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Re: [piecepack] Dice Inconsistancy



mschoessow wrote:
I was working on my Solitary Confinement entry last night when I
noticed a peculiar inconsistency in the piecepack dice in my set.
The Sun, Moon, and Crown dice are all identical in implementation,
but the Arms die has the 2 and 5 transposed compared to the other
three dice. This is inconsequential in most games, but it could be
significant in some. For example, if a game used dice as moving
pieces on a board with the movement determined by the top face, and
if there was some other mechanic in the game that caused dice to
rotate toward particular sides, then the Arms die would change its
upward face in a different pattern from the other dice.

So I have two questions.

1) Are all piecepack dice sets made this way (Arms die unique), or
is the printing of the dice done in a manner that makes the 2 and 5
orientations randomly interchangeable?

2) If all sets are made this way, why? If all sets are not intended
to be like mine, then I would be interested in hearing if anyone
else has a set in which the four dice are not identical regarding
numbering convention.

Given that poor Karol at Mesomorph hand stamps all the pieces to make
the sets, it's probably just a mistake.  Note that the piecepack spec
doesn't appear to specify the pattern of the dice faces.  A Standard d6
has opposite faces add to seven and if you look at the 1-2-3 corner then
those numbers go around the corner in a counter-clockwise direction.
We could have a similar rule where opposite faces add to five and the
blank-ace-2 corner has the face going counter-clockwise, i.e, it's
just like a standard d6 with each face reduced by one pip.  Or for
compatibility with standard d6 we could just say it looks like the
standard d6 with the 6 face replaced by the blank.  In any case, as the
piecepack spec doesn't specify this you can't really write a game ruleset that depends of it without completely specifying what you
want as part of the rules.

--
mark@...
mark.a.biggar@...