Dice Arenas (tables)

(boy, this message has been sitting unsent in my outbox for a while)

I'm wondering what other GMs and players use for a dice arena, if
anything at all.

For IRC, I use a dice bot I wrote (which doubles as a channel bot,
keeping the IRC channel open and owned), but for all the in person
players, I've got a dice table I designed and constructed.

As for the table itself, it's been a long time coming. About nine
years ago, a plasma discharge glass became available called
"lumiglass". You've seen the spheres with the neon effect, but this
one I'm talking about is FLAT. I'm not a trekkie, but they were
featured in a Star Trek movie that year (First Contact), though I
first saw them in a trinket shop. At about US$200 for the 20" one,
they're pretty steep. Once I saw them, I knew I needed to have one
for a dice table. Granted, they're not a TABLE per se - they're
intended to stand at an angle on the edge, sort of like a display
plate.

My wife bought one for me for Christmas that year, and I adapted some
legs to it to make it a dice table until I could get the time to
construct a real table frame for it. Problem was, without a rim, dice
had a tendancy to roll off. I fixed that by taking some old garden
hose and slitting it lengthwise and wrapping that around the edge of
the table (in three pieces, as there's three legs on the table). This
made do for entirely too long as I'd never gotten around to dealing
with the table construction - always something I'd plan to get around
to when I had some time.

Well, a few weeks ago [er, as sent, this is over a year ago], after
getting a new tool for my humble workshop which would make cutting a
perfect circle a breeze, I decided that I really needed to make the
table a reality, and so I sat down and sorted the design and
construction. The outside is a hexagon, with a circle cut out of the
inside for the glass to sit within. At each point of the hex, there's
a shallow dice well (about 1/8" deep), capable of holding a complete
set of dice with room to spare. At three of the points (every other),
there's a leg, which mounts at an angle, sloping down underneath the
tabletop (so much more attractive than a simple vertical, and
structurally, a lot stronger).

The tabletop frame is painted with a faux "rust" finish - a copper
base with pewter and "mocha" (brown) glazes sponged on to give it more
of a weathered look (some flat colour simply wasn't an option here as
it would have lacked character). The legs are formed into a compound
blade/talon shape (routed edges and voids are routed down about 1/8"
so there's depth, not just a surface paint), so I went with a metallic
finish - a silver basecoat, a few random muted streaks of black, and a
steel semi-opaque overcoat (which tones down the brightness of the
silver). This produces a reasonable aged steel look - again, I wasn't
looking for a brand-spanking-new shiny appearance. Some voids within
the blade patterns (which ideally would have been carved clear
through, but that wasn't feasable due to a desire to maintain
structural strength in the legs) were painted with a ultra flat black
(so that they wouldn't be quite as reflective). The outer edges of
the blade patterns however were cut away completely and shaped so that
the blade nature isn't at all lost. Before painting, the legs were
strategically though generally somewhat randomly rapped with the mouth
of a small jar, to provide some divots into the blade edges (giving
the darker surface finish somewhere to collect and make dark "battle
scar" markings in the steel).

Over the paint and glaze, there's a few coats of satin finish sealer
(yea, even over the ultra flat black voids, which pretty much negates
them having been painted flat).

The construction is entirely wood and glue. There are no screws or
nails anywhere in it. This increases the time for the construction,
but it makes for an (in my opinion) superior end result. The top
"ring" is joined with "biscuits", with a support piece affixed on the
underside at three points using four dowels each (this support piece
adds more "meat" to the table where the legs join to it, but also
provides the lip for the underside of the glass to rest on). The legs
are keyed to fit slightly over the lip of the top, and are dowelled
into the undersupport at a compound angle, trapping the legs on (the
dowels would have to work free of both pieces of wood in order for the
legs to become loose).

My house rules for dice, and some pictures of the dice table are at:

<http://wyvern.professional.org/dicearena.php?view>

The storm effect is shown in the dark because with light or a camera
flash, my digital camera has a tendancy to shoot for an exposure that
lights the whole table, and washes out the lightning effect. It's
still quite visible in person under the gaming lighting conditions
(which aren't in the dark).