It’s not the best d20 ever but it’s a good value and well made
Name: Tidal Wave Cast Resin Chonk d20
Description: This is a sharp-edge resin chonk d20 die made with a sage-green translucent resin with thin whisps of both black and white resin inside that look like smoke. The font is a custom font that is chunky with thick vertical lines and thin horizontal lines. The corners are mostly rounded. It’s got a retro Atari (good that kids) look to it. The font is mostly very readable with the exception of the number ‘7’ which has a tiny cross-stroke in the middle that only sticks out of one side. It looks like a backwards ‘F’. The numbers are etched and painted a brassy metallic color. The 6 and 9 faces have underbars to indicate their orientation.
Size: (Face->Face) 55.66 mm (Point->Point) 67.87 mm
Where did it come from: Lost Star Tabletop Gaming (made by 1985 Games)
How much did it cost: $30
Material / colors: Sage green tinted resin with wisps of white smoke inside and bronze colored numbers
Quality: Good. There are a couple of mold lines
Readability: Very good. The Brassy numbers are easy to read
Value: Fair. This is a reasonable price for a 55mm chonk d20
Overall Rating: 7/10
Attempts needed to roll a natural 20: 3
One Hundred d20 rolls: 18, 13, 17, 5, 11, 4, 17, 7, 2, 12, 14, 17, 3, 10, 1, 20, 8, 1, 17, 14, 10, 20, 20, 1, 1, 13, 1, 18, 6, 19, 1, 2, 8, 2, 19, 18, 8, 18, 18, 2, 15, 8, 12, 8, 4, 18, 3, 18, 5, 5, 15, 13, 6, 11, 8, 3, 11, 7, 5, 6, 6, 16, 19, 13, 16, 1, 1, 15, 13, 8, 4, 12, 11, 9, 4, 1, 19, 5, 9, 10, 14, 2, 18, 2, 8, 3, 1, 15, 12, 2, 5, 13, 1, 13, 3, 6, 14, 10, 14, 17
Mean: 9.62
Median: 9.5
Mode: 1
Chi-square: 20.000 **
Result: Balanced
6d20 drop 1s & 2s stat block: 20, 14, 11, 3, 6, 8 (62 total) An irritable Goliath Barbarian from the base of a volcano who always keeps their promises
For reference: the Standard Array method totals to: 72 and the Point Buy method totals to: 69.
A 20th level Goliath Barbarian (Path of the Berserker, Fire Giant ancestry) with the Boon of Irresistible Offense (We’ve switched to 2024 rules) using a Flame Tongue Greatsword (with the Graze mastery) and the Great Weapon Master feat fighting against a
Initiative rolls: Barbarian (at advantage): 20 Death Knight: 13
The Barbarian Rages
Barbarian attack 1: 18 + 13 = 31 HIT! 2d6 + 2d6 + 1d10 + 4d6 + 7 + 7 + 4 = 58 damage
Barbarian attack 2: 15 + 13 = 28 HIT! 2d6 + 2d6 + 1d10 + 7 + 7 + 4 = 49 damage
Death Knight Legendary Action: Fell Word (DC 18 CON save): 21 SAVES!
Death Knight Attack 1: 13 + 11 = 24 HIT! 12 slashing (1/2) + 13 Necrotic: 19 damage
Death Knight Attack 2: 7 + 11 = 18 MISS!
Death Knight Attack 3: 7 + 11 =18 MISS!
Barbarian attack 1: 20 + 13 = 33 CRIT! (2d6 + 2d6 + 1d10 + 4d6 + 3d10) x 2 + 7 + 7 + 4 = 126 damage
The Death Knight is… dead
Barbarian damage explained:
Great Sword: 2d6
Flame Tongue: 2d6
Fire Giant Lineage: 1d10
Frenzy attack (only on the first attack per turn): 4d6
Brutal Critical: 3d10
Rage damage: 4
Strength bonus: 7
Great Weapon Master: 7
Graze weapon mastery (if you miss the attack it still does damage): 7
Great Weapon Fighting Style: damage rolls of 1 or 2 become 3
When I make up these absolutely silly min-max scenarios, I scour through the source books looking for little things that can add a few damage here and there and can also stack up. Now…. our barbarian unleashed a river of damage on his opponent but how would this barbarian fair against a first level command spell (with his WIS stat at 6 (-3) and no proficiency)? very badly. Find some friends big guy.
Random Table Rolls (7d20):
Book Titles: 53 – Is The Astral See for Me?: A Travel Guide for the Carelessly Adventurous.
Variant Wild Magic: 85 – The caster grows eyes i the back of their skull that remain for 1d10 hours. While they have these eyes, the caster cannot be surprised or flanked and is immune to sneak attack damage.
(I’m in-between random table generators at the moment so I’m scrounging for tables wherever I can, mostly in books)
Final Thoughts: When a nearby game store that I like posts to Instagram that they have new dice in stock. The reasonable thing to do (reasonable to a dice goblin) is to get over there and see what they have. The store is small enough that they’re not open every day of the week, so I didn’t rush over there for a few days after they posted about the new dice. That turned out to be a mistake. By the time I got there, they only had 2 of the new 55mm resin chonks in stock. I didn’t love either of the two dice that they had left but I do love to support my local game store and I also need to keep the dice reviews coming… so I bought this one. It’s nice enough but I don’t often bring 55mm dice to my in-person games, so they mostly just sit on my D&D shelf in with other chonky dice. That’s probably the ultimate fate of this d20 after it makes it’s first trip to the in-person game as all newly-reviewed dice do. At my game I mostly just use a chonk d20 this big for big rolls… death saves, revivifying another PC, or other things that are a big deal outside of combat. I have a different 55mm chonk d20 that I like to bring (See Review 040: “The Third Eye”) for these rolls.
This d20 is well made for the most part. I found a couple of de-molding lines on the 3 and the 15 faces. They’re pretty small blemishes thankfully, nothing like the URWizards dice that had mold lines on every single die in last 3 sets that I bought from them….
<Time for a tangent>
I can’t believe that I didn’t notice the lines on those URWizards dice. The worst part of buying those flawed dice from URWizards was that when I brought it up to them and sent URWizards photo proof, the customer service person said that she would send replacement dice. I offered to ship my defective dice back to them at my expense for a clean set but they said not to bother, that they’d just send me new dice. The customer service person I was engaged with slowly stopped sending updates, so every 3-4 weeks I would email and just gently ask how it was going. I got excuse after excuse from URWizards why they hadn’t sent the replacement dice. After 6 months, they stopped responding to my emails. Now I’m at the point where I’ll made truthful comments about my experience with their dice on any of their social media posts that come up in my feed. I won’t go looking for their posts but it their posts make it to me, I’ll comment in hopes that I can save some other dice goblin the annoyance with receiving flawed dice from them. I also won’t buy their dice any more. It’s a shame too, they have some very nice looking dice coming out lately. It’s just not worth the chance that URWizards are still sloppy with their dice-making process.
Now where was I before I went off on that big tangent?
Ah, the quality of this d20 is pretty good. The resin is clear, the “smoke” tendrils inside look good, the numbers are well inked. I don’t care too much for the font though. It’s mostly the number 7 that I hate in the font with it’s tiny half crossbar, looking like a backwards cursive ‘F’. The edges and vertices of the die are nice and well cast. The die is very clean overall and it was a good value at $30. I like some of the sharp-edge dice that 1985 Games makes but they only have a few color variations of their sharp-edge resin dice and I have nearly every color combination that their website has for sale. (there are only 7) so this is the first die I’ve bought from them. They seem like a good company though, LGBTQ friendly, small, they have a cool retro vibe and sell some other neat D&D products. I feel like their website is under-representing the amount of dice designs that they sell. They also not only have a blog, but I found an article that mentions the Chi-square dice balance test that I started using a few dozen reviews ago. (Link to the blog post)
The key takeaways here are: This d20 is pretty good. 1985 games are pretty good too!
** I’ve added a new value to the reviews called “Pearson’s Chi-square Test” 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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