LED light-up dice will be just up your street. To the untrained eye, these dice look like simple, boring, black dice but with a slight flick of your wrist or roll of your hand, flashing red and blue lights appear as if by magic! This impressive party trick will delight small children and cats alike, although they are a choking hazard so please don’t give to either unsupervised. Weighing a surprisingly light 4g, these dice are more noisy than usual due to the battery and therefore have a ‘Rollocity Rating’™ of 7.3.
How do they stack up?
In the name of SCIENCE and for you, our geeky readers, we decided to do an incredibly 100% scientific test in order to check the accuracy of these dice. Risking the potential of repetitive strain injury (I will be suing) from rolling dice so often, we conducted an experiment to see how each of the dice fared after 100 and then 300 rolls. I wanted to keep going and do 500 rolls but food was calling.
To keep the experiments relatively fair, I was the only person who rolled the dice. I was probably also the only one who was mad enough to enjoy doing this sort of weird thing. The dice chosen were the 20-sided dice from each set and they were each rolled onto the same surface to compare the distribution of what they landed on each time.
100 Rolls
The 100 roll test came up with a nice fancy graph but not too much to distinguish between the three types of dice. In an ideal perfect world, statistics say that each of the dice *should* equally land on each of the numbers 1 to 20, so a total of 5 times each. As our lovely little squiggles show, this doesn’t really seem the case for any of the dice… Undeterred, this intrepid roller continued rolling for an additional 600 rolls…
300 Rolls
They said it couldn’t be done but it was indeed done. 900 rolls later and a visit to A&E for suspected repetitive strain injury (I joke, I joke. I’m fine, honest), we had ourselves another fancy graph (oooohhh!). Once again, the squiggles mean little to the untrained eye but with some fancy-pants maths, this graph can be split into three graphs like so…
If you look carefully at the light blue trend lines, you’ll see a slight variation between them. In that ideal perfect world, where dice behave themselves and unicorns are real, this trend line should be a straight line across for a frequency of 15 rolls per face of the dice. The closest to this is the glow in the dark dice, which only increases ever so slightly in gradient. The LED dice has a slightly broader spread of results, with a decreasing trend line displaying a slightly negative gradient. The liquid dice, however, have a significantly steeper negative gradient and a very broad spread of rolls.
All this leads us to conclude several things:
1) I am terrible at rolling 20s. Like, consistently bad.
2) The glow in the dark dice consistently perform the most fairly across the board in terms of their rolls.
3) The liquid dice are best at rolling a critical fail. I’d avoid (if I was in charge of your rolling anyway).
Final observations
Jokes of repetitive strain injury aside, there was a significant difference in the rolling experience of the three dice.
The glow in the dark dice gave the smoothest roll. The dice was light to the touch and rolled smoothly onto the surface. It was also fairly easy to read, with the black lettering contrasting well with the coloured face of the dice. The only numbers which caused some difficulty to read were 6 and 9 (although this could be because I’m a moron who kept forgetting that the dot should be at the bottom).
The LED dice was surprisingly light to roll, although a really good shake was needed to have it flashing for any good length of time. We were slightly concerned that such vigorous testing would have a significant impact on the battery but this doesn’t seem to have been a issue. If you are planning on continually rolling your dice for upwards of 200 rolls, the length of time in which the dice lights up for does diminish but I don’t know what you’d be doing with the dice for this to happen.
The liquid dice, whilst definitely cool and fascinating to watch with the glitter swirling round, was probably the least user-friendly. It is quite difficult to read the numbers quickly or easily as they are carved into the plastic and not differentiated by a contrasting colour or outline. The dice itself was the heaviest of the three (which surprised us as we thought the LED would be due to the battery) and the vertices were more sharply pointed on my dainty and delicate lady hands.
These observations may or may not help you as a DnD player or avid dice-rolling fanatic (I appreciate this is a cross over article in terms of audience) but it was a pretty interesting test to do. Catch us on our new YouTube channel for more dice rolling fun. I promise there will not be live-action footage of all 900 throws.
Disclaimer
‘Rollocity Rating’™ is a completely made up and arbitrary term. But I hope it catches on. #RollocityRating for the win.
Also, I accept no responsibility for anyone trying to replicate this experiment at home. Roll at your own risk, Geeks!
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