Can the Sea of Thieves RPG Dice be Used for Other Things?

  • I'm just wondering if the Legendary Dice used for the official Sea of Thieves tabletop roleplaying game, despite the custom prints, are able to be used as dice in general, too, like for other games and such?

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  • Why wouldn’t you be able to use them for other purposes?

  • @n1njagamer13 the only limit is your imagination.

  • It would probably be tricky to use them for something other than the RPG. The way the RPG dice were made for the game do not follow the conventional d6 layout if you are wanting to convert the symbols back to numbers. Normally 1 & 6 would be opposite each other, but the corresponding symbols on the SoT dice with the Skull and Chest respectively are not positioned in this way, which in turn skews the placement that the Bones and Coins would have on a standard d6 layout.

    That said, I normally wouldn't use custom dice in this manner anyways. You'd be having to do extra mental gymnastics in order to convert what you rolled into the corresponding number (assuming you have a custom die that tries to more clearly adhere to the standard d6 layout) which seems silly to subject yourself to when d6 are also by far the most common dice on the market that you can easily nab or acquire.

    Of course, you could add numbers to the faces to allow them to work for other purposes. It won't look great and kind of kills the charm of the custom dice, so again I wouldn't recommend it.

    As a final note, however, there are other games out there which use d6 with custom faces that total up the same way as these dice do, so for those you could make an easier conversion so you could roll your SoT dice for those games and not have skewed results or too much in the lines of mental gymnastics to perform.

    This has been a word from your friendly neighborhood tabletop game developer.

  • @redeyesith
    Clearly you have put much more thought into this than most of us. But if dice are supposed to be random number generators, how should results be skewed (as you put it) if you switch what number is on what face? Should be random either way rite?

  • @shifty189 the SoT dice do not have numbers on them. They have:

    1 Face = Chest
    1 Face = Skull
    2 Faces = Bones
    2 Faces = Coins

    So, there are only 4 icons used on the d6. Since the high value (Chest) and low value (Skull) don't confirm to the normal placement, you have no way to properly distinguish what 2 numbers you might have if you roll the other 2 possible results.

    If the high and low value did conform to the proper placement, you could sort out what you actually rolled with those by checking where the other faces were placed and be able to distinguish them directly. Since you can't do that, the only way you could make them work as a 1-6 generation result would be to simply write numbers on each face in advance of rolling them so you can see your result. This is not desirable obviously, for multiple reasons, so they really don't work for anything that doesn't also confirm to 4 values spread across 6 faces where 2 of those values have a single repeat.

  • @redeyesith Thank you for your answer! I don't own them yet at this point so I was just wondering as I was not sure how many faces it had or what the layout was. Kinda unfortunate, as I have an insatiable desire for SoT-themed dice that I could use for a variety of things

  • @n1njagamer13 indeed, but I understand why they did it (aside from not having the high and low value correctly positioned as that would at least leave the door open for other uses, even if it wouldn't be efficient still). And sadly, the way the art is on them I don't personally feel trying to add numbers to the faces works well in the end (and aesthetically would just not look great since it isn't a part of the design outright).

    There are a few games out there, though, that do have dice that conform to that same layout, so you can still sub these in under some specific circumstances potentially (assuming you also have those games, or at least have access to play them).

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