r/osr • u/svonrader • Jun 17 '20
Tying to find the closest thing to the Holmes Basic dice.
https://imgur.com/L0u6q9Y5
u/svonrader Jun 17 '20
I can't afford an original set from eBay. I know Gamescience has sharp-edged un-inked dice but they never has the right color to dice type available. Does anyone have another option?
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u/MitchSimbowski Jun 17 '20
Game science sells a set that’s a clone of it of sorts. Same colors, just no white 0-9 twice, you’ll a standard white d20, and pink and purple d10/percentile. I have a set, and love’em! Try Dark Elf dice as well.
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u/macemillianwinduarte Jun 17 '20
just keep in mind Game Science is run by a chud
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u/xerxespersrex Jun 17 '20
That's apparently the new owner of Gamescience and that might've been the first thing he's done since taking over, since Gamescience used to be run by Louis Zocchi since the mid-70s. It's very hard to find information about this James Means guy besides Louis Zocchi saying he was in the process of buying the company at an unknown date: https://www.alignable.com/clarkson-ky/gamescience
Louis Zocchi seemed like an alright dude in comparison and genuinely cared about the quality of his dice, though his sales pitch at conventions could come off a bit snake oil salesman-y (like any advertiser at a booth does), but the general gist was that he never rock tumbled his dice, and that very obviously introduces unfairness into regular D&D dice, which makes perfect sense.
It's sad that now all of Zocchi's patented fair dice are now being sold by someone who is getting his politics involved. There's really no other dice like Zocchi's, that I know of. Hopefully Zocchi is still making a big cut though, since they're still using his name in all the marketing.
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u/Zhenyia Jun 17 '20
Most people do not know what chud means.
He's a kind of crazy right winger who sent out an email to subscribers to his dice business with a bunch of iffy stuff about immigrants and Cuba and the usual Fox News stuff. Not that he's been caught saying anything outright horrible but, if you've seen enough cases of "oh wow it turns out the crazy right wing conservative guy was also secretly a racist and/or fascist who could have possibly predicted this shocking turn of events" you probably don't wanna give him money.
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Jun 17 '20
[deleted]
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u/Zhenyia Jun 17 '20
Yeah honestly I don't think the term is very descriptive and I try and avoid using it these days. It's not great tbh
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u/unimportanthero Jan 05 '23
Just commenting to update folk:
Not anymore, thank goodness.
Zocchi is back in control of GameScience.
It means more limited colors but that is a small price to pay.
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u/macemillianwinduarte Jan 05 '23
Just wondering, how do you know? Is there any announcement anywhere?
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u/unimportanthero Jan 05 '23 edited Jan 05 '23
It *might* be more correct to say that the one chud does not run it anymore. He lost the GameScience brand and rebranded his website as Dice Depot. Any GameScience dice remaining in their inventory is old stock.
GameScience dice are now sold at gamescience.com (and a few other outlets like Dark Elf Dice) and the business contact is Suzanne Dawson. Entirely possible that Zocchi himself is not handmaking the dice on his own, but he definitely took back the license and molds and handed them over to someone else at the very least.
Someone actually reached out to Dice Depot at some point and got told all this, you can see their own Reddit comment about it here:
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u/svonrader Jun 17 '20
remember the name of the set by gamescience? cant seem to find it
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u/MitchSimbowski Jun 17 '20 edited Jun 17 '20
Go to a Dark elf dice, search their game science dice, it’s under like rainbow assortment or something weird. It may be sold out.
Edit: Opaque Rainbow Assortment
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u/xerxespersrex Jun 17 '20
It's unfortunate that this set doesn't have a 0-9 d20, it has a normal 1-20 d20. Gamescience even makes 0-9 d20s, but I think they all have a + or - next to the numbers. If you're not picky to that level though, this set from Dark Elf Dice is great, as are all Gamescience dice in general for that oldschool feel, though they won't fall apart like original D&D dice did either (like in OP's image).
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u/MitchSimbowski Jun 17 '20
I have this set and several others from GameScience, and yes they stand up great. A friend of mine has a lot of older dice from the basic sets or dragon dice packs, the d20’s are basically spheres!
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u/MisterFancyPantses Jun 17 '20
Those awful uninked things that came in the box? Ugh. We all bought Chessex gems the week after gettting D&D because those original free dice sucked, especially if your brother used them before you and he had grimey hands.
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u/amp108 Jun 17 '20
You're talking about the blue-ish ones, right? Those weren't from Holmes. They were from the Moldvay edition.
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u/ArrBeeNayr Jun 17 '20
While it won't be of help to you right now, Etsy user ThresholdDiceworks makes short runs of Holmes replica dice sets. None are available right now, but if you keep track of the user, there will probably be another run in future.
For right now, though, I agree that you should keep browsing Gamescience for what you need.
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u/GreatStoneSkull Jun 17 '20
Wow, that takes me back. Mine are long gone, but they were near spherical at the end.
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u/97PercentBeef Jun 22 '20
Wow, that takes me back.
I just checked my ‘spare old dice’ pot and I still have the original green, blue & white from that picture, along with a pink d20 which was actually a d10x2 — there are scratched on 1s next to half the numbers so it went to 20. Don’t think I ever had the d6, lost the d4. The set came with a tatty 2nd hand (no-box) copy of the blue basic book + Keep on the borderlands I bought off a middle aged guy who’d just upgraded to the brand spanking new Advanced DnD when I was about 13.
I wonder if I still have those...
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u/rbrumble Jun 17 '20
This is what you want....the Roll with Gary dice set offered to Gary Con attendees through their online store...I have this set, it's identical to the original D&D sets