Sociable

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Can we say patentable?

Alright.. this is off topic from my TAGE RPG and publishing stuff, but is a side quest that got started by my looking into the costs of making a Die-TAGE.

Doing a lot of research on the current dice making processes, I have come to the shocking realization of just how primitive our dice making methodologies still are. Here's what I mean.

Originally there were precision dice in the polyhedral dice options for RPGs. They tended to be pressure molded, sharp edged, garraunteed to have a high degree of accuracy on balance and their likelyhood to land on any side and they were never pre-painted.

For years that was the way of it. They didn't even know how to ink the numbers for a while, and then that problem was solved. But it ruined the precision in dice. The problem with pre-painting is that only in a real sweatshop environment can you get people willing to be paid little enough to hand paint them and there isn't an efficient way to actually paint them in a machine, so they currently use a trick to paint them. They tend to start with percision dice, they paint the whole thing and then they get tumbled in a rock polisher to break off the excess paint on the surface and in the process the edges round and precision is lost... Makes for pretty dice but not precise dice.

Well, this got me to brainstorming, I talked to a couple genius friends of mine and a couple of us may have a solution that could offer the gaming community affordable, pre-painted precision dice. If this checks out, it won't be anytime real soon, because this is concept air, prototyping and major machinery type stuff... This isn't something we could really do in our kitchens and ever make it economical, but it is very doable.

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