神々は何度も何度も何度も, 気が遠くなるほどサイコロを振りました.
Having hard time fully understanding this sentence. Especially this part 「気が遠くなるほど」, or how it affects 「気が遠くなる」. My translation would be something along the lines of "Over and over and over again, the gods are astounded as they role the dice."
I would really appreciate it, if someone could break the sentence down a little bit and explain the grammar part, that I might have missed.
Answer
気が遠くなるほどサイコロを振りました
The construction is explained in this answer: "About ...ほど constructions" that it literally means "they rolled the dice to the degree that you (almost) feel faint".
Actually, 気が遠くなる is a very common metaphor in Japanese that depicts how overwhelming the scale/number is (imagine that you count sheep over and over, and you will soon fall unconscious). Here the referent is a number, so you can just translate it like:
They rolled the dice for countless times.
cf.
気が遠くなるほど長い時間 a nearly-eternal time
気が遠くなるほど低い確率 an incredibly low probability
気が遠くなる事業 a gargantuan project
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