Shadow Blaster

If you like D&D and other role-playing games, you probably like dice.  Unfortunately, one of the standard RPG dice is problematic: the d4; it's hard to pick up, it doesn't roll so easily, and it's a hazard on the floor.

The typical d4 is shaped like a Platonic tetrahedron.  In its most stable state, it presents only angled sides, making it difficult to pick up.  If the weather (and your hand) is dry enough, squeezing it will only force it to slip out of your fingers.

You may be able to slide it off the edge of the table into your other hand, but if you drop it, the sharp peak on the top makes it hazardous to step on; it's the caltrop of dice.

The solution is to roll the d4 without ever needing to pick it up, or even letting it loose in the gaming environment.

Shadow Blast

Many years ago, my Game Master ran a game wherein me and my friends played as extra-dimensional creatures who posessed some kind of weird raygun-like ranged attack called the Shadow Blast.  The Shadow Blast did multiple d4s of damage.  At some point, we were expected to roll 20d4 for damage.  Picking up all those d4s made the attack a ridiculous time-waster at the game table.

The Pop-O-Matic bubble is a classic way to "roll" dice without picking them up, and lots of people have hacked the Pop-O-Matic bubbles out of old board games in order to fill them with other dice.  Unfortunately, you can only roll about 4 d4s in one of those little domes.  It would be neat to craft your own, but I have been unable to find a source for the "popping" spring at the heart of a Pop-O-Matic, other than by sawing apart old Pop-O-Matics.

Enter the Shadow Blaster

That's why I invented The Shadow Blaster.  The Shadow Blaster meant that I never needed to pick up a d4 ever again.  It's stupidly simple: it's a jar filled with d4s.

For a jar, you want a wide, squat glass jar with a flat bottom, like a salsa jar, or maybe some other kind of chip dip/vegetable dip/pickle jar.  The flatter the bottom, the less likely the dice will end up 'cocked' at an angle.  The wider the jar, the more d4s you can put in it.

Wash the jar.  Use Citra-Solv to remove any label stickum, and maybe try to dissolve out any stale chili pepper smell from the lid.  Let it air out for a while.  Drop in some minty chewing gum.  You will never completely remove the stale chili pepper smell.  But once you put dice in the Shadow Blaster, you will never need to open it again, so who cares what they smell like.

Now get various d4s.  You want to pick d4s with numbers at the peak (so you can read them when they're crowded together).

You will also want to get these d4s in color groupings such that you can call out how many dice you roll by color.  For example, my Shadow Blaster has 12d4 in it, colored much like this:
4 dark d4s
3 red d4s
2 yellow d4s
2 green d4s
1 blue d4

In this way, if I wanted to roll any number of d4s from 1 to 12, I could specify which colors I would read (or "all of them") before rolling.

Put the dice in the jar, seal it up, glue on a cool label, and you're set.  Shake up the jar!  The dice should make a satisfying popping and clinking rattle.

Let the dice settle at the bottom, and read your random numbers.

Need a cool label?  I've got you covered; print out this logo, cut it out, and glue-stick it to your jar.

Cool Tool for the Disabled

You might think this stupidly simple idea isn't valuable; that you never had much trouble picking up a d4 in your life, and you never needed to roll more than one d4 at any time.  But suppose you have a friend with a motor-control disability (maybe Parkinson's disease, a broken arm, arthritis, or Carpal Tunnel syndrome) which makes picking up small slippery dice difficult or even impossible.  If they can pick up a jar, then Shadow Blaster to the rescue!  Just drop a complete set of 7 dice in the jar (or whichever dice your game needs), and if they all lay flat at the bottom, have your friend shake the whole jar every time they need to roll a die, and only read the one die they need.