I'm not sure how many of you share my compulsion to hoard dice, but I've no doubt there are some of you to whom this scenario may sound familiar. At last count I had more than two hundred polyhedral dice. If there was any geometric solid that had numbers etched and inked on its faces, I either had it or wanted it. It's not a cheap collection to build: a simple set of seven dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20 and d100) would set me back a fiver. If I take the time to sit down and work it out, I suspect I'll find that I've spent close to a hundred quid on the damn things! It's a pretty sobering thought.
I suspect there are a few of you who've done similar things over the years. You might not have got them all at once, but a few sets here, a special offer there… it all adds up.
Time to make the scenario more disturbing. Dice get lost, stolen, left behind on the bus or (in the event of significant reality failure) disappear altogether. Congratulations. You've blown all that cash, and, sobered, have resolved not to throw good money after bad. What do you do?
Spinners
The cheapest alternative to using polyhedral dice is to resort to spinners: polygonal spinning-tops. All you need is a piece of cardboard, a craft knife, your printer, and some matchsticks or cocktail sticks or anything else that's long, slender and rigid (hur hur hur) that'll serve as the spinner's axis.
Drawbacks
Arguably the spinner's plane isn't perfectly polygonal, because cutting things out by hand always results in imperfections. This could conceivably bias throws toward certain numbers. Mind you, the same's also true of your dice: they are imperfect polyhedra, with rounded edges and corners. Moreover, each die is slightly different from its fellows. That means the chances of each result are very slightly inequal.
That never stopped us before, of course: the probabilities aren't inequal enough to make a serious difference to gameplay, but there it is. When we throw a d20, we want to generate a number between 1 and 20, with a roughly equal chance for each result. We accept (because the alternative is to go on a hopeless quest for the ideal dice (Platonic solids, if you'll pardon the classical joke) and that way madness lies.
The real drawback to using spinners is that they're subject to wear and tear. Depending on the material from which you make them, corners get bashed in; spindles wear down and they'll need replacing more often than dice.
Do It Thyself
To save you some of the trouble, I've drawn up a template using GIMP and the GFig extension. Simply download the PDF, print it out, stick it to cardboard, cut the spinners out and stick some spindles through the clearly marked centres.
Spinners template (284.5 KB PDF)
Random Number Generators
Alternatively, you're using a computer right now. You can use that to generate random numbers. I've created a dice bag that fits into this site's sidebar, and released its source code. Although it'll a wide range of die values and modifiers, that might not be good enough for some of you. What if you're the GM of a game and want to make sure the die rolls are genuine? One option is to rely on a dice server. Some dice servers send authentication messages, whether by email or personal message, verifying that the die roll has not been modified or otherwise meddled with. A great example of this is Irony Games's dice server.
Those old farts among you who are familiar with MUDs and their cousins are no doubt well acquainted with their use of random number generation, while fans of MUSHes (are there many of us left?) ought to know about the die(), rand() and pickrand() functions. It's easy to code a simple die with authentication message. Here's one I knocked out in a couple of minutes. Feel free to use, modify and other wise mess with this example.
@create die=10
&CMD_ROLL die=$roll *d*:@va me=die(%0,%1);@emit %ch%cg%n%cn rolled %ch%cy%va%cn.;
page owner(me)=%ch%cg%n%cn rolled %ch%cy%va%cn.
@Use die=Type %ch%cyroll %cn<number_of_dice>%ch%cyd%cn<die_size>%cn to roll
them bones!
@Desc die=Electronic dice!
@set die=INHERIT
@set die=!NO_COMMAND
This object generates a number, outputs the result, and then pages that same result to the owner of the object (who should be the GM). If there's any difference between the two, you'll know the player's been cheating. Make sure your character has the NOSPOOF flag set first, though!