The Dice Jail

So, I was faced with a problem that I'm sure most other #tabletopRPG players face...the dice were not rolling as they should. In fact, on a fairly consistent basis and across multiple games for multiple players, they were rolling positively horribly. No amount of sweet talking, promises, or encouragement improved that behavior. Witness the following:


This lovely die rolled 1 every time my gnome gunslinger Theophraxis tried to use his rifle. We even caught this behavior on the Time2Tabletop stream for The Infinity Tower. And yes, I know it's a spin-down die. I don't care. That's no excuse.

These naughty twins both decided to produce a critical failure on a roll with advantage during my own D&D homebrew campaign. ("Advantage" is a rule in D&D 5e that lets you roll two dice and take the higher of the two scores.) The player was not amused.





In the same game, this tag team teased the player into the false hopes of a critical success on a disadvantage roll. ("Disadvantage" is another D&D 5e rule that has you roll two dice and take the lower of the two scores). This was particularly cruel as you can probably imagine. The player let lose with flurry of curses that would make a Bard blush.



Now, let's make it clear right out of the gate. I don't hate my dice. I don't even hate their behavior. (Hate is such a strong word.) And really, I don't want to punish them. I love my dice as though they were my children...the whole lot of them are a pack of multi-faced little darlings. Moreover, I believe in modeling good behavior, such as this:

Taking a shot at a bit of hand-over-dice prompting to demonstrate their expected behavior. This did not help. In fact, it only made things worse. I never had the chance to implement the reward-based behavioral plan either. Drat.

But every once in a while corrective measures must be taken to ensure that dice (my dice, your dice, everyone's dice) are fully contributing, responsible citizens of the games with which they become involved. I realized, with much sadness, that if my dice were ever to achieve such a lofty goal, more drastic measures would be needed.

It was time to build a dice jail.

I'm not exactly a crafter. I dabble here and there for sure. I'm nowhere near as talented as some of the amazing work I see on Twitter and Instagram. (I have far too many interests to become particularly proficient at any of them.) Still, there was a need! And by golly I was going to fill it.

I set out to build a dice jail...or, if you prefer, a polyhedron behavioral enlightenment center. A PBEC for those who enjoy a jumble of capital letters. The following images show the progression:

The first thing I did was to use some foam core poster board left over rom a previous project to construct the general shape of the jail. I went back and forth between an irregular shape (such as a cavern might be) and a standard cube shape. I settled on the cube mostly for easy transportation to and from games. I assembled the pieces with tape and Elmer's glue. Nothing special there. I only did three sides of the walls, though, because I wanted to add a door.

Next, I put in the flooring. I used a piece of a cardboard box. I cut pieces so that they were shaped like flagstones. I then glued them in place with a hot glue gun.

Once the floor pieces were in place, I glued on irregular chunks of foam to add interesting shapes to the interior. This was a holdover from my idea of making a cavern that I didn't want to abandon. I got the foam at The Dollar Tree. Initially, the shapes proved to be too bulky, so I shaved them down to a more manageable size.

Next, I applied the wall texture to the interior. I cut out pieces from a paper bag and crumpled it up. I then applied the paper using Elmer's and a glue gun. One thing to watch out for are the seams of the paper bags. They just look bad. It's easy enough to tear the seam but who wants to be bothered with that?

I then textured the outside walls using the same technique. In some ways, this was like wrapping a present...and just as I have problems planning the seams on a present, I didn't plan for the seams on the jail either. Some of them came out fairly messy and I had to smooth them out with glue. I also applied glue along the edges where the walls met the flooring to add a little blending to the final look.

With this out of the way, I moved on to the door. I used the same texturing technique and experienced the same issues with the seams. (That's right, I'm a slow learner.) I used toothpicks for the bars. I simply slotted each toothpick into the foam core and added a little glue to make sure the wouldn't fall out. I applied some Elmer's to the flagstone to create some added variations on their surfaces. I also filled the spaces in between the flagstone with sand to simulate grout. This was a straight-forward step of simply filling the gaps with glue and then dumping a bunch of colored sand onto the floor. Again, I got the sand from The Dollar Tree.

With all the main parts fabricated it was time to paint. I applied a base coat of primer, then a coat of a slate color. I then dry-brushed a light gray for the walls and alternating red and brown for the floor. I experimented with a few wet techniques as well to simulate some weathering or some water stains. None of my attempts gave me what I was looking for I think because the paper bag was disperse the color instead of letting it flow. Eventually, I decided against that sort of aging.

Once the colors were applied, I attached the door. I picked up a woodcraft chest from Michael's and salvaged the hinges and lock. I used those to mount the door and create a latch to make sure the door would remain shut. I attached the hardware with the hot glue gun initially and then used the screws from the woodcraft chest to secure them. That's right, I used screws on foam core board. I think the hinges are going to be the weakest part of the overall construction though.

I still wanted some sign of aging so I added some moss to the floors and the corners of the walls using the standard "fake grass" that you can buy at a hobby store. I had a bunch left over from a diorama I did of my favorite WWII aircraft--the P-61. Anyway, I applied this and considered the project complete...for now.

I toyed with the idea of adding a ceiling with lighting. I even picked up a couple of e-candles from, yep you guessed it, The Dollar Tree. My initial fabrication was horrible though so I decided to skip that for now. I might go back to it later though.

So, that's my new dice jail all ready for some #diceShaming when needed. I hope I don't ever have to use it...maybe the threat of jail will be enough to straighten out my dice. Only time will tell.

Things I would have done differently:

• texture the walls before the floor
• use an irregular shape just because
• plan the seams better
• experiment a little more with weathering
  I really want to apply some weathering to this...and I'll probably play around a little more to see what I can get away with.
• build a ceiling
  A detachable ceiling with lights could be a pretty cool.

Anyway, that's one of the random things I've been up to lately in between DMing two campaigns, playing in a third campaign (Time2TableTop on #twitch Tuesday nights at 6:30PM Pacific Time), and writing up more DMs Guild materials.

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• Epic Gnomish Inventing
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