The RPGPundit & Venger & Grimjim will be back together to talk about dice, is D&D5e a ghetto, things that happened in Pax, & the far-right troublemakers on Gab & Twitter. Join us, 7:30pm Central!
[video=youtube_share;wTy57q71jGs]https://youtu.be/wTy57q71jGs[/youtube]
Re: dice -- another angle of the dice fetish thing that I don't remember hearing you touch on is the tactile/physical aspect. RPGs can be very abstract games, and dice are one of the physical touchpoints to the abstract ideas.
There's both the importance of the dice to the play of the game and the feel of interacting with the dice that is (I'd imagine) emphasized by how abstract and intangible other things about the game are.
Dice that have a cool color scheme to look at and a nice feel in the hand can improve the experience of playing the game. I think of it as similar to using a nicely built tool rather than a mediocre or cheap one. I personally find a bit of extra satisfaction in using nice dice and chase dice collection a little bit for various flavors of nice look and feel during play. (That has me pretty hyped for Chessex Lab Dice at the moment -- even though the math nerd part of me likes Gamescience, Chessex are so much fun to roll and Lab Dice have wild/more experimental color schemes.) I also like playing with "ugly"/mismatched color scheme dice because it feels like a touch point to the heritage of the hobby.
A factor of d6 systems that I earnestly enjoy is that they tend to involve rolling big fistfuls of heavy, colorful dice more often.
I have kind of the same experience when I'm playing chess. In fact, FIDE tournament regulations have a section on the design and aesthetics of tournament chess sets including the language "The pieces should not be shiny and should be pleasing to the eye." [1] (emphasis mine) which is interesting in how subjective it is. There are hot debates over various chess set designs and which ones are beautiful and which ones are not, including (quite famously) the London World Championship set, which has a controversial knight design [2] and intentionally invoked the aesthetics of the Parthenon. [3]
However, cheap chess sets of unweighted plastic sell well too, so I suppose there must be players out there that don't care or are purely pragmatic about it. But I've noticed that serious chess players generally seem to have a similar relationship with their dice as RPG players, and will spend thousands of dollars on some sets.
This isn't to discount the other angles you guys touched on. It seems interesting that chess has kind of a similar thing going on too.
tl;dr nerdy people who like playing nerdy abstract mind/strategy games seem to also like nerding out over the physical interface to those games and how the look-feel interface impacts the meatspace enjoyment factor.
[1] https://www.fide.com/images/stories/NEWS_2016/FIDE_News/GA_Agenda_2016/Annex_29.pdf
[2] For example: https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-equipment/official-fide-chess-set
[3] https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/march-2013/daniel-weil-redesigns-the-chess-set/
Well yes, those are good points.