By Robyn Fleming
I can’t remember if I picked them out for myself or if they were a gift, but the important detail is that my first dice were pink. Not a bold, aggressive neon, either – they were translucent and pastel, with just a hint of shine to them. I think the best adjective to describe them would be “cute.”
Which was great, because I was seven at the time, and cute was a pretty big deal to me. I happily gamed with my cute, pink dice for several years, until other things started to seem more important – things which were better represented, in my mind, by other colors and new accessories – and then I set them aside, tucking them into an old jewelry box on a shelf in my closet, where they sat in the dark for quite some time.
I didn’t use the dice again until I was in college, and gaming with my brother and a group of our mutual – all male – friends. I was playing a paladin, Tourmaline Helgasdottir, at the time, and had picked out a new set of dice in bright, pearly white for myself. But with a gaming group made up of seven people in their late teens and early twenties, someone was always forgetting his dice on Sunday mornings, and we kept a stash of “loaners” in the box with the manuals at my brother’s house. My contribution to the pool was my old set of cute, pink dice, stored in a bag that I had whimsically covered with sequins.
I believe it was Isaac who first referred to them as “the Dice of Evil,” but it didn’t take more than a couple of repetitions before everyone was doing it.
“Forgot your dice again, Stryder? No problem! Just grab the Dice of Evil,” my brother might say, trying to get the game started on time.
Dan, putting things away when we were done, would ask Jake to pass him the Dice of Evil so he could toss them in the gaming box. Even I called them that more often than not.
It bugged me a little. The dice were not, of course, actually evil. They were just dice, exactly as virtuous or wicked as any other pieces of machine-molded plastic. It wasn’t as if they were weighted, or had razor-sharp edges, or even a history of belonging to a string of players who had died mysterious and gruesome deaths. The only thing that made them stand out from any of the other dice we played with was that they were pink.
And it bothered me that it was so easy for everyone – including myself – to make the connection between “pink” and “evil.” It felt like a condemnation of femininity – something I was particularly sensitive to as the only woman in the group. My gaming friends were all good guys. I knew they liked me and appreciated my company. But I was the only woman player, and my character the only female, and between the out-of-game joking and gossip and the in-game plotlines, it seemed as though either Tourmaline’s or my own gender was always more important than it should have been.
I won’t pretend that my being the only woman in the group ever totally stopped being a problem for me. It did get better, because I got better at expressing my concerns and because my gaming friends are good guys. But there were always uncomfortable moments outside the game, and gaming storylines that made me cringe a bit. I did, however, stop feeling bad about my cute, pink dice being called the Dice of Evil.
What changed my mind? I think it was when I made the shift from being a player to being a Game Master, and was told all about how totally evil I was following the most exciting and successful games I planned. Average games were met with a general chorus of “good game”s and cheerful but unexcited “see you next week”s. Challenging encounters that got everyone’s adrenaline pumping and left characters grievously wounded but still fighting (and eventually emerging victorious, of course) netted me the much more passionate – but happy – accusations of evilness.
It was then that I realized that when one of my friends referred to my pink dice in their sparkly bag as the Dice of Evil, it wasn’t a critique of femininity, as I had believed – it was a compliment.
I have a lot of dice now, in all sorts of colors. Pretty much everyone who plays tabletop games collects them, and GMs collect more than most. I don’t know very many people who have as many pink ones as I do, though.
Article © September 2007 by Robyn Fleming.
