Arnold Schweiner began welding at 19 years old.
Now, at 75, he found a new passion: dice-making. He retired from his welding career in May and spends his days making sets of dice by hand.
“I’m lucky I still have good dexterity in my fingers,” he said, “otherwise I wouldn’t be able to put in half the time into these dice that I am now.”
Schweiner’s dice-making brought him to Gainesville for the first time for Swampcon, a UF-sponsored anime and gaming convention. Schweiner’s booth in the Reitz Union offered around 250 sets of dice to Swampcon attendees.
The time it takes Schweiner to handcraft his own dice amounts to more than 30 hours every week. Each hour is spent in his workshop, a small room in his Jacksonville home. The room has a workbench and table, a 36-square-foot cork board holding his tools and most importantly, around 450 dice.
“I haven’t counted in a long time, so 450 is just an estimate, but it’s somewhere around there,” he said. “That’s the upside to working with your hands for 50 years, you get pretty fast.”
Schweiner’s 56 years as a welder come in handy every day when he sits at his work bench and plans out his next set of dice. His inspiration comes from countless sources around him, he said.
“I just made a really nice wooden set with daisies carved into the sides because our neighbor… has some beautiful daisies [cropped] up in her yard every spring,” he said. “It’s easy to get inspired if you just open your eyes to the world around you.”
Schweiner said part of his process as an artist is to constantly look for new ideas. He has never made two sets of the same dice.
“I’ve never repeated a design because I don’t have to,” he said. “If anything, I have to slow down some because I’m churning out more than I’m selling.”
The selling side of Dice by Arnold is run by his 45-year-old son Terry, who first began playing “Dungeons & Dragons” when he was 15. At that time, Arnold had no idea what the game was.
“Terry would come home from his friend’s house and tell me all about the latest game he was playing and his character,” Arnold said. “He was so happy and he would have so much fun.”
Terry, who played exclusively with traditional cellulose plastic dice, came home from a game one day and asked his father for a ride to the board-game store in their neighborhood after breaking his set of dice.
“I told him I could take him [to the store] if he wanted, but I was more than happy to carve him a new one right then and there if he preferred,” Arnold said, “and it’d be free.”
Terry said he was intrigued by the offer and took his father up on it.
“I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but the finished product was beyond my wildest dreams,” Terry said. “It was this nice, deep wood die that looked exactly like what you’d get in a store.”
An unusual addition to the die was Terry’s initials carved into the corner of one of its faces. Arnold said he worried about the die getting lost or taken, so he wanted to make it clear who it belonged to.
“I took it to our [‘Dungeons & Dragons’] game the week after and everyone wanted to know where I got my die and if they could get one, too,” Terry said.
It took nearly 30 years for Arnold’s creations to become available for purchase, but he says the demand is even higher now than it was among his son’s fellow players.
“I don’t sell many places, because I’m a grumpy old man who loves his rest, but when I do go to events and conventions, people like my dice,” he said. “I sold 19 sets in four hours at the last medieval fair I went to.”
Sets of dice aren’t reserved exclusively for Dungeons & Dragons, but the role-playing game is one of the most common activities to use dice. Linda Simpson, an Alachua County Library District employee, has seen the game become more popular in recent years.
“We used to have just one ‘D&D’ group that played together weekly, but now we have multiple groups meeting all week long,” she said. “Sometimes, there are even multiple sessions going on at the same time on the library floor.”
Simpson organizes a weekly class for both amateur and expert “Dungeons & Dragons” players to improve their skills and explore different aspects of the game, she said, which has seen a significant attendance increase in the last year.
“At the start of 2023, I had probably five or six people showing up to my class,” she said. “Slowly numbers began to climb, and now I’d be surprised to see fewer than 50 or 60.”
Arnold Schweiner doesn’t play “Dungeons & Dragons” himself, but he said he is excited about growing interest in the game.
“I love hearing about the fun people have with their friends, and I’m glad my dice can be part of that,” he said. “Passion is passion, and I hope all the D&D players out there using my dice know I care as much about making them as they do about using them.”
Contact Bea Lunardini at blunardini@alligator.org. Follow her on X @bealunardini.
