Dedicated Dungeons & Dragons players love to accessorize. Pen and paper games take very little to get started, but the more Dungeons & Dragons players play, the more they want to celebrate the craft. Dice, velvet bags, fancy tokens, character journals, and more are just some examples. Dice towers are a Dungeons & Dragons accessory that players can get especially creative with. One player has captured Dungeons & Dragons players' attention with a particularly interesting new dice tower that they build out of LEGO pieces.
The project in question is a "Self-loading Dice Tower." The Self-loading Dice Tower is a design intended to make repeated rolls simple while still using a strictly mechanical construction. The dice tower has a lever on its back that when pressed down lifts the tray of dice up and places them at the top of the tower. Then, once the lever is let back up, a trap door in the tower's ceiling drops and the dice fall, roll, and spill back into the dice tray as expected.
Creator pattspatt is an active participant in the LEGO community on Reddit, sharing multiple designs over the past year, including impressive forklift and helicopter builds. They've never had a design as popular as their latest creation, however. What they've named the "Self-loading Dice Tower v2" has accrued over 5,000 upvotes on the DnD subreddit and over 14,000 on the LEGO subreddit. Pattspatt even went so far as to make instructions for their build freely available on each post.
Pattspatt admits that their dice tower isn't necessarily self-loading, as it doesn't reload the dice on its own. It requires the user to press the lever in the back to roll the dice, so pattspatt says "Lever-action Dice Tower" might be more fitting. For the time being, the name will stand, though. LEGO and Dungeons & Dragons fans likely won't give pattspatt too hard of a time about it.
As the name implies, this also isn't the first time that pattspatt has shared their dice tower design before. They shared the first version of the Self-Loading Dice Tower on Reddit around 10 months ago. This isn't a simple re-post, however. pattspatt has improved the design of the dice tower, altering the mechanics of the trapdoor and the overall sturdiness of the dice tower. The Dungeons & Dragons community clearly appreciated the update.
The concept of a dice tower with a simple mechanism for reloading dice isn't original, of course. One Reddit user even posts their video of a similar LEGO creation made 12 years ago. Still, it's a clever idea and a beautiful construction. Plus, the fact that pattspatt shared his design so others can make their own Dungeons & Dragons LEGO dice tower goes a long way toward building up support.