Rainbow Dice

I recently plowed my way through Daniel Norton’s excellent Song of the Mapper OD&D Actual Play backlog, and one shorthand he uses a lot is a white d6 and black d6 in combination. He can make one roll and determine, say, surprise for the PCs (white die) and the opposition (black die), without having to keep track of anything other than the dice he grabs. I’ve seen DMs do on-the-fly contortions like declaring “OK the first orc is one and the second orc is two” and then rolling two white d6s in succession. This kind of improvising process on the spot is something I like to avoid, because each instance gives me a slight bump of flusterment. Hence, I’m always looking for ways to shape my tools so when I pick them up, they fit my hand and are immediately usable. So I dig Daniel’s method here (which maybe comes from Ironsworn?), but in thinking about the absurdly large bag of multicolored dice I have, I realized there’s a way to make this second dimension of dice a whole lot 🌈wider🌈.

I collected a set of 7 standard dice (4,6,8,10,%,12,20) in colors approximating the 6 real colors of the rainbow (GTFO indigo), along with black and white. I put these in a special dice bag I use specifically when DMing ¹. So now I have up to 8 of any given die type, and they’re inherently ordered. I can roll damage for three orcs engaged with three different PCs by grabbing any three d6s from my bag – e.g. red, green, purple. Red is damage for the PC nearest to my left, green for the next in counter-clockwise order, and purple is for the last.

Online games make this less easy, since the person I see to the left of me in my Zoom window might be above me in someone else’s UI. Having some pre-made order for this, either using the most recent marching order, or just alphabetical based on PC names, is not only useful for our rainbow dice tool, but it also gives us another inherent tool we can reuse, like when asking for individual initiative roll results. “Aaron the Aadvantageous, what’d you roll?”