> My mother doesn't really understand the obsession I have with collecting dice (close enough to a hobby I suppose) - I have far more than I could ever use at once for roleplaying.
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> She makes my sister and me birthday cakes every year, and asks us what we want on them. This year I said a picture of a d20. I thought of that since I recently got a shirt with a drawing of this type of die on it, and the perspective of the drawing was simple enough that it could be easily reproduced on a cake. She did not really take to my suggestion very well, so I thought that I was just going to get some roses on the cake, which would have been fine. She does nice roses with icing and they always are pretty.
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> Well, I was absolutely delighted when it was time for me to see the finished cake... no drawing of a die, but five actual dice on it. They were pink and green ones to match the roses and leaves that she put on the other side. She wasn't able to find my shirt as she was decorating the cake, so she went out to the garage where my box of dice was, and went through them all to find the perfect colors. That was just amazing to me. To top it all off, she said later that "some of them are really pretty." She had previously seen all my dice as more or less identical to each other, but now had a bit of my appreciation for the different colors and styles that dice are created in.
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> Gahalyn

I consider any kind of collection a hobby. Well, not stuff like speeding tickets or zits, but dice sounds like a real good idea. You have what it takes to be a serious collector. You see those little details that others miss. All dice are not the same.

That attention to little subtle details served me well when I started collecting Langley DeLiars. These are little pocket-sized scale and tape measure combos that are designed to keep lying fishermen honest. When I found myself with several De-Liars, I started checking to see if they were identical. Some were marked pat. pend. and others Patented. Others were marked with model number 208 or 228 and still more had no model number at all. Very early De-Liars did not have "lbs" at the top of the scale and the most recent ones had "lbs" and "kg." Variations in size and color were more obvious, and I wound up with about 16 different variations. The collection is not yet complete.

Some people collect the usual stuff like coins, stamps, and sugar bowls. But more interesting collections are fishing reels, golf balls, license plates, and antique items like cash registers, Monopoly tokens, gear shift knobs, postal scales, and whacky stuff like potato chips that look like Elvis or airline barf bags.

I don't know where dice and motorscooters fit in, but just about anything you can think of, somebody collects it.
Howard