Dinner Rolls: or, this orc is the banana, this orc is the brandy

IMG_9064My sister Laura, who’s a D&D player and artist, made me these dice for Christmas:

There are 24 dice total, so that means Laura drew 144 tiny, beautiful pictures of food. She tells me that she stole the idea from some other product she saw but didn’t buy – presumably Recipe Dice. Laura’s dice are more D&D-themed: I bet the Recipe Dice don’t have so many forageable plants, mead, and so on.

Laura decided I needed the dice after playing in my food-focused run-through of Isle of Dread. My players were always making Nature checks to find unique toppings for their pizzeria. If only I’d had these dice then!

It’s great to have a collection of niche specialty dice, and they’ll come in handy whenever the ranger looks for food, but there’s another reason why a bunch of these dice made it into my travel dice box:

When I DM, I’m often too lazy to use real minis. I often use d6es instead. With their faces turned to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, it’s easy to keep track of who’s attacking who: “Which orc do you hit?” “#4.” The problems with this classic technique are that 1) no matter how many d6es you have, you’re limited to sets of 6 monsters, and 2) the rogue is likely to scoop up your minis to roll sneak attack damage.

fooddiceNow replace the d6es with a large number of non-numeric dice. The images on the dice are irrelevant, just so they’re unique. The dice make whimsical minis: “Which orc do you hit?” “The banana.” You’re limited only by the number of dice you own. You don’t need to carefully turn the faces up to specific numbers: you can roll a handful and play them as they lie. And they’re useless for rolling sneak attack damage, so the rogue won’t steal them.

Laura’s not gonna hand-draw you another set of Dinner Rolls dice, and you can’t have mine, but you can get most of the same benefits by picking up some Recipe Dice or Rory’s Story cubes or similar picture dice.

6 Responses to “Dinner Rolls: or, this orc is the banana, this orc is the brandy”

  1. terren says:

    there’s a kickstarter Idea here.

  2. Joshua Drake says:

    What did she use for the base of the dice?

  3. paul says:

    I’m not sure exactly which ones, but they have recessed faces – maybe something like this:
    http://www.purplepawn.com/2010/01/indented-blank-dice/

  4. 1d30 says:

    But … but I want THESE!

    I like how they’re themed, so you can roll the “booze die” to generate a random booze. Seafood, etc. Please tell me that die with the yellow stuff is the “butter” side of a “fats and lards” die!

  5. 1d30 says:

    This would be a cool way to handle, for example, small treasure. One die could have sides like Coins/Coins/Coins/Gem/Jewelry/Vessel. Another Sword/Spear/Mace/Axe/Hammer/Dagger.

    Although at that point I wonder if a Big Dumb Table stuck to your DM screen might work better …

    The dice are just very cool.

  6. Claire Claire says:

    I think the yellow dice represent products you could make on a farm? so there are grains and farm vegetables and dairy–maybe one category per die. But then one of the yellow dice is just a “hobbit” die, with tea and crumpets, pipeweed, rashers of bacon, and other hobbity things on each face.

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