D6s with numbers vs D6s with pips, is it just me?

[Thierry-Advent]

My guess would be you internalized rolling D6s with pips in childhood with normal board games, and that went set, so you add those up without any conscious effort, and the D6's with numbers were only encountered later, so you brain has to switch gears. Ths may very well not apply to other types of dice because you only encountered them later in the first place.

It's possible. We played Parker Brothers, Milton Bradly and other 70s games using pip d6s. I got my first set of polyhedral with the BX box at age 15.
Apparently the brain keeps evolving until age 25.

 

[jolt]

If I'm rolling a lot of dice, the pips are easier for me. Part of the issue (I think) is that with printed numbers, they're all the same size and so one number doesn't jump out from any other number. With pips though, a six looks significantly different from a one. If I'm looking for high numbers for example, it's easy to just "tune out" the one and two pips.

It's easier to establish pattern recognition in pips where large numbers take up more of the die face compared to small numbers.

 

[Agamon]

Pips on d6s in RPGs is just odd to me. I've been using "RPG dice" since I started, coloring in those cheap matte colored dice from the dnd basic set. And dice with pips feel like they belong more in a casino, or at best a Yahtzee game, than in an RPG.

 

[aramis erak]

That really depends on the study. The basic assertion above holds very well through casual testing, numbers above six do not. So take that for what it is I guess.

Die reading is generally considered symbol recognition, not sight counting, anyway. Unicode has pipped dice ⚀⚁⚂⚃⚄⚅. The same patterns also appear on cards...
When reading 2d or 3d, I know some who can hit the total in under a second accurately, generally not long enough for the addition... but that's the same skill as sight-reading words. Just alternate spellings for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and so on to 18. ⚃⚃⚄, ⚃⚄⚃, or ⚄⚃⚃ is 13. If you're dyslexic, you might not even notice the 3 spellings in the die-face symbols.

Oh, they're also used on dominos... but dominos differ from cards for 7-15 patterns. (I had a set of double 15's. Makes for LONG games) Unicode only has to double-6. 🁬🁼🂌 Those three dominos showcase all 6 symbols.

That tracks. I know a few (older) people who add heart/spade/clove/diamond symbols rather than their numerals when adding cards in cribbage.

Also usually symbol recognition. There are standard patterns for A-10.
When it comes to cards, however, I use the indicies, not the patterns... because 99% of bridge/poker card use I've had has arabic indicies and held cards hide the face of the card. I've seen one in a museum without indicies.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's possible. We played Parker Brothers, Milton Bradly and other 70s games using pip d6s. I got my first set of polyhedral with the BX box at age 15.
Apparently the brain keeps evolving until age 25.

Oh, I know. I recieved brain damage to the motor center of the brain as a child and was physically inept until my early 20's, when it, well, mostly resolved.

That said, early habits stick hard, which is why its so much easier to learn new languages as a child for most people.

(That was only a speculation on my part of course, but the fact it specifically applies to *D6" makes me lean into it, though you can also argue other dice with pips instead of numbers are somewhat less common in the first place.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

Pips on d6s in RPGs is just odd to me. I've been using "RPG dice" since I started, coloring in those cheap matte colored dice from the dnd basic set. And dice with pips feel like they belong more in a casino, or at best a Yahtzee game, than in an RPG.

Some of it may be effected by whether any of your frequent RPG activity was D6-centric too. A lot of my gaming history was taken up by the Hero System, which is D6-only. In fact, for a fairly long period at one point I was using a set of casino "true dice" (that is to say ones where th pips were just ink embedded into the transparent polymer rather than physic depressions). When I wasn't I was often using packs of D6 marketed for craps games or the like, because they were cheap and easily accessible early on. So I never got out of the habit of reading pips on D6's.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Relating a bit to a couple of other people's posts above, I'll note I learned to read Hero "normal" dice very quickly over time (these are the dice used to generate what's known as "normal" damage, which is, in a combat context less lethal, often done by impact or the like; this was read as a straight count as far as Stun damage went, but for Body damage was 0 for 1, 1 for 2-5, and 2 for 6. You could quite well be rolling 10-15 of these dice for damage, especially in superheroic games, and I got so I could read off the Body damage almost as fast as the dice stopped rolling; this was primarily because I could group the 1's together and 6's together, then add in the remaining dice in very quick order, and I would not be surprised if it was partly that fast because as shapes go, a 1 or a 6 in pips is very distinctive.

 

[...m...]

Dice should be cubes with pips on them, like Ghod and Nathan Detroit intended.

...the biltmore garage wants a grand, but we ain't got a grand on hand...