About Us
About Crit Hit Ceramics
The short version
Crit Hit Ceramics is two best friends — Arron and Lance — making handcrafted ceramic dice out of a small studio in Richmond, Indiana. We’ve been at it for 12 years. Every set you see on this site was mixed, pressed, cleaned, numbered, and fired by us. No factory, no overseas manufacturing, no middlemen. Just two guys, a kiln, and a stubborn belief that ceramic dice are the best dice.
How this actually started
Lance and Arron have been friends and gaming buddies for years. The whole thing kicked off before a D&D session — Arron showed up early to help set up, and while they were getting the table ready, Lance casually mentioned he wanted to start a business.
“What kind of business?”
“A dice business. We could make dice for gamers.”
“You’re crazy.”
Arron pushed back. There are already a hundred dice companies out there. What’s the angle? And Lance said, “Not just any dice. I want to make them out of clay.”
“Now you’re really crazy. They’ll break.”
Lance just smiled and said, “You’d be surprised.”
Twelve years later, we’re still doing it, and it turns out Lance was right.
Who does what
We both do ceramic work and we both pitch in on everything, but if you split the workload roughly:
- Lance runs more of the studio side — the clay, the kiln, the actual making. By day he works at a local art museum, so the artistic eye comes naturally.
- Arron handles more of the business side — the website, marketing, customer support, the dozens of little things that keep an online shop running. His background is in a family business where he wore every hat from grunt work to marketing.
But honestly? On any given day you might find either of us elbow-deep in clay or buried in spreadsheets. Small business life.
Where the dice actually come from
We started in Lance’s garage, like every good American small business is supposed to. Eventually we outgrew it and moved to a dedicated studio in Richmond, Indiana, where we have actual space to work, store materials, and run multiple projects at once.
Here’s the process in a nutshell:
- We mix all the pigmented clay by hand. Every color, every batch.
- We mold-press the clay into the shape of each die — d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20.
- We hand-clean and hand-number every single one. This is the slowest part of the process and the part we’ll never automate.
- Into the kiln they go, fired to 2300–2400°F until they’re rock-hard and ready for the table.
- Then they ship to you.
No two sets are exactly alike. That’s not a marketing line — it’s just what happens when humans make things with their hands.
“Won’t they break?”
This is the question we hear the most. People assume ceramic = fragile.
The honest answer: you’d be surprised. Once they’re fired at those temperatures, they’re significantly tougher than they look. Think of them as little math rocks. They roll, they clack, they take a beating, and they keep going. That’s why we put up durability test videos on the site — we’d rather show you than try to convince you.
What customers actually say
The two things we hear over and over from customers when their dice arrive:
- The feel — there’s a weight and texture to ceramic that plastic can’t replicate.
- The sound — ceramic dice have a specific clack-and-rattle that gamers fall in love with the first time they shake them in their hand.
Once you roll a ceramic set, plastic feels weird forever after. We’re sorry in advance.
What we play with
If you’re curious — Arron rolls with our Mocha Fusion Set at his own table, and Lance is partial to the Blood Splatter set. We love them all (we kind of have to), but those are the ones that live in our personal dice bags.
Custom work
Yes, we do custom sets. Some of our favorites over the years:
- A custom run for a Facebook community called Goblin Dice Hoard, with their logo on the 6-face of every d6, in their colors.
- A set for a customer where the d6 faces had birds on them. Specific. Weird. We loved it.
If you’ve got a character, a campaign, a guild, or just a strange idea, reach out and we’ll see what we can do.
The kiln story
We almost didn’t make a deadline once.
We had a big order due to ship out, all the dice were finished and ready for their final firing, and when we went to fire them up — the kiln wouldn’t reach temperature. One of the heating elements had burned out. Kiln dead. Deadline looming. Hundreds of dice in limbo.
We scrambled. Called a potter friend, begged for kiln time, drove the dice over, and got them fired in time to ship. It worked out — but barely.
We tell that story because we want you to know two things:
- We care about deadlines. When we say something will ship by a date, we mean it, even if it means calling in favors at midnight.
- Ceramic work is genuinely hard. When something cracks, breaks, or doesn’t fire right, we eat the cost and start over. That’s why we charge what we charge — not because handmade ceramic dice are cheap to make, but because they’re worth it when they’re done right.
Why we’re still doing this 12 years later
Because we love it. Because every time someone rolls a Nat 20 with one of our sets and tags us in a photo, we get the same kick we got with the very first set we ever made. Because we’re gamers ourselves, sitting at our own tables on weeknights, and we know what it feels like when the right set of dice finds its way to your hand.
Thanks for being here. Now go roll something.
— Arron & Lance Owners & Artisans, Crit Hit Ceramics