Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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ExtraplanarLabs.net created an app called Arcane Eye that uses your phone camera (and possibly a USB camera?) to read physical dice rolls and sync them directly to a VTT or game log with the appropriate roll labels.
I hope D&D Beyond could look at adding something like this. Many players want to roll real dice while playing digitally, and this would finally bridge physical and online play.
Let us roll real dice without breaking digital integration; a huge quality-of-life win for digital tables.
Note: I understand the concerns about camera use or moderation: Wizards of the Coast already uses camera-based technology with SpellTable for Magic: The Gathering, where players use webcams to play remotely. The precedent already exists; cameras use with clear guidelines and user controls.
What you're asking for is an API to add log entries.
We currently don't even have access to the existing API: https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/d-d-beyond-feedback/148262-can-i-use-the-api-for-free
[Preamble—please keep in mind this forum is not just for people to share feedback, for the community to give their opinions on said feedback, hence my below response]
Yeah no, I don't think this is something the devs should invest time in, let alone would.
I feel like this is a solution in search of a problem and not something that'd meaningfully add anything to the value of using D&D Beyond.
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The alternative is allowing Arcane Eye style send log entries to the D&D VTT, which would be far less extensive, and have far more general utility.
To the API, I'm not asking for coding or access to anything to plug in or use externally to DNDbeyond, just for it to be a default/native function.
1. Dice are standardized.
Dice have been standardized for decades. Outside of edge cases like novelty or bullet dice, official sources already define the expected dice set — the PHB (2014, p.6) directly lists the standard dice, including the typical cubic d6 and the common 7-dice set. This isn’t an unsolved recognition problem; it’s a known, consistent format that could take alot of building blocks from Spelltable (probably).
2. The hardware problem is already solved.
Camera setups aren’t a new barrier. The SpellTable community already normalized the technology in the wotc consumer base; camera mounts, overhead rigs, and DIY stands during COVID-era remote play, many still sold in LGSs today. Households may already own a smartphone or USB camera, so this isn’t asking users to adopt exotic hardware, it builds on tools people may already be using. If anything, it might have players have to go buy dice-sets, (which I see as a win)
3. This is not a “solution in search of a problem,” nor is it niche.
This isn’t a bug report, but if it needed a problem to address: reconnecting physical dice with modern digital tools. Many pre-Beyond players feel D&D Beyond shifted play away from rolling physical dice toward digital-only play, it's a common sentiment, not a niche one. Just because you wouldn’t use it doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to others. “Just meet in person”; this misses the point; many groups play remote or hybrid due to distance, schedules, or accessibility. "Just roll the dice and tell them", if I roll a nat20, I'm going to jump up and down and taking a picture and posting in group chat anyway, why not have Beyond do that, this function doesn't even need to be a live-view function. The goal is to restore the physical tabletop feel within how people actually play today.
Great points, thanks for the opportunity to clarify!
Have you not seen all the zany dice people use? Different fonts, styles, effects and materials. I'm not talking number of sides, I'm talking how any given dice looks.
All of this is rendered moot by just rolling dice just like you would at a physical table. Roll dice, tell you rest of the table
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A d12 is still a d12. It’s 2026, camera recognition handling numbers on dice a few feet away isn’t an unsolved problem, and edge cases could be addressed with simple limitations or dice guidelines.
At this point, repeating “just roll and tell people” isn’t engaging with the suggestion. I understand your disagreement, but let's not drift into a “why support SpellTable when Arena exists” argument.
The goal is simple: preserve an experience D&D was built on; rolling real dice and sharing that moment in real time with friends.
Cost vs Benefit is an important factor.
Your suggestion would require a massive amount of cost, time, effort and resource management to develop from a small, already overworked, team.
The benefit is minimal since the result can be achieved without all of this by just telling your players what you rolled or using a webcam to show your roll. Since the exact result can already be achieved without D&D Beyond having to do anything, them having to spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to just achieve a more complicated way to do the same thing is a pure waste of resources.
The best middleground would be allowing manual roll results into the dice log and that is something already been raised as feedback and passed on.
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Also, to clarify Davyd's point. A d12 isn't just a d12, it can be a d12 that is hard to read because of colour, texture, font, and bad environment such as lighting. Your eyes are better at reading such things than any camera software would be - so you will encounter a lot of issues and problems when trying to make something read fancy dice.
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It's great to make suggestions, but this is simply not one that would be worth implementing.
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Those "simple limitations or dice guidelines" defeat the purpose of what you're suggesting—a system to enable people to automate rolling their physical dice which is more likely to apply to people who have esoteric dice collections.
I have several dice with numbers that I find slightly difficult to read in person, and don't show up on camera at all. But part of the reason I like them is because of their unique aesthetic. Committing dev resources to a hardware contingent integration to allow you to roll your favourite physical dice, but doesn't reliably work with all physical dice is self-defeating.
That argument doesn't make sense given that SpellTable is to facilitate people playing physical magic remotely by satisfying a core game requirement—your opponent must be able to to see your board state at all times. There is no requirement like that for D&D, you don't need to be able to see the other players dice to play.
That experience doesn't need "preserving" because you can still do that. There's no barrier to rolling physical dice when playing remotely.
My point is that I personally think the ROI on such a feature is shockingly low and I would rather dev time not be committed to such a notion.
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Dice aren't that standardized. For instance, there are at least three different types of d4, two of them hard to read from overhead. I'd expect d20s to produce a lot of false reads, because the surrounding numbers are quite prominent. 2d10 d100 rolls have obvious inherent problems. A lot of pretty dice have a fair amount of visual noise. And there's a non-trivial number of dice that do something unusual on the max or min faces.
Can it be done? Probably. Can it easily be done reliably? Maybe. (I am aware you cited it being done. I just would be surprised if it can reliably overcome the issues I mentioned.)
You are vastly overestimating the number of people with such a setup. Or even the number of people with enough room to attempt such a setup.
I've actually improvised an overhead camera rig to do ship combat in a SJ game that was otherwise mostly theater-of-the-mind at the time. It was a non-trivial operation that required I clear off my kitchen counter. (We have since shifted to VTT, for some strange reason.) And I only did it very occasionally, not every game. The number of people who have a suitable space where they play, and have the necessary stands, additional camera, etc, and don't have cats, is not going to be large. I'd expect that, after a couple of sessions of setting up and tearing down a camera rig just to roll dice, most people will go to virtual dice.
It's absolutely niche. Support for the bluetooth dice that can report your roll to your computer is niche, too, but at least that'd probably be easy.
OK. So what if it has? Virtual play, virtual dice. It makes sense, and, except when DDB is mucking around with their die-roller, it works.
Physical dice aren't superior. It's an aesthetic preference, and I don't think a particularly strong one for many people.
I have quite a few dice. (I'd say I have a lot, but I know what people with "a lot" of dice are like, and I'm not anywhere near there.) I likely have more dice than the median D&D player. I just recently went and bought some dice just because I'm planning to run Blades in the Dark, and wanted d6es with an appropriate aesthetic. And I have zero need to roll physical dice when I'm playing online.
Perhaps not, but "this is less of a waste than the previous mess" isn't all that compelling a reason.
And a 3D VTT could have had broad appeal, but they didn't have coherent goals or reasonable expectations, so it was DOA.
"Let people who are playing virtually roll physical dice" doesn't have the same potential. (It does have the "requires people to have specific hardware" problem that Sigil did, though.)
Yes, Yes, No. And a false equivalency.
Project Sigil did cost more and take long but it was definitely more useful. Dark_Jester89's suggestion is a more complicated way to do something we can already do. Project Sigil was intended to be a 3D VTT that was directly connected to the D&D Beyond tools and books. Something that doesn't officially exist yet and is something a lot of people genuinely want. It also had potential to be a revenue stream by selling additional models and assets. It's a much easier risk when you can reasonably expect a large selection of users to generate potentially hundreds, to thousands, of dollars each in purchases. Most VTTs, like Roll20, stay afloat due to the sales of their maps and assets.
Project Sigil's failure was not the premise. It was something a lot of people wanted (unlike Dark_Jester89's suggestion), it was something nobody could just do already (unlike Dark_Jester89's suggestion), and it had potential to be very profitable (unlike Dark_Jester89's suggestion). It's failure was mismanagement, poor decision making and too many people behind the scenes making too many mistakes.
Let's not devolve into comparing apples and oranges.
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> It was something a lot of people wanted, unlike what darkjester suggested.
I don't understand what this is contributing. Unlike project sigil, it's an app that isn't mismanaged and actively being used on two of the biggest vtt's in the market, built and maintained by the request of the community, solving a problem people have had with digital tools since beyond came out.