Skip to main content

Dice tray & dice tower on the cheap!

RPGs tend to use dice, lots of 'em! So, it's common to find, as part of a gamer's collection, some tools and gadgets specially designed to ease all that rolling.

The two most common are dice trays and dice towers. However, buying them can be expensive, and depending on where you live, getting either of those can cost a bit of $$$.

Of course, there's always an alternative because with a little bit of patience, and some random household items, you can craft a dice tower and a dice tray yourself!


After searching all over the web for possible methods of crafting (and pretty much discarding all those that required complex carpentry tools or other advanced skills), I found two wonderful solutions.

DICE TRAY:
For the first one, all you need is a cheap photo frame, some felt fabric (or any other type of fabric that has some soft thickness to it), and a pair of scissors.

Essentially, all you have to do is to remove the glass from the frame, and instead of framing a picture, you will be framing your felt fabric! You can use the scissors to help you trim the excess fabric from the back. It's as easy and cheap as it gets. Here's the video from which I took the idea:

DICE TOWER:
For the second one, all you need is a standard-sized can of Pringles (the small one unfortunately won't do), some wooden skewers (3 of them is more than enough), adhesive tape or some hot silicon, a cutter, and a piece of cardboard. There are more materials in the video, but they're for cosmetic purposes, which you may or may not require.

The audio quality of the video is not the best, but if you watch it once, you'll get it how it's done because it's not a complicated process.

I also used a pointy screw to help me in the process of opening the little holes for the skewers to be placed, and a plastic cap to draw a small circle. You'll see what I mean if you watch this video:

I can tell you that both of those crafts work as they're intended. In fact, I've made my own.
Here's some gifs showing how both dice tower and dice tray work in tandem.


 
I hope this may give you some ideas!

Enjoy!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Customizing your Scarlet Heroes experience

You can tell I really like Scarlet Heroes because I'm always bringing it up. Not only was it the very first solo RPG book I bought, but also I find myself going back to it, time and time again, despite having other titles in my collection.   The illustrations of the book are also fantastic, in my opinion! Due to its origins (see my previous article for a quick overview on this), Scarlet Heroes is easily customizable and adaptable. This is exceptionally useful if you're playing entirely on your own.  By default, the game comes with the monsters, spells, and lore of the Red Tide , an original campaign setting by Kevin Crawford (the one man behind Sine Nomine Publishing), which was made available as a Labyrinth Lord supplement around the time Black Streams: Solo Heroes (Scarlet Heroes' predecessor) was originally released. The world of the Red Tide was inspired by Southeast Asian myths and culture. When the full Scarlet Heroes was released via Kickstarter, the Red Tide setti...

Quick 5e to OSR conversion method

I've seen this question pop up time and time again in forums and similar websites: How do you convert 5e material into OSR games? This applies mostly to monsters, foes, and other creatures that sometimes are hard to convert into older systems because of the concepts of AC (Armor Class) and HD (Hit Dice). Modern 5e foes use HP (Hit Points) as opposed to HD, and their AC is ascendant (which means that the higher the AC, the better). So, whenever you're playing a module, things go smoothly until you encounter your first enemy, and then you're lost because how do you transfer such a detailed enemy into a much simpler system, while ensuring you're keeping it relatively balanced? Well, here's one way how you can do it. I'd like to share with you a very simple conversion system, that will allow you to convert 5e foes and other creatures to OSR games with a descending AC (such as Labyrinth Lord). This also works with other games such as Scarlet Heroes (more info ...

Tools #1: Fate/Fudge dice Oracle System

This is an easy oracle system that can help you when playing solo, or when you're GMing an RPG session. All you need is a pair of Fate/Fudge dice. If you don't know what that is, keep on reading! Do you have any Fate/Fudge dice (Fd’s)? If not, you can easily create your own. All you need is: Some ordinary d6 or six-sided dice. A black sharpie or any other permanent marker. The following chart.  ----------------------------------------------------------------------  Source: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/726115/paolo-robino ----------------------------------------------------------------------  It’s a cheap and easy solution that works just like the real deal! ----------------------------------------------------------------------  My example. As you can see, it's a simple process. ----------------------------------------------------------------------  Now, with your Fd’s ready, here’s the Oracle. You just need 2Fd’s for it. The ...