Dark Elf wants to put a ring on it. My presssscious. We wants it
Name: Magic Ring Dice Set – Gold With Green. (Dark Elf are careful to tiptoe around any copyrighted terms)
Description:
From the Dark Elf site: “Get ready for epic adventures with a Magic Ring dice set! Cast in crystal clear resin, these amazing inclusion dice each hold a golden ring and are infused with inky tendrils of green color. We promise you won’t turn invisible using these dice, but you’re sure to gain the attention of everyone at the game table when you roll your saving-throws and rolls-to-hit. It’s magic!”
This is another set of 7 sharp-edge resin dice. The resin is clear, with a little bit of green tint dropped in there. The font is a very clean non-serif font. Again it looks closest to Oracle Sans just like the rainbow set from review 009. Maybe this font is more common than I knew for dice. The 6 and 9 faces use dots to indicate orientation (even on the d6 oddly). The font is inked in gold, which for once looks good with the green tint. The d10s have edged waists and all edges / vertices are fairly sharp. The d4 die is an exaggerated 8-sided shape called a “Crystal” d4. It’s a tetch smaller than I’d expect it to be though.
Oh, I almost forgot… each die has a gold ring suspended inside of it. The ring has something written on it in a strange script font that does not use the Latin/Roman script alphabet that the English language – and many others rely on. The ring inside looks like it could be some kind of boss-level ring, maybe it rules other rings that were made for Dwarves, Elves, and “Men”. It’s fancy AF but at the same time it’s the kind of thing that some barefoot yokel might find in a river while fishing with his brother and get killed over.
Size (d20): ~22mm
Where did they come from: Dark Elf Dice.
How much did they cost: $40
Material / color: Resin. Clear with some green tinted bits and gold numbers
Quality: Extremely good which is normal for Dark Elf. I don’t see any blemishes or sloppy number inking at all.
Readability: Pretty good. The gold numbers match well with the gold ring inside of the dice but at an angle the numbers and the ring can blend together and hide a bit in the glare of the well-polished/buffed faces. No problem reading them in front of you but across the table, maybe not quite as easy to discern.
Value: These are a great value for a set of specialty dice with very specific geeky inclusions. They’re made for people who’ve seen/enjoyed a certain movie trilogy. that made $3 Billion dollars at the box office (no exaggeration) which is about $4,398,000 per minute of film (The extended versions of the 3 films totaled 683 minutes). So $40 for a set of very good quality sharp edge resin dice with detailed rings inside of them in a nice color scheme feels like a really good value.
Overall Rating: 9/10
Attempts needed to roll a natural 20: 78 rolls!!!!
Ten d20 rolls: 13, 8, 5, 19, 7, 20, 11, 17, 9, 8 (10.7 avg)
4d6 drop 1 stat block: 13, 12, 11, 9, 16, 15 (76 total) An adventurous Halfling Cleric who started a rebellion in the Northern mountains.
That is a good stat block total. For reference: the Standard Array method totals to: 72 and Point Buy totals to: 69.
Random Tables rolls:
Clothing Randomizer: 34 – A Cursed Luxstone outfit (see dnd beyond).
Books: 41 – “Steal This Tome” A short but passionate treatise on living as a low-level character in a high-level world.
Final Thoughts: This was another set of dice that I saw in a promo email and thought: “Sure, I’d buy those if they’re not that expensive” (Kingdom of Arnor tax rates being what they are) and sure enough they weren’t that spendy so here I am with a set all ready to bring to this weekend’s game. I don’t have high hopes for ability checks / saving throws after it took so.. many… tries to roll a natural 20. I don’t like to bring dice sets to my game that I know are going to roll high or low. I had to stop bringing my favorite recent metal dice set after it seemed like the d20 was rolling very high. I don’t want to cheat on my rolls even on accident.
As a test, I just rolled the aforementioned metal d20 from the set in post 001 and the d20 from this set 50 rolls each at the same time. The metal d20 rolled three 20s and the d20 from this set rolled zero. If it couldn’t be avoided, I’d rather bring a dice set that I know rolls low to a game than bringing one that rolls high.
I think this set might just be hard to balance with the plastic ring inclusion sitting at an angle inside of each die. It’s something you just have to make peace with when you buy them I guess.
Maybe the triangle here is: Pretty, Cheap, Balanced (pick only two). This set is very much eye candy. We’ll see if I “gain the attention of everyone at the table when I roll my saving throws” like Dark Elf’s product description promises. Years from now maybe I’ll realize that these dice had a magical hold on me the whole time and I’ll have to be persuaded to throw them into a local volcano to be unmade. Actually, I think an oven heated to 350F would be hot enough to get the job done. WWTBD? (What would Tom Bombadil Do)
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