Look at these lovely blue dice. Just not close enough to see their flaws
Name: Dragon Orb Blue dice set
Description: A set of hollow metal dice with dragon cutouts on each face. The shapes of all dice (even the d4) are very rounded. The metal is anodized Royal Blue with white raised metal numbers. The edges are minimal to non-existant. The places where the edges meet (which I would normally call “vertices”) are just tiny metal balls places on top of the junctions. The font used for the raised numbers looks like a narrow version of Times New Roman and is painted white. The d10s have very minimally edges waists. The 6 and 9 faces have tiny underbars to indicate orientation. All of the dice have “pillowed” faces and are nearly all the same size and all approach being spherical. In a strange turn of events, only the d4,d6,d8, and d12 make a nice jingling sound when you shake them together in your hand. The d10, d% and d20 make a normal metal die rattling sound when shaken in your hand.
Size:
d20: (Face->Face) 22.2mm (Point->Point) 24.7mm
Where did they come from: Lost Star Tabletop Gaming (support your local game stores!)
How much did they cost: $60
Material / color: Hollow metal (Aluminum?) anodized in a lovely royal blue
Quality: Good. The detail is somewhat fine on these dice, especially the edge detail and the dragons in the center of each face. The paint on the numbers is already coming off and they’re brand new.
Readability: Decent. They’re easy to read on the table in front of you but they were about 50/50 from 4 feet away on the rug. Some of the numbers were much harder to read than others. The single-digits that looked similar to each other (3,5,6,8,9) kind of blended together but the double digit numbers were a little better spaced and readable from 4 feet away.
Value: Good. Hollow metal dice are often more expensive than this and given some sort of grandiosity that they don’t always deserve.
Overall Rating: 7/10
Attempts needed to roll a natural 20: 2 rolls
Ten d20 rolls: 14, 19, 14, 9, 17, 6, 2, 16, 14, 17 (12.8 avg)
4d6 drop 1 stat block: 12, 10, 16, 13, 14, 10 (75 total) A Cheerful Dragonborn Sorcerer from a thriving seaport town who always cuts to the chase
For reference: the Standard Array method totals to: 72 and the Point Buy method totals to: 69.
Random Spell: Cone of Cold, 8d8 cold damage. Damage rolls: 22 points of cold damage.
(This is another excuse for using random tables and rolling dice)
Random Tables rolls:
NPC Physical Attributes: – 76: Completely hairless
Construct or Golem type: – 40: Aluminum
(I’m getting these random tables at: https://d100tables.com by the way
Final Thoughts: These dice look gorgeous. The blue and white together is fantastic. The shade of blue mixed with the light reflecting off of the shiny metal is great. The intricacies of the dragons and the edge detail is lovely. Where these dice fall apart is largely twofold:
1) The paint on the numbers. I’ve had these dice out of their protective foam container for all of a few hours and I’ve rolled them a few times each and shook them around together somewhat gently in my hands briefly. The paint on the numbers for a few of the dice is already flaking off. It’s not subtle either. There are some numbers that I can’t read without the die right in front of my eyes. If I keep these dice I’m going to have to re-paint them with better paint. This absolutely should not happen to dice that are meant to be used. and shaken together in your hands.
B) With the rounded shape of the faces, several of the rolls that I’ve made with these dice have been nearly indeterminate. Instead of a face being on top of the die, one of the edges will be pointing up. It makes you really have to watch the die closely or just gives you the choice of which face to pick…. Did I roll a 2 or a 14? Which roll would be better in this situation?
Fashion over function. These dice should either have slightly flatter faces or the little balls on the vertices should be larger so that they sit up straighter. I feel like it’s pointless to even bring up how much these dice with rounded faces all roll around on the table longer than dice with standard or even sharp edges do. The puffed-out rounded edges and faces of each of the dice makes most of the different dice very hard to tell apart at a glance. The d6 and d12 are probably the easiest to spot with their four and five sided faces
I like what these dice were going for but poor quality control, they aren’t nearly what they should be. I couldn’t see these dice being 10/10 unless the paint on the numbers was much better and the dice were able to sit up straight to take away any confusion over what you just rolled. They’re beauty from a distance I guess.
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