Roll 2000D6...

[ffutures]

One of the current mysteries for the accounts department at my day job (educational technician) is trying to work out who ordered eight tubs of 250 six-sided dice. They don't show up on any order, so someone presumably entered the wrong order code, at our end or the suppliers - it'll probably turn out we wanted eight packs of pencils or something. Unfortunately it's our biggest supplier, and the delivery note has gone missing, so it could be pretty much any department - I'm fairly sure it isn't me, but that's about all.

But I can't help wondering if any game could ever use so many dice for real. Maybe Champions, if someone used their rules to stat something like Galactus, but I doubt it. Some sort of war game?

Comments

[elementalv.livejournal.com]

Shadowrun requires users to have an ass-ton (or is it ass-tonne in the U.K.?) of D6, and I think D&D uses the same. Other than that, I got nothing, because casinos usually go to a specific gaming supplier for craps dice.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

In Diana: Warrior Princess some of the gods etc. might need to roll 25 or 35 D6 if they used the right combination of skills, magical weapons, etc., but that's about as high as it goes.

I think the usual (fairly coarse) British equivalent is "Metric shit-load"

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

Clearly it would be arse-tonne.

[raygungothic.livejournal.com]

That is a mighty quantity of dice.

GURPS uses 6d6*(big number) for big explosion damage but it might be fun to use 2000 actual d6 just for the one time. Messes with the bell curve, though.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Who'd want to count them?

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Rolling that many dice all at once is pretty pointless: you may as well call the score 7000 +/- 450 and be done with it

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That's no fun...

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

Tunnels & Trolls with nuclear weapons?

Operation Cavalry in Star Fleet Battles?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Maybe - I'd forgotten SFB. Some other very large scale wargames might go up to a couple of hundred for all players, but 2000 is just a bit silly...

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

Practically speaking I don't think you'd need more than a couple of hundred for an all-sides alpha strike even in Cavalry. You're right - 2000 dice is definitely silly.

Maybe your staff member used to be a matchstick modeller but is branching out into a new medium?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

;-)

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

{ob_Fizban}
Fireball
{/ob_Fizban}

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Sounds suitably silly.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Somebody in the Maths department watched Season 4 of The Wire and decided to teach the kids probability by way of rolling lots of dice.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That's what they're sold for, of course, but 2000 is a bit silly.

[serpentstar.livejournal.com]

Some of the enormous multi-player Warhammer and 40K games at Games Day might well call for several hundred dice. I'm just trying to think how many you might reasonably need; I guess there are units & squadrons that might conceivably call for 60-odd dice to be thrown at once, and if you had 20 players in 2 teams of 10, that's 1200 dice... you might want to have more than 2000 handy, if you were organising the entire event, with several such large-scale games going on.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

And it sounds like we have a winner. Good grief - I thought I was being silly.

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

But you now have another mystery to solve - who is the phantom Warhammer player? And why haven't they bought any of your other gaming stuff yet?

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

I could use a couple of tubs…

A tub is a class set, barely. I've done activities that really need 20-30 dice per student, and with 35 kids in a class that means I'd like three of those tubs. (I got 18 dice total — let's hear it for trying to innovate on less than a shoestring.)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm sure they have loads of educational uses - we do a radioactivity activity that needs 100 dice, for example - they're wooden cubes with one black face, not real dice, but we could use 100D6 instead.

[trinfaneb.livejournal.com]

Part of some attempt to get in the Guinness Book of World Records? :)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Nowhere near close - I mentioned this on an industry list, and someone mentioned a warehouse incident, accidentally dropping and spilling the dice from a pallet of 192,000 (48 boxes, each containing 4 bags of 1000 dice)

[wiredwizard.livejournal.com]

Someone just wanted to build a new cubicle out of d6's. =)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Maybe gerbil sized - each tub was about the size of a 1kg bag of sugar, you're not going to get much of a cubicle out of that.

[wiredwizard.livejournal.com]

Have to start somewhere, right?