Epic Quests: Premium Tabletop RPG Accessories and Dice Sets for Gamers

The float test most people skip

Drop a translucent d20 into a glass of water with about three tablespoons of salt stirred in until the die barely floats. Flick it. If the same number keeps rolling up to the surface, the die has an air pocket or uneven resin density, and it will favor certain faces on the table too. This is the cheapest quality check there is, and it catches problems that no amount of inspecting the print can.

The test only works on clear or semi-clear resin. Opaque dice, metal dice, and anything with heavy inclusions like real flowers or flakes will not give a clean reading because you cannot see which face wants up. For those, the practical move is rolling 60 to 80 times and tallying results, which sounds tedious until you have a session where a player’s lucky set quietly rolls 15-plus on half their attacks and nobody can prove anything. Chessex and Gamescience have both built reputations partly on consistency, with Gamescience in particular skipping the tumbling step that rounds edges and shifts weight. Rounded corners feel nicer in the hand and roll less true. That tradeoff is the whole argument.

Metal dice are heavier than the problem they solve

A full set of zinc-alloy dice runs 150 to 250 grams. They feel fantastic. They also chip lacquered tabletops, crack acrylic dice trays after enough drops, and make a sound at 11pm that gets noise complaints in thin-walled apartments. Anyone gifting metal dice for the heft should pair them with a tray that has a genuine soft floor, not a thin felt sticker over hardboard.

The enamel fill on the numbers is where metal sets diverge in quality. Cheap sets fill the recessed numerals with paint that flakes within a few months of regular rolling, and once a 6 loses half its fill it reads ambiguously at arm’s length across a wide table. Better sets use baked enamel or anodized color that sits in the recess and survives abrasion. Norse Foundry and Die Hard Dice both sell sets in this range, and the price gap between a 12 dollar metal set and a 45 dollar one is almost entirely in the fill and the plating. The cheaper plating wears at the high points first, so the edges of a d4 go from gunmetal to raw zinc and the whole die looks tired fast.

Weight also changes how a die behaves on a roll. Heavy dice settle faster and bounce less, which players read as more dramatic, but on a hard surface they can also rock to a stop on an edge more often than you would expect from a d20. That cocked-die argument at the table is more common with metal than resin, and a deep tray with sloped sides cuts it down.

What a tray actually needs

A dice tray has one job: stop dice without killing the roll. Two centimeters of wall height is the floor for a d20 thrown with any energy. Below that, dice clear the edge and end up under the snacks.

The case for a folding leather tray over a fixed wooden box

Most dice trays at conventions are the snap-together leatherette squares with four corner buttons. They flatten for transport, weigh almost nothing, and the surface deadens sound better than wood. The downside is that the leatherette surface is slick, so a hard throw skids dice into a pile against one wall and you lose the spread that makes a roll feel fair. For a player who likes to really chuck a handful of damage dice, that pile-up is annoying.

Fixed wooden trays with a felt floor solve the spread problem because felt grips just enough to let dice tumble and settle apart. A tray from a maker like Wyrmwood, routed from a single block of walnut or maple with a wool felt bottom, sits in the 60 to 120 dollar range and lasts for decades because there is nothing to wear out except the felt, which you can re-glue. The weight is the catch. A solid hardwood tray is not going in a backpack for the weekly drive to a friend’s place, so a lot of players end up owning both: the folding one travels, the heavy one lives on the home table.

The felt color matters more than it seems. Black felt swallows black-and-gold dice so you squint to read a result. A mid-gray or deep green floor gives almost every dice color enough contrast, and that is why so many premium trays default to green. If the gift recipient already rolls a specific dice line, matching or deliberately contrasting the tray floor to those dice is the kind of detail that lands better than another generic set.

Edge construction tells you whether a wooden tray will survive drops. Mitered corners glued only at the seam pop open when the tray gets knocked off a table. Box-jointed or splined corners hold. On a routed single-piece tray there are no corners to fail, which is the strongest argument for the higher price even though the slab of hardwood is the obvious cost driver people fixate on.

Storage that does not scratch the set you paid for

A 32 dollar resin set with sharp edges and a glossy face will haze over inside a year if it rattles loose in a bag with metal dice. The scratches are micro-abrasion from harder objects, and on translucent dice they cloud the whole body so the inclusions you paid for stop catching light. Foam-lined boxes with individual cutouts stop this completely, and they double as a way to keep a full set of seven together so the d4 does not vanish under the couch.

Magnetic flip cases in the 15 to 25 dollar range have gotten common because they stack and the magnet closure does not loosen the way snap lids do after a few hundred openings. The thing to check is whether the foam is closed-cell or open-cell. Open-cell foam crumbles and sheds bits onto the dice within a couple of years, while closed-cell foam stays intact. You can tell by pressing a fingernail in: closed-cell springs back clean, open-cell holds the dent and feels spongier.

For a collector who is past the single-set stage, a binder-style case with multiple removable trays beats one giant box because you can carry only the three sets you want for a given campaign instead of the whole collection. Dice Envy and a handful of Etsy makers sell these, and the removable-tray design is the feature worth paying for since a fixed-layout case forces you to haul everything or repack constantly.

Sharp-edged versus tumbled, and why gamers argue about it

Sharp-edged dice are cast in a mold and never tumbled, so the faces meet at crisp 90-degree-ish angles and the numbers sit flush. They look like cut gemstones and they photograph beautifully, which is half of why they sell. The other half is the claim that flat faces and sharp edges roll more randomly because there is less rounding to bias a settle. There is some truth to it, but the bigger real-world factor is whether the die was cast evenly in the first place, which loops right back to the float test from the top.

The practical cost of sharp edges is comfort and noise. They are harder to scoop off a tray, they hurt slightly if you grab a fistful, and they clatter louder. A player who rolls dozens of dice per session for a sorcerer’s fireballs may genuinely prefer tumbled dice for the hand feel even knowing they roll a hair less true. Kraken Dice and Level Up Dice both run sharp-edge lines at a premium over their standard tumbled sets, and the markup is mostly the higher reject rate, since a sharp-edge die with a single chipped corner is scrap while a tumbled one would have hidden it.

For a gift, the question is whether the recipient is a roller or a collector. A collector wants the sharp-edge set in a display case and may rarely roll it. A heavy roller wants something that survives 200 sessions of getting flung across a tray, and tumbled resin or well-plated metal takes that abuse better. Where does a set that does both even exist, given that the qualities pulling toward display are the same ones that make a die uncomfortable to actually throw?