Are they blue or are they gray? They’re a decent value for the price
Name: Shaded Blue | Worn Acrylic Dice Set
Description: This is a set of 7 cement gray dull-edge acrylic TTRPG dice with white faded edges. These dice are available in 5 other colors in this same worn-out-edges style. The font is almost an exact match for Microsoft’s temu-version of Helvetica: Arial. If it’s not clear, I’m not a fan of Arial. It’s a cheap copy of one of the most stalwart classic fonts ever. Yet another thing that Microsoft made a shitty copy of and used their unchecked monopoly power to push into people’s hands rather than sticking with the one or two decent products that people actually want to pay for and use. Cheap dice, cheap font. The d10s have softly edged waists. None of the dice have sharp edges or vertices. Underbars are used to indicate orientation of the 6 and 9 faces. The numbers are carved out of the faces and inked black.
Size:
d20: (Face->Face) 20.14mm (Point->Point) 23.53mm
Where did they come from: Viridian Dice
How much did they cost: $6
Material / color: Acrylic / cement gray with black numbers
Quality: fair
Readability: Excellent
Value: Very good
Overall Rating: 6/10
Attempts needed to roll a natural 20: 27
One Hundred d20 rolls: 10, 17, 5, 17, 9, 4, 13, 16, 15, 15, 18, 3, 17, 2, 18, 12, 9, 3, 9, 15, 11, 12, 14, 19, 15, 9, 10, 7, 11, 7, 14, 20, 17, 11, 11, 13, 9, 18, 18, 13, 20, 10, 1, 18, 6, 15, 5, 6, 13, 20, 4, 16, 11, 10, 6, 7, 16, 19, 16, 15, 20, 15, 5, 7, 17, 2, 14, 18, 4, 2, 7, 19, 19, 19, 10, 18, 16, 5, 3, 2, 6, 19, 15, 15, 6, 2, 20, 13, 17, 20, 15, 1, 3, 18, 19, 13, 6, 18, 15, 2
Mean: 11.85
Median: 13
Mode:v 15
Chi-square: 22.800 **
Result: Balanced
4d6 drop 1 stat block: 10, 14, 9, 9, 14, 12 (68 total) A Motivated Dragonborn Druid from the Forest of Sadness who has been on the run for over three years.
For reference: the Standard Array method totals to: 72 and the Point Buy method totals to: 69.
A Druid casting a 9th level Wall Of Thorns spell to surround a party of 3 trolls with a cylinder shaped wall of thorns that’s 20′ in diameter, 20′ high, and 5′ thick. For every turn that the Trolls spend time inside of the thorns, they take: 63 damage on a failed DEX save and 31 damage on a success. (I rolled a lot of 7s on the 10d8 damage rolls).
Random Tables rolls:
Book Titles: 34 – Ungrid Ironhand’s Complete Guide to Arms and Armor
Coastal Random Encounters: 14 – The party encounters: 2d12 + 4 goblins riding in pairs on giant sharks, which are not very well trained
(I’m in-between random table generators at the moment so I’m scrounging for tables wherever I can, mostly in books)
Final Thoughts: I looked back through my emails for the receipt for these dice and I definitely ordered Shaded Blue dice. These do not look blue in person. They’re cement gray as far as my eyes tell me. These dice are available in a gray colorway “Gray Worn Steel” which are much darker gray than these dice. When I took photos of these dice and used the apple magic photo tool to adjust the exposure/color/etc they came out a little bit blue. No where near the photo just above that I screenshotted from Viridian’s website which shows dice that are definitely blue.
These dice are acrylic, which is something that I typically don’t ever buy but these aren’t terrible. They’re very readable. I don’t like the way that they roll and settle (the rock back and forth as they come to a stop). These dice are so light that they don’t feel good to roll.
The faded look of these dice isn’t terrible, they look like they’ve just been worn down from years of playing. I don’t think I’ll ever get to that point with my dice with all of the various sets that I’ve bought and how often I change out my dice. It’s rare that I keep dice in my to-the-table rotation for more than 2 sessions in a row. I get into different moods when I’m getting my D&D bag ready a day or two before game night. For example, last month was Pride month and I filled my dice case with almost all sets that were either rainbow colored or sets where each die was a different color.
The good things about these dice:
– They’re dirt cheap (cheaper than Chessex)
– They look okay with the faded color
– They’re easy to read
The bad things about these dice:
– Pretty much everything else.
I’d say give these dice a pass. Unless you really need some cheap acrylic dice, there’s nothing with these dice that makes them a compelling purchase.
** I’ve added a new value to the reviews called “Chi-square” which is a calculation of the difference between of the number of times each value was rolled in the d20 roll test compared to the number of times each value would be rolled in a perfectly equal roll test. (perfectly equal means every value comes up the same number of times, or [total number of rolls / number of sides on the die]) Chi-square gives a sense of how far away from the statistical average the results of the d20 roll test were. It’s not a perfect measure of a die’s balance and fairness but it’s a good step in that direction. More information about die fairness / balance roll testing can be found here: https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/70802/how-can-i-test-whether-a-die-is-fair
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