Dice Rollers

A friend of mine recently launched a simple dice rolling app for the iPhone. It's very straight forward; Select the number and type of dice to roll (one type at a time I think) and shake the phone to roll em.

He used it for a while in our weekly tabletop game and our various reactions to it were... typical? of long term roleplayers. Maybe it's a degree of grognardia (I certainly don't count myself as a true grognard.. a pretender at best), but I want to physically roll the dice. The pleasing sound as they tumble across the table top, the feel in your hand, and the all important naughty corner for when your dice desert you at a critical moment.

Like many roleplayers in my experience I have a lot of dice (not hundreds, but many) and I tend to use specific sets for different games. There are two beautiful Amethyst and Jade sets that were gifts and are used for AD&D 2E, my purple plastic 'gem' set used for Pathfinder, along with a dark green mottled set for the same, and so on.

The important thing is that my dice (and they are very much *my* dice - I don't like it when other people use my favoured sets) are physical artefacts of the game i'm playing. I can't imagine using an electronic dice roller as a player during a game.

As a ref I think that's different, but I'll save it for another time.