On a Roll..

We’ve all experienced it. Either as players, or much more often, as DMs: Dice, and the rolling of said dice can take up a lot of valuable tabletop space. Numerous house rules have been developed concerning dice landing on the floor, askew and partially atop rulebooks, in drinks, ad infinitum.

I had a moderate epiphany today that could very well address these issues.

It started this morning as I was blearily leaving for work; Candace recently purchased a pill case that finally met her grueling standards. It’s quite large, and her reasoning behind putting off the purchase for so long was that a lot of her vitamins and supplements are much larger than the standard pill. As I was standing and staring at the box, I absentmindedly wondered how many dice could fit in a case like that.

Flash forward to a smoke break later in the day, that’s when the thought hit me: If a clear plastic container can contain the dice for storage and portability purposes, then why not utilize it for rolling purposes as well?

As I sit behind my homemade screen, I have rulebooks, stat sheets, index cards, and sundry other gaming supplies competing for space on my small side of the table. Rolling dice becomes such a hassle, that I have often just considered generating sheet after sheet of random numbers and marking them down successively. But if my dice we’re all stored within self-contained clear containers, rolling them would only involve shaking the container a few times and setting it down to read the pip. This could be particularly handy for percentile dice.

I believe there was an old board game that echoes this idea (Sorry? Boggle?), only 2d6 was stored within a clear plastic dome, and rolling was accomplished by depressing the dome. Now some of those would be pretty handy. Good bye dice clutter! Hello new self-contained rolls!

Container Store, here I come.

Note: If this idea has already been done, then I’m unaware of its application. If you utilize this idea to make RPG millions, I would appreciate a free set and some credit.