Dice – we love ‘em. Shiny dice, metal dice, crystal-cut quartz dice, the dice from the 1980’s DnD starter set you had to color in with a wax crayon, there’s just something about math rocks that roleplayers adore. Hero Forge has added a lavish new dice type to the crowded market, dice with 3d printed miniatures, props, and heroic busts inside them – but are they worth adding to your collection?
Hero Forge is running a crowdfunding project to launch its customisable Dice Maker, which looks to be built on the same technology that lets customers design original DnD character models. If you haven’t used that already, we have a guide on how to use Hero Forge to create unique models for your characters, picking and then customising their DnD race, class, equipment, pose, and even color scheme.
The Kickstarter campaign is live from March 6 until April 4. The dice aren’t cheap – pledges start at $39 (£31) for a single custom die, or $199 (£155) for a full set of seven.
I’ve received review samples of several dice types: four D6 with lit dynamite inside them, a D4 with a teeny smiling mushroom, a small D20 with a character bust, and a larger D20 with an entire tabbycat playing with a ball of yarn. My daughter has already claimed the tabbycat die for her own.
It seems that you can’t quite shrink your whole character into the die, but you can cut their head off and roll that. Or if you’re playing one of the DnD classes that gets a loyal familiar, you could preserve your character’s pet inside a D20. Or maybe you want your damage dice to have tiny weapons in them so you never forget which die to roll?
The models inside seem to be printed to the same high quality as regular Hero Forge models, though it’s hard to be certain given that we can only see them through the faceted walls of a die. The miniatures are color printed – a technology that still feels like witchcraft to me – resulting in pale but brightly colored models.
The legibility of these dice really varies, depending on the colors chosen for the numbers and the model inside the die. The D20 with the bust of a druid in it, and the D4, have pale green numbers, and they’re fairly legible on most surfaces, though I wouldn’t call them outstanding.
The D6s have dark red numbers, which don’t stand out well at all against the orangey dynamite sticks floating inside the dice, or the dark table protector on my gaming table. The fact the numbers aren’t embossed, and so don’t have shadows to make them more pronounced, doesn’t help.
I don’t have enough dice samples to test if they’re fair. Because each die is made from a single material, albeit with varied pigments, it should be uniformly dense and therefore unbiased. But without a lot of dice and a lot of time to roll them I can’t confirm that.
Technically, you can make something similar yourself using a flexible dice mould and clear resin. You’d need several pours – one to line the base of the die with clear plastic, then another to fix your painted component in place, and a third to cover it over. I do a lot of messy things with chemicals for my hobby, and I don’t fancy that.
These dice are fully 3d printed in one pass, colors and all. Knowing how tricky it would be to make something like these dice conventionally makes me even more impressed by them as a technical achievement. The four D6s with dynamite in are identical, and that just wouldn’t be possible with traditional casting methods. It’s sci-fi.
I’m less convinced of their practical use. Their legibility depends a lot on how well the numbers on each die contrast with the miniature inside it and – since they’re clear – the color of your table surface.
Investing in a full set of these dice for your main gaming set feels like an incredibly expensive gamble, at least until there are a lot of example pictures of different dice so you can judge what will work and what won’t.
But if you’re a dice goblin, or you’re buying a gift for one, these will be a total treat. About half of the high-priced dice I see at conventions are so overdesigned they’re practically illegible, while others are made of material heavy enough to dent the gaming table. There’s clearly an audience for purely ornamental dice, and Hero Forge custom dice are a great example of just that.
If you’re between games while you wait for the next big thing to hit the DnD release schedule, you can do a lot worse than mess around with Hero Forge to see what the tools can do. I did a deep dive into the Hero Forge’s pro kitbashing toolset last year, which was a real treat, but even the basic free version is loads of fun to play with. It’s digital dress up dolls with fantasy characters – what’s not to love?
Source: Wargamer
