How to Organize Your Useless D&D Dice When You're a Slob

Intro

(Editor's note: This guest blogger is not an affiliate of 1985 Games)

I did not plan to have this many dice.

About 18 months ago—after a pretty rough stretch—I bought my first mystery dice set at a comic shop. I didn't think I would start a collection. I'd been toying with the idea of learning D&D and saw this pretty cool-looking Halloween set hanging near a box of '70s horror comics. 

And now as I write this, I'm staring at four giant D20s that have no more point than to sit near my mouse like stones that would power some kind of warp drive in yet another Star Trek series. I guess I've become like kids these days who get antsy if they don't have their tablet and headphones in reach. All I can say is that being a dice hoarder keeps me plugged into a world that I would rather be in if I didn't have to do dumb stuff like work so I can do more dumb stuff like eat.

Without my dice hoard, I would be in a sorry state.

For perspective, I would not say I'm as committed to my dice as owners of marimo moss balls. Look them up. They're little spheres of algae that can live over a hundred years if you treat them right. I came across them in a Reddit thread and let me tell you, moss ball pet owners are a lovely community. I recently met someone who even believes his algae buddies talk to him telepathically and takes them to his therapy appointments. Amazing. 

Obviously, I don't have to nurture my dice like fuzzy little balls that look like green Tribbles, but I get the feeling of connection. I've got a set of sharp edge dice with galaxy swirls that makes me feel like I'm saving the universe like Flash Gordon.

All of which is to say: I'm kind of on a strange journey with my dice collection. I still haven't learned to play D&D, but I'm okay with it. I'm happy with my dice being useless. Because just having them around makes me feel like I could step into a fantasy world at any moment. Gothic dice, cosmic dice, shimmery dice that look like the jewel the lady threw in the ocean in Titanic... giant dice, plastic dice, acrylic dice, enamel dice, holiday-themed dice. As long as they're colorful and numbered and cut into polyhedral shapes, I'm into it.

And if you're like me, and you love rpg dice without any practical motivation, then I hope you'll read on. Because I'm going to share some tips on how to organize your dice when you don't really do anything with them but love them.

Let emotion and imagination breathe and evolve.

Step One: Get Out Your Meditation Mat

I'm a fan of Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. You should read it. He talks about how motorcycle repair starts by laying all your parts out. It's like building a spreadsheet or a map. You've got to externalize your information. You've got to make it tangible. Otherwise, your dice are going to try and talk to you (like those moss balls) and get lost in all the white noise in your head. You won't hear the possible reconfigurations of your dice collection.

Pro tip: Don't do this when you're exhausted or hungry. Make sure you're ready. 

Now, clear off your table or spread a blanket on the floor and start dumping out all your dice. Your bags, boxes, loose dice, everything. It should look like a beautiful mess—like a family of raccoons broke into the fulfillment room of a dice company (well, if you're my dice, anyway). Then... meditate. That's right, meditate!

Don't think, don't judge, just breathe. Through the nostrils, out the mouth. Feel the ground beneath your feet. Imagine light from your favorite star entering your third eye... kidding. But seriously, stare at your dice without any mental focus or sense of purpose. Because this is where the magic happens. This is where the Zen comes in. Now gradually allow patterns to emerge from your subconscious. These messages are what T.S. Eliot called "objective correlatives": they give coherence to your inner experience in the symbolism of gaming dice. Conjure scenes from the packaging. Project your imagination into your loose or stray dice. Let the colors, textures, marbling, speckling, inking, call up emotions or associations... and begin to put names to them. 

Ocean. Stars. Mountains. Thunder. Jungle. Desert sun. Love. Fear. Hate. Palace of the gods. Infernal realms. Intrigue. Conspiracy. Chaos. Kingdoms. This is the groundwork for discovering the categories that you will assign to your dice sets. At this point, grab an old-school pen and paper and capture what comes to the forefront of your consciousness. Go ahead and channel that s##t. Scribble wildly for a page or two, then stop.

Because now you're going to refine your list. From your heart, your gut, your whimsy. We're going for momentum, not cold logic. 

Already, your new configuration is taking shape...

Chaos becomes mystery dice. Home of the gods becomes galactic dice. You get the idea. Some of my dice started out as blacksmith and ended up being funneled into my metal dice stash. My mystery sets tend to end up in my Ragtag Bunch of Misfits box. Something about the blind-bag concept compels me to think of one of my favorite war movies of all time, The Dirty Dozen. 

Again, do not intellectualize your list. 

There's no right or wrong here. 

Unless you think you're done.

Step Two: Assemble Your Teams

Okay. You've got your terrain (your dice pile) and your map (your list). Now start separating your dice into groups. Literally. Throw them in plastic shopping bags, old Amazon boxes, clump them together by the cat tree. Stick with your map, but feel free to make adjustments if inspiration strikes. This is not the time to be rigid or regimented. Think that giant d20 with a (fake) moss ball inside it would go better in your seafaring category? Make the switch. The hands-on phase of sorting is no small part of the pleasure of dice collecting, in my opinion. It invites intuition and openness. 

I don't know about you, but I spend most of my time being bored by rules and standards and best practices. With my dice sorting system, I let emotion and imagination breathe and evolve. Remember what I said about the objective correlative? This is you relating to you, evoking feelings within yourself, through the dice that you keep (I'm really not fond of the term "click clacks"). Just don't forget that this is not the only iteration of your dice collection, that it continues to grow and invite reconfiguration, and that at some point you need to declare victory with this step. That is, unless you really want to walk around your abode with dice spilling from every corner. 

Okay. Your dice are locked and loaded. 

Time to officially home them.

Step Three: Ask Your Dice, "What's Up?"

I admit this is my least favorite step in organizing my dice collection. I want to swim in stormy nebulae of aesthetic possibilities, not embark on a quest in Home Depot. But there's a practical, tool-forward necessity to this process, and working out your storage system is it. Personally, I like to mix up cool dice towers I find on Etsy with more utilitarian setups like tackle boxes. Or sometimes I'll actually put a little thought into it and try to connect my dice with my own origin story. That's how some of my loose dice ended up on my kitchen table—arranged on repurposed cloth pouches (not pictured here, obviously) near framed photos of loved ones (also not pictured here, obviously, as I am trying to respect them) who currently reside in the palace of the gods.

Here are some other ideas for homing your newly sorted dice:

Bead organizers. Grandma's style of dice storage.

Zippered dice books. These make me think of the black storage cases I kept in my glove compartment back when I sang along to 4 Non Blondes's "What's Up" and Veruca Salt's "Seether" like I was at a music festival and not rolling down I-5 in a shaky Econoline van doing company mail runs. I once found a zippered dice bag on eBay that looked like it came off a poster for the '70s Japanese horror movie, House. I still regret not getting it.

Toolboxes with removable trays. Grandpa's style of dice storage.

Drawer dividers. If you're using drawers. Steal one from the next Airbnb you stay at (but only if the hosts suck—I've rented from some pretty rotten ones). 

Mousepads. Seriously. Even if you're like me and don't play tabletop role playing games, do what I did and get yourself a cool dnd playmat to rest your wrist on and adorn with your shiniest dice set. Or your moodiest dice set. Whatever makes deleting your junk email feel a little closer to a human experience.

As for labeling your dice containers... I don't know. Sticky notes. Index cards. Washi tape. Colored dot stickers. Custom design stickers. As robotic as it sounds, I took my labeling to the cloud with a color-coded spreadsheet because I spend a lot of time at computers. And I'm cool with it. Really cool with it. Spread in a half-circle at my fingertips, my d20 chonks give me sage counsel about my dice configurations through metallic voices that reverberate inside my head. They speak of blood-spatter dice that need more subcategories, Valentine's Day deals that need links in my spreadsheet. They order me under threat of carpal tunnel syndrome to pursue my other passion besides dice and start writing a blog...

Step Four: Not Really Sure What to Say Here

I confess I'm pretty much boring as hell when it comes to this step. I live alone, I don't have a lot of space, and I'm not too picky about where I display my dice... because I'm the only one who sees them. To give you an idea of just how uninspired I can get sometimes, I'll eat Chef Boyardee out of the can at the kitchen sink. With a spork. 

Yeah, it can be like that when you're a slob.

As far as my dice go, I am for whatever can hang with each other, sort of like a college dorm room minus the youthful exuberance. To an outside observer, it might seem that I buy dice on a whim and then abandon them, like those horrible people who give up their dogs as soon as they're no longer puppies.

On my kitchen island, I've got an unidentified monster figure—a thrift store gift from an aunt—rising from a seascape of Cheetos and Chips Ahoy like the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes. On my dining room table, you'll see a modern-day charnel ground (an open-air site where bodies are left to decompose—seriously, deep stuff) piled with bills, unread books, old photo albums, and recently digitized VHS cassettes instead of corpses and carrion. And yeah, my d&d dice live in this chaos. My dice hoard lives in an actual hoard.

More than once, I have eaten Trader Joe's lasagna on a paper plate in front of a six-pack of sharp edge resin dice that I still haven't opened. It's sad, right? Like a scene from an old French movie. You know, that '70s European vibe where dentistry doesn't exist and neither does a musical score...

But whatever, I see the beauty in all the chaos and I feel other worlds calling to me. That's enough for me: to feel called. 

I guess I'm not the right resource for showing off your newly sorted dice.

Outro

Okay, maybe that was an overshare. Maybe I should have saved it for a therapist. But I just want to give you a real picture. Some honest context. Portrait of a dice collector who can't be bothered to move a few snacks off his kitchen island, but can find in his spreadsheet which Halloween-themed resin dice he bought three months before the pandemic because they came with a sticker and pin. 

Contrary to what we often see on social media, collecting isn't always pretty. Sometimes it's gritty like a cop film and smells a bit like malaise. Or low hopes for the future. Or both.

Then again, it's not the glamour you see on social media that fuels collecting at its heart. The glorious book nooks that look like they fell out of a Wonderful World of Disney opening or the Warhammer dioramas that win awards. It's the oddity—or maybe the superpower—in human nature that makes us want to acquire objects that have emotional rather than practical use, whether we labor on them or take the easy way out and buy them in finished form. 

I think of people who collect vintage paperbacks just for the cover artist. Or salt and pepper shakers. Porcelain dolls. Elephant figurines. Rabbit's feet. Napoleon's penis. Yeah, Napoleon's penis, allegedly removed during post mortem examination. Someone actually owns that. Imagine eating your egg salad sandwich with a French general's shriveled penis winking at you from a glass case next to your printer in the corner. That's probably where I would have it, anyway... if I was into centuries-old penises of famous military leaders. Who am I to judge?

Humans are strange. 

But yeah, to go back to where I started this somewhat meandering listicle, I bought a bag of role playing dice on a whim and watched it grow to a few hundred. Along the way, I discovered that reconfiguring my dice collection was as fun as looking at my dice, holding them in my hand, or shopping for new sets. And because my giant d20s told me to share this information, I wrote this blog post in the hopes that it might resonate with other domestically challenged hoarders like me. Hence my oversharing. 

To sum up: Organize your dice. Even if you don't organize anything else. Even if it looks like you're hanging by a twenty-sided thread while the rest of your life is falling apart. You're not doing it for hearts on Instagram, you're doing it for the sense of adventure that is just a roll away, even if you never roll your dice on a game table. 

And sure, your priorities might sound strange... but strange is human. We nurture balls of algae and spend thousands of dollars on dead men's penises. 

So be strange. 

Be the dice hoarder you are.

☹️ 🎲 Hi, I'm Marcus Aurollicus. I'm a d20 hoarder and first-time blogger. Check back for more of my dice-related thoughts and adventures. 

See what my fellow dice fanatics are saying at: d20cabal.blogspot.com