From the humble d6 to the iconic d20, there’s a lot of magic packed into a set of RPG dice. In a world built on imagination, RPG dice are the tangible link between the real and the fantastic. The dice are the engine of action and the thrill of adventure, all wrapped up in a fun set of odd little polyhedrons.
For Todd Tiemann, co-founder of Die Hard Dice, one particularly magical set of dice captured his imagination, drew him back into a beloved hobby, and propelled him into an unexpected career — a story he shared with us in a recent interview.
An Inspiration Dice Set
Die Hard Dice began with a set of metal dice that Todd stumbled upon while browsing online. He had played RPGs as a kid*, but real life and grown-up responsibilities had taken him away from the hobby.
“When I saw that set of nickel-plated metal dice,” he says, “something profound stirred within me. It brought back a flood of memories, and a wave of nostalgia.
It made me feel like there might be an alternative to the messy, complicated, and stressful real-world of being an adult. I felt a sense of hope that there were still fantastical things to be found among the mundane.”
Todd followed that feeling back into the hobby he’d first experienced as a kid. Soon, he was listening to RPG podcasts and painting miniatures. He even brought his wife and young children in on the fun. But there was something about those dice that Todd couldn’t shake from his imagination.
“At the time, metal dice were pretty rare, and I’d never seen them [before]. I reasoned that if I could feel this way about them, maybe others would too.”
According to Todd, one of the first sets of dice Die Hard Dice sold was the exact set he’d seen online. And that, of course, was just the beginning.
“Although the dice world has completely changed in the last ten years, and metal dice are now more commonplace,” Todd adds, “our goal is still to create that sense of wonder and surprise.”
From One Set… to Many More
The company started small, operating out of Todd’s home. They have grown a lot since 2015, adding new employees and expanding along the way. Todd reflects on how far the company has come:
“Over the course of the first year-and-a-half it went from our closet, to our spare bedroom, to our master bedroom, and then to our first warehouse,” he says. “We grew pretty rapidly from there and leveled up our warehouse twice in one year. We’ve since been able to settle into a more regular pattern, build out our R&D team, and figure out what kinds of products we like making.”
They’ve also expanded their offerings far beyond that initial set of dice. Today, Die Hard Dice offers a wide range of metal dice in a variety of colors and designs, along with polymer sets and a growing line of accessories.
For Todd, it’s been a rewarding, if unexpected, journey:
“I have never wanted to own a company or even aspired for upper management. I can be an excellent cog in the machine, though! Which is to highlight that none of this was planned, expected, or even hoped for. I did want to be able to do something that was more interesting than working in IT, but I had no intention of starting a company.”
One thing that is very important to Todd is the people who make all this possible for them: the customers.
“We are nothing without our customers. We owe everything we have and are to them. They deserve to know that,” Todd says. “I believe that if we just treat
people well, it’ll eventually work out in the end. Sure, sometimes we’ll get taken advantage of, but that’s the exception. In addition, treating customers like real people and doing everything to make things right feels good. By ditching draconian policies, our employees feel good about what they’re doing, and our customers get to feel respected and appreciated.”
A Company of Adventurers
While Todd was the cofounder of the company, he also acknowledges the other people who help turn cool dice ideas into cool dice realities. Like any good adventurer, Todd has picked up a whole party of heroes along the way.
“Because all of our employees are empathetic and enthusiastic gamers, our company’s voice comes to us naturally. We don’t have to run our desires and hopes through a translator to make them align with the company’s goals, it pretty much just happens.”
You can find out more about the whole Die Hard Dice crew on the company website.
A Few Questions with Todd Tiemann (Die Hard Dice)
How much of what Die Hard Dice sells is designed in house?
About 98% of our metal offerings were all designed in-house. That’s well over 1,000 SKUs over the last ten years. We’ve added a few stock sets that are in extremely niche designs recently; things that we believed would have enough demand, but not enough to justify the high cost of R&D and production if we did it all ourselves.
For polymer dice, about 60% of everything we sell was designed by us.
Can you tell me a bit about the creative process that goes into designing a new set of dice?
For polymer dice, it starts with our alchemists working in the lab. They come up with pretty prototypes and we then have to look at the various aspects to determine how feasible it is to reproduce at scale. We have to decide which technologies we would need to use, the materials that would go into it, estimate the costs, and the demand. If everything feels good, we’ll create recipes for our partner factories and start tests to see if we can get it right. Many times we’ll get it right on the first try, but sometimes it could take many months to get it right, and in some rare cases, we realize that we need to put the idea back on the shelf until we unlock more tools and processes.
For metal dice, it starts with a general concept, and then we’ll sketch it up physically, or digitally. We will then go through a similar process to determine how feasible the design is, how much it would cost, how much we’d need to sell it for, and decide if we want to move forward to prototyping. In prototyping, we use CAD software to create full 3d versions, and then 3d print them. It is very rare for a 3d design to be right the first time. It’s more likely that we’ll end up with a box of hundreds of printed iterations. From there we talk to our manufacturing partners to get their feedback and make final revisions before making new molds and production samples.
What about the manufacturing itself? How much work goes into a finished set?
There are a lot of steps in the manufacturing process, no matter which material you’re working with. All dice need to be cast, or poured into molds, polished and/or plated, and painted. The exact order those steps happen changes from product-to-product, but they all have the same general flow. Almost all of these steps are done by hand, so it is very labor intensive.
You’ve made dice sets based on popular RPG shows like The Adventure Zone, Critical Role, and others. What’s it like to partner with such well-known names in the tabletop community?
It’s always an honor to have respected creators in the tabletop industry trust us with their brand. We take it very seriously. We do not take a project on unless we feel like we have a connection to it and an understanding of the fandom surrounding it. Luckily, we have a team with very diverse interests, and we’ve always had at least one member of our team that’s already a massive fan.
We like to match the pace and processes of the brand owner, and each company likes to handle merch development differently, so there really hasn’t been a singular process. Sometimes they come with a fully formed idea that just needs us to convert it into something that’s manufacturable. Other times we get a chance to come up with a pitch deck of ideas, essentially throwing dice spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. Although it’s a lot more work to make dice: spaghetti, it’s a whole lot of fun.
You offer braille dice, which I’ve never seen before. What a great idea! Are these unique to Die Hard Dice?
The braille dice are a passion project led by DOTS RPG, a charity focused on accessibility in gaming. We have been close friends with DOTS for many years. Originally, their dice were all 3d printed on-demand, but they have been looking for a way to improve the quality by manufacturing them at scale. Manufacturing braille dice is no easy feat. There are many things that work in 3d printing that don’t work when casting dice from metal or plastic. The design of their dice had to change drastically, and it took over five years to complete. DOTS deserves an incredible amount of praise for getting this over the finish line. I know we are all proud of the final product.
Are there any other particular products that you’re especially proud of / would like to focus on?
First would be our Avalore designs. Jessie knew early on that sharper edged dice would be a hit, but it took us years to slowly unlock different tools and technologies to make them at a price point that would work. We know there are plenty of fans of Avalore out there, but we’re probably the biggest ones.
Second would be Sanguine Call, our spooky themed Horizon Die. It features a scene that plays out in the background of the center-line of the d20. It’s just as much a work of art as it is a functional d20.
Lastly… keep your eye on the Horizon for a collaborative project that will release around Halloween.
What’s the strangest material you’ve seen used for dice?
We’ve been asked multiple times if we could put a loved one’s ashes into resin dice for them. We definitely could, but at the moment we didn’t have the time to dedicate to ensuring we were doing everything legally and ethically.
Thank you very much for your time, Todd!
*Bonus Content: Ninjas of Fire
According to the Die Hard Dice website, the game that Todd played back when he was kid, the one that the inspirational metal dice set reminded him of, was a game called Ninjas of Fire. This was game invented by Todd’s friend (and future Die Hard Dice employee), Chris Call. We couldn’t pass up asking about this game, and we got the lowdown from Chris himself:
“I was into Ninja Gaiden on the NES at the time. Super Mario Bros 3 had just come out and introduced these cool world maps that I really liked. I was just making video games on paper. I’d show what was inside buildings, caves, and castles on the backside of the paper. Then we started playing through them on the trampoline. One thing led to another, and suddenly we were roleplaying! Didn’t take too long until dice got involved. Each character was a different ninja color. Todd was the white ninja.”
Thanks, Chris!
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