My opinion of custom dice changed a lot. I used to hate them, now I love them.
After trying more arcade games I realized how powerful custom controls, purposefully built for the specific game of the cabinet, are, and how much crazy design there is among arcade games, from rhytm games where you actually hit drums with drumsticks to gimmicky Street Fighter 1 giant pressure-sensitive buttons that deal more damage the harder you punch them. It's amazing and just completely impossible with standardized gamepads of home consoles.
And... the dice set is, well, mostly standardized: d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20. Weird dice (or other input methods, like cards, or, jenga, or freestyle rap) can enable new experiences that we can't even imagine yet because we are so accustomed to dice, and so little experiments with other ideas was done.
And even within home consoles (or computers) with their standardized gamepads (or keyboards), there are standards within those standards. Some games deviate from those standards, and it, too, is beatiful. Receiver is an amazing game that completely breaks conventions of first-person shooters to deliver novel experience: you don't just press one button to reload, like is customary in other games, no, you press one button to eject the current magazine, then another to insert a new one, then third one to rack the slide, it's finicky, it's infuriating, it's amazing, it's fun.
Dread suggests that if you don't have a jenga handy, you can try and stack towers of dice. Fiasco tells you to roll all your dice first, and then choose when to spend them. How about throwing dice at the other dice, trying to displace them, sort of like in billiard? Trade dice like resources for in-game favors? Bet them like poker chips?
There is an ocean of possibility that we cannot even fathom because nobody built a foundation yet.
