Are your dice balanced/random?

Short answer: Yes, even more so than mass produced dice

Long answer: Balance and randomness in dice comes down to three things: Shape, material, and technique when rolling.

Shape

Take a pair of digital calipers to any set of mass-produced dice (like Chessex) and you will find that these machine-made dice are far from perfect. There are small differences in thickness between opposing faces. Cut some of these dice open and you'll find they are not fully solid - many mass produced dice have bubbles hidden inside of opaque material that can affect their balance.

Photo Credit to u/VagabondVivant on Reddit

My dice are geometrically shaped to be as perfect as the human hand can reasonably achieve. This means sharp corners and tight tolerances on face-to-face measurements. If a die doesnt meet these standards, such as a face being warped or raised, then I will not sell it. 

Material

Mass-produced dice are usually made via injection molding, where liquid plastic is forced into a metal mold and cooled. This is where the aforementioned bubbles can form in inconsistent ways. My dice are resin cast, where I mix 2 parts of a liquid epoxy that slowly cures into a nice hard die. To prevent bubbles that would affect the balance and surface finish I pressure cast my dice in a professional pressure pot. This gives them balance, brilliance, and clarity.

When choosing pigments and inclusions to decorate my dice, I always look for a material that has the same density as my resin, or will be added in small enough quantities that it wont affect the balance and randomness. Things like imitation gold leaf are thinner than paper and will not have a noticeable affect on the weight of a dice. For larger items, I either resin print or resin cast my own inclusions.

When a die has a liquid core, the fluid nature of the interior means that the randomness will not be affected. A die would have to have a large number of heavy inclusions in a liquid core to have a hope of overcoming randomness in rolling, which I avoid.

Rolling Technique

What many gamers forget to consider when judging the randomness of a die is their technique when rolling it. Simply dropping a die onto the table is not random enough to say the result hasnt been altered, as a small number of faces can be favored in this way. For true randomness in a roll, the user should attempt to roll the die so it rolls over at least twice before landing on a result. I highly recommend a dice tower or rolling tray to aid in this noble venture.

But are your dice perfect?

No, and that's okay! Handmade dice, like any handmade product, will always bear minor flaws. They will also bear amazing features that cannot be achieved with mass-produced dice. Each handmade set is a unique piece of art that the artists works hard on to provide the most beautiful, balanced, and durable set of dice that they can for a long life of rolling.

Small imperfections are just part of the game with handmade products of any kind, and that human touch is what makes them special. Minor sanding marks, pigment irregularities, and other small flaws remind us we are human and not machines. Learning to embrace these imperfections and see the beauty beyond makes us artists.

And while handmade dice may not be perfect, mass produced dice are far from perfect themselves. Take a quick look at the mass-produced dice in your collection with a critical eye and you will find scratches, bubbles, cracks, mispainted numbers, inconsistent faces and edges, and other glaring flaws. 

 

Photo by Darker Horse Art

Here you can see one of my favorite factory-made dice, a spindown d20 packaged with a Magic the Gathering bundle. Note the cracks that formed after I received the dice, likely caused by brittle injection molded plastic. While this dice is pretty, its clear that not much thought went into its longevity or use because of the scale it was manufactured at.