What makes a good set of Dice?

[Nytmare]

What little you gain from "precision" dice doesn't really matter to me at all. For me it's all about whether or not they look cool.

As a side note, I find Gamescience dice to be freaking hideous.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

The metal dice I've seen have been smaller than most plastic dice are, I assume to reduce costs as well as weight because who wants to be rolling around a half pound of dice in their hand as well as see the family fine-furniture dining table get covered with little triangular marks from the corners of repeatedly falling heavy bits of metal?

Now, precision-milled plastic dice, or maybe resin or something like that. That'd be something I'd be more interested in. Hmn... thinking about it just now I think aircraft-grade aluminum might be a choice for dice. Still get scuffed and scratched but I think I could own a set. I've thought a few times about maybe getting some of those 3D-printed dice, but haven't found a set that looks USABLE while still looking cool enough to want to own.

Thing is, though, it'd be just for fun - just to be geeky. For all the touting of the accuracy and precision of Gamescience dice (for example) the effect on probabilities in RPG's is insignificant. What I won't tolerate is dice made of cheap, low-impact, brittle plastic. The kind described whose edges and corners wear away until it's almost more of a ball than a faceted solid. I had a friend who ran a game using a pair of d20's made of that cheap stuff. He'd actually deliberately filed down the corners and edges - so much so you could see it from 10' away. One he filed down so it would always roll low and the other would always roll high. We eventually forbid him to use them for anything, ever, and I think even he realized he was being a bit of a wanker about it.

But playing D&D is not the same thing as rolling dice in a casino tens of thousands of times a day FOR MONEY. There a thousandth of a inch can mean hundreds and thousands of dollars of lost profit. In D&D the results of our die rolls are UTTERLY buried in the noise of the purpose of the roll and all of the variables being applied to our chances of success/failure. Precision dice are therefore simply unnecessary. Because of that the major sales points for dice seem to be their variety of colors and their readability rather than precision. I MIGHT buy a set if they seem cool or geeky enough but aren't outrageously priced.

 

[Nytmare]

I had a friend who had a set of ... I guess they were maybe brass(?) dice that were a little bit bigger than twice the size of normal dice. He rolled them once and effed up my map and wooden tabletop then went back to plastic dice.

 

[howandwhy99]

Good dice are fair dice. But there are very few dice made to be unfair or cheater dice. So go for the level of precision you want and for everything else buy what appeals to you.

I have to agree with the posters above though. If you can't read the dice, then you need to get some dice you can read.
(Wouldn't it be great if I could just declare every roll a "hard 8" at the craps table with an illegible pair of dice?)

 

[BlackSeed_Vash]

1) As people have said before, 7 dice to a set, but most of the time you need more than one set (especially if your the DM).
2) This is a mater of personal preference. As long as the dice a clearly not weighted I'm more of less fine with whatever dice are handy.
3) Only really noticed a difference when I was taking a statistic course. If I remember correctly my group figured that "sharper and cleaner edges" provided about 3% more randomness to the rolls. Oh and by notice, I mean if I didn't have data from across ~36hrs of game-play I wouldn't have had a clue.
4) Not really. Most metal dice of quality costs to damn much and that's not counting in the added cost for precision. Also, my group rotates which house we play at. One of the tables we use is +200 years old and no way we're going to risk denting/scratching it with metal dice. Same goes for glass table we use at another's house

Personally I buy my dice in bulk. Cheaper and I often find my self needing a ton of one type for one crazy event or another (Like the time I needed 100 D20s for an encounter with a Hecatoncheires... we ended up ~ 15 dice short). So far, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009R6J8RY/ref=oh_details_o03_s00_i01?ie=UTF8&psc=1, has been the best deal I've found. When I purchased it I received 16 set with only 1 repeat in color

 

[Stormonu]

Gamescience dice are made of bulletproof plastic (or so says the advertising). How do you break one?

It wasn't a gamescience die I broke, sorry if that confused. It was a cheap plastic/ceramic die - probably a chessex (sometime back around '91).