Fate and its predecessor, Fudge, both use six sided dice with two plus signs, two minus signs and two blank faces. With the popularity of the Fate system I thought getting a set would be easy. I was wrong.
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| Sadly, good art costs money. I'll add that to the list! |
I live outside of a city of 160 thousand people. There is one comic shop and two gaming stores that all sell table top RPGs and the dice you need to play them. No one at any of them even knew what Fate or Fudge was. At one store when I asked for Fudge dice they handed me loaded dice!
I know what you are thinking, "The internet will provide," right?
I thought the same, but I was wrong again. I live in Canada. Up north and far from the border so I can't keep a US Post Office Box to beat the crazy shipping costs. As much as the internet had reasonably priced Fate Dice, getting a set for less than $30 was impossible after shipping was added.
For most of the games I used a set of wooden cubes with plusses and minuses drawn on with a marker. I eventually purchased a set at the Complete Strategist while on a family vacation. Thankfully it was only a couple of blocks from the Empire State Building and my family was willing to indulge me.
The idea that I had to go to New York City to buy a set of dice for ten dollars is completely insane! Thinking about it reminded me how hard it was to get different RPGs up here back in the day. So many games only existed in the pages of Dragon Magazine. There was no Traveller, only Star Frontiers. No Talislanta, only AD&D. We had access to only the most mass produced and widely distributed games.
Now, getting the actual games in PDF is easy no matter where a gamer is. In many ways this might be the best time ever for RPGs. The problem of getting dice is still a real one for many gaming groups. The more remote you are, the less access you have to other media, the more attractive an RPG can be as form of entertainment, but the harder it is to get the dice!
And the dice are important. A die rolling app on a computer or phone is not the same. There is a greater feeling of tension built by the time it takes to roll the dice and for them to stop! There is satisfaction in the physical act of rolling! It's fun!
Besides, funny dice are awesome!
For all these reasons I decided to create an online store to sell dice this fall. I spent a great deal of time finding manufacturers and distributors that could ship to just about anywhere at a price that would make dice accessible to anyone.
And that is how the Save or Die store was born!
I created Save or Die so anyone could get the polyhedral dice they need to enjoy gaming. I set it up so shipping is always free. The price shown is the price people pay. Depending on where people live they may have to wait a little longer to get their dice, anywhere from three to eight weeks, but they won't get boned on shipping.
It's Black Friday/Cyber Monday this weekend so I'm opening the store early. There is still plenty of work to do. The promo isn't done. The product line will continue to expand, especially with the other things people need for gaming like graph paper notebooks (something else that is hard to get around here). I haven't completed all the SEO.
So head over to Save-or-Die.com and take a look around. If you have any questions shoot me an email.
NOTE: We now have a Facebook page for Save-or-Die! Take a moment to like it!
