Support your local game store and buy some mid-level hollow metal dice with dragons
Name: Dragon’s Lair Hollow Metal Dice Set – Red
Description: A set of hollow metal dice with chain edges and moderately sharp gold caps on the vertices. Each face has a carved dragon profile with a gold number on top of it. The font is some kind of Dwarven stonecraft abomination with diamond-shaped zeroes that have slashes through them. The fives have odd angles built into the dropped loop on the lower half. The eights are double rhombuses. The font is the least attractive part of these dice. The font uses dots for the odd 6 and 9 digits to indicate orientation. The d10s have edged waists even though they’re just tiny bits of chain between the gold caps on the points where the faces meet. The points have all been dulled down except for the d8 (somewhat sharp) and the d4 (extremely sharp). I don’t understand this choice.
Size:
d20: (Face->Face) 22.7 mm (Point->Point) 28.6 mm
Where did they come from: Lost Star Tabletop Gaming (Resold from Misty Mountain Dice)
How much did they cost: $60
Material / color: “Copper Plated Metal”. Red metal skeleton with gold numbers and gold caps on all vertices
Quality: Pretty good. There are some blemishes, paint smudges and a few numbers with rough edges.
Readability: Decent on the table, less-so from a distance. The gold-on-red color scheme is pretty good but the shine of coming off of the red metal edges and the lack of shine from the gold numbers hurts readability. They’ll do fine as long as the light isn’t dim.
Value: A fair value for a set of nice looking hollow metal dice
Overall Rating: 7/10
Attempts needed to roll a natural 20: 39 rolls
Ten d20 rolls: 20, 11, 12, 19, 1, 14, 7, 16, 19, 7 (12.6 avg)
4d6 drop 1 stat block: 14, 12, 15, 12, 11, 12 (76 total) A Reliable Elf Barbarian from a line of fallen royalty who has a pretty selective memory.
For reference: the Standard Array method totals to: 72 and the Point Buy method totals to: 69.
Random Tables rolls:
Rare Zombie-infested D&D locations: 28 -The Tower of the Necromancer – An ancient tower that was once home to a powerful necromancer and his undead minions. It is now overrun with even more powerful zombies, making it a dangerous location for any who enter.
Assassins, Thieves, and Criminals: 52 – Sigimund Goldshore Noble-looking Halfling smuggler with a peg leg and a bushy beard, both of which hold any number of illicit goods at any one time.
(I’m getting these random tables at: https://d100tables.com by the way
Final Thoughts: Given how I feel about the Dwarven font and slashed diamond-shaped zeroes on dice, I shouldn’t have bought this set. My snobbery concerning dice goes down considerably when I’m buying them from an actual game store and not an online retailer. I’ll likely give these dice away to someone, or maybe even back to the store to be a prize in their next giveaway.
What I do like about these dice: The contrast of the dark red and the gold. The style of having caps on all of the vertices. The sound that they make when you shake them around in your hand. It’s more of a high pitch “tink tink” sound than some other hollow metal sets that I have. I need to play a session where I only bring hollow dice to the table and see how that goes. I’d need a few hollow Chonk d20s as well since I hate to be at a table without at least one Chonk to roll.
What I don’t like about them: How long they take to settle. Sharper edges/vertices caps would help fix this. The font. I hate the font. there, I said it. The font is stupid with all straight lines and no curves. The quality control on these dice isn’t great. There are some blemishes that I’d expect from Amazon dice but not dice from a TTRPG-specific retailer.
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