Dice Shaming

Submission 4,358

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About

Dice Shaming refers to a trend practiced by Dungeons & Dragons and tabletop RPG players in general where a player takes a photograph of a dice roll that ended up detrimentally affecting their game sitting on top of a note written from the die's POV, describing how it failed the player as if shaming itself. The trend is inspired by dogshaming and began in 2013, becoming popularized on Tumblr and Reddit in the following years.

Origin

On November 3rd, 2013, Redditor u/HandsOfBlue posted to /r/rpg,^[1] "Is dice shaming a thing? It should be," along with an image of a black die showing a roll of "1" sitting on a note reading, "I made my owner do nothing but chop herself in the leg," garnering over 1,200 upvotes in eight years (shown below).

Spread

The practice grew in popularity over the course of the year, peaking in popularity throughout 2014. On June 26th, 2014, Tumblr^[7] user @schneiltzle posted a dice shame, garnering over 22,600 notes in seven years and greatly helping spread the practice, becoming one of the most popular dice shames.

Following this post, dice shaming became a popular practice on Tumblr. On August 15th, 2014, Geek X Girls^[10] published a collection of dice shames. On November 20th, the Daily Dot^[11] published a collection and write-up on the trend, with every example coming from Tumblr^[12]^[13]^[14] (examples from article shown below).

On July 4th, Tumblr^[5] page "shamethedice," dedicated to posting dice shaming content, opened, sharing schneiltzle's post as their first and claiming it as inspiration. On July 7th, dice-corner-of-shame^[15] opened a similar page.

Although the trend slowed down after 2014, RPG fans continued to practice dice shaming. On March 11th, 2016, Geek & Sundry^[4] published a collection of dice shaming images. On April 29th, 2019, SyFy^[6] posted a similar collection.

Dice Praising

The opposite practice of Dice Shaming, known as "Dice Praising," is also practiced by RPG players, following the same format albeit showcasing positive dice rolls. The earliest known Dice Praise was posted to /r/Pathfinder_RPG^[3] on September 2nd, 2014 by u/talondigital, garnering over 300 upvotes in seven years (shown below).

On October 5th, 2017, Redditor u/mg115ca posted to /r/DnD,^[2] "Dice praising, the opposite of dice shaming! [OC]" along with an image of a dice showing a good role and a note describing how it helped the player defeat a number of high-level enemies, garnering over 3,300 upvotes in three years (shown below).

Dice Jail

A dice jail is a novelty product that resembles a jail cell in which you can put your dice in order to shame them. These are largely sold on Etsy^[8] (example shown below, left). Some users make their own dice jails and use them in dice shame posts to increase the intensity of the shame (example from Tumblr^[9] shown below, right).