Rolling Mobile

Lets face it, as much as we all like our giant collections of dice, this is the 21st century. We have out game books on laptops and hand-held devices, we can play Play By Mail with someone on the opposite side of the world with turns taking a matter of hours instead of days and instead of small enclaves of gamers coming up with great campaigns which they can only share with a few, groups like the RPG Blogger’s Network let everyone know about awesomely innovative campaigns and settings.
So why are we still carrying around bags of dice when there are digital versions just a few clicks away?

The number of dice replacements available is surprising in a couple of different ways.
On one hand, there really aren’t that many programs for generating dice rolls, on the other hand there are quite a lot of websites for generating rolls, and a ridiculous number of iPhone apps for generating rolls.

My favourite dice generator is the one provided by Wizards of the Coast. It’s presumably aimed at D&D and D20 gamers, but since you can roll any number of the standard dice, with positive or negative modifiers, it can be used for just about any game.
It keeps a long log of dice rolls and seems to give a fair spread of results.

For d6 based games, then you might be better off with the aptly named Random.org, which allows you to roll between 1 and 16 d6, and presents the result in a list of dice faces. Not as much use to most gamers, but it has a certain charm to it.

iPhone users are literally rolling in dice apps. There are a couple of dozen apps on the iTunes Store already.
At the perfect recession-friendly price of absolutely nothing, you can get Dice Bag (link opens iTunes). This is a straight forward app, but it doesn’t have the customisation and visual polish of some of the the paid apps.

My preferred app is the nicely named Dicenomicon (link opens iTunes). It’s possibly a bit pricey at £2.39 ($4.99 or so in the US iTunes store), but it allows you to roll just about any combination of any type of dice. It also has a decent variety of presets combinations.

And while you’re on the iTunes store, remember to pick up a copy of Files (link opens iTunes) or similar so you can carry your game books around on your phone/iPod as well. Nothing worse then having to lug half a dozen hardbound volumes home with you for the Christmas holidays.