I get that when D&D Beyond set out to create their dice roller, they wanted to recreate the experience of a player actually rolling a die, so the outcome is a physics engine slowed down to the pace of a realistic animation. It’s cute. Very nostalgic. It’s also disruptive in the extreme.
(1) Dice shouldn’t roll all over the screen/character sheet. It covers up the character sheet. Lots of players roll manual dice in dice rolling containers for this exact reason. Containerize the dice, please.
(2) Relatedly, dice shouldn’t roll UNDER UI elements. Right now, the dice often roll UNDER the dice result hover text in the lower-right of the screen. This means you have to dismiss the result to see the actual dice. This is very poor user experience. Block the dice from important UI elements, please.
(3) Dice shouldn’t roll OVER UI elements. If a die ended up on top of an interactive element, I shouldn’t need to first click the die to dismiss it before I can click what’s underneath it. Make dice a non-interactive overlay, please
(4) You cannot currently roll to-hit and damage at the same time. Some players prefer this. Others don’t. (Heck, my first DM back in 1998 had the rule: if you don’t roll your damage dice with your to-hit dice, you did no damage.) Check out the Beyond20 extension for good implementation of this. If a crit occurs, any additional damage dice immediately roll on their own after the fact and the total is added. It’s seamless. Allow combined hit + damage combined rolling, please.
(5) The dice take too long. The choice of a physics engine is cute. But TBH, the fun of Dungeons & Dragons was never the dice. They are part of the fun, yes, but they can also very much get in the way. When you’ve got 6 players, a Druid summoning constrictor snakes, NPC allies, and enemies, it can take forever to resolve each round. In the game I played today, we spent about a third of the time in combat waiting* for the result of digital dice to roll. Click. Wait… Click. Wait… “If an 18 hits, it did 6 points of piercing damage and 3 points of cold damage.” Click. Wait… “Does a 15 hit?” “Yes.” Click. Wait… “7 points of radiant damage.” The DM is considering house ruling that we use an instant-rolling alternative because D&D Beyond takes too long. Provide a quick-roll option, please. (You can keep the physics engine; just speed it up to about a quarter or half second per roll. Rule of thumb: the dice shouldn’t take longer to roll than an anxious heart beats.)
We are playing Dungeons & Dragons in 2022, not 1984. We are using electronic character sheets on laptops and smartphones. We are playing remotely over Zoom. We are looking up rules in digital books with a search function. If pencils and erasers and paper and printed books and in-person groups aren’t necessary for Dungeons & Dragons, which they aren’t or D&D Beyond wouldn’t exist, why do dice need to be simulated in slow-time? (Answer: they don’t.)
I’m sure you get some income from dice design sales. You can keep it! You don’t have the switch to a heartless random number generator (though I wouldn’t be mad). Surely, your designers are crafty enough to come up with dice designs that look BETTER when sped up. Just please: speed up the dice rolls, limit where they roll on the screen, and allow combined rolling.
Continue your wonderful tradition of making the annoying parts of Dungeons & Dragons go away. Realistic dice speeds should be your next target for optimizing. Dice are cool. Slow, limited dice are not.
(For players who want slow dice, let them keep it. Make quick dice a flipable setting switch. That could even create drama: the DM says “OK, slow roll this” to build tension on important checks like a 3rd death save.)
* The longer we spend waiting on dice to roll, the less time we have to narrate combat. Imagine if we could reclaim that wait time to be flavor time! Player clicks. DM seeing the results a split second later in the dice log: “Gjalp swings her ancient Glaive into the goblin. Viscera flies as the blade nearly severs its arm.” Group gasps. Player clicks. DM: “Almost without looking, Gjalp bashes the goblin with the butt of her glaive into the goblin’s skull, and, with a nauseating wet sound, the goblin drops.” Group cheers.
1, 2, 3) I think these are all the same issue - it seems you don't want dice on your sheet at all since much of the character sheet is interactable. I think these 3 are preference more than anything. I personally, for the most part, like dice rolling directly in the same window over the character sheet. Dice are already on a non-interactive layer, I can click through them no problem.
Although I also use an extension that allows me to put the dice over/under the results and provide transparency options so I can see everything anyway so it's likely less impactful for me. I also use an extension for when I want the dice separate from the sheet or added to a stream. These are all great options to have but I wouldn't want it limited to one of them. My own preference changes too much so I'm sure there's others out there that like it the way it is at least sometimes.
See spoiler of an example of a separate dice tray and sped up dice on my slow work laptop. Normally the dice take 5-10 seconds to give a result when not sped up on this computer. My personal computer has near instant dice rolls by default and I sometimes choose to slow it down to see the shiny virtual rocks in action. I would love something like this to be an option natively but wouldn't want it forced. There is a little bit of a hiccup because my laptop is not great and it doesn't like recording much lol - it's much smoother without OBS running.
4) I'd like this as well although beyond20 is a good work around in the mean time.
5) This is computer dependent right now (I actually have to slow down the dice on my personal computer) however you can manually change the speed of the dice with a bookmarklet, extension or directly in the dev console (faster or slower see above spoiler for faster example).
There are definitely QoL improvements that can be made available natively but I'm ok using work arounds for these issues until they can address them in a way that will please the most amount of people. Preferably options instead of one way or the other for 1,2,3. #4 I don't think there's a down side but some people would probably like the option togglable. In the same vein I think they should have a slider/options for dice speed instead of leaving it up to the system/browser to decide.
1,2, and 3 are three sides of the same weird coin. I agree though that if i want to see the dice and my character sheet, i'm usually out of luck due to how these rolls are animated. The idea of a virtual tray has some merit though.
4 i'm hit or miss on, but i can see how it would be something desirable more community wide
5 i've never had an issue with. Even when playing on AboveVTT with a party of 5 it was barely any lost time. Certainly no more than actually rolling real dice. And that's on my PC or the smartphone app.
Yes, they are closely related issues, you're right. 2 and 3 could be considered subsets of 1. I was erring on the side of specificity for easier requirements doc generation by product managers. They're also broken down so the deliverables can more easily fit into a scrum sprint.
These are all great options to have but I wouldn't want it limited to one of them. My own preference changes too much so I'm sure there's others out there that like it the way it is at least sometimes.
I agree, and I tried to convey that I want fast rolling as a toggle.
I personally, for the most part, like dice rolling directly in the same window over the character sheet.
I didn't mean to suggest I wanted them in a separate window. That would be annoying (and basically impossible on mobile apps). I just don't want the dice to end up resting on important character sheet elements.
I also use an extension that allows me to put the dice over/under the results and provide transparency options so I can see everything anyway so it's likely less impactful for me. I also use an extension for when I want the dice separate from the sheet or added to a stream.
Please link to these extensions and any setting configurations instructions you recommend! 🥹
See spoiler of an example of a separate dice tray and sped up dice on my slow work laptop. Normally the dice take 5-10 seconds to give a result when not sped up on this computer. My personal computer has near instant dice rolls by default and I sometimes choose to slow it down to see the shiny virtual rocks in action. I would love something like this to be an option natively but wouldn't want it forced.
I have a pretty speedy laptop, but the dice still seem to take a set time to roll. It's approximately the same speed on both my iPhone and laptop, which render the dice at approximately the same speed as the dice rolling at the bottom of the screen during the D&D Beyond Dev Updates (Twitch and YouTube). (Here's a quick video: 3.0–3.1-second dice rolling.) Did you tweak something to speed the dice up?
When I'm not using Roll20, which only one of my games uses, Beyond20's UI kinda gets clunky. That said, I wasn't aware I was able to use Beyond20 without a virtual tabletop. I just tested it, and it works. Great suggestion! The extension also allows you to toggle "Use D&D Beyond's Digital Dice." I switched it off and the results were still sent to the D&D Beyond game log yet no time-consuming visual rolls happened. Once again, great suggestion!
however you can manually change the speed of the dice with a bookmarklet, extension or directly in the dev console (faster or slower see above spoiler for faster example).
Can you please link to any bookmarklets or extensions (besides Beyond20) that you're referring to? I'd also love to see the dev console modifications that can be made. (A brief search didn't show anything about speed.)
Yeh, for the most part I agree with you just was adding my thoughts =) - wasn't trying to argue any points if it came off that way. I think the secondary window for dice has a very niche purpose but I whip them out every now and then (streaming, dice roll sharing, or tableTV dice trays mostly come to mind). I agree it could not be the default option.
The bookmarklets (just create a bookmark name it w.e you want and paste one of the below in the URL section) I use are: Faster dice: javascript: (() => { window.requestAnimationFrame = function(e) { setTimeout(e, 1); } })();
I also set up a script for people to just install for the slower dice but it can be modified for the faster.
Alternatively you can just put the window.requestAnimationFrame = function(e) { setTimeout(e, 1); (minimum 0 where the 1 is) in the dev console on each visit to speed up dice if you don't want to use the bookmarklets or more permanent script.
The animations have a set number of frames based on how they get thrown/bounce around this just decreases/increases the time between frames which results in slower/faster dice animations. Generally browsers/systems will decide what the best speed is for a "smooth" animation so my laptop is significantly slower when I don't use this and the opposite for my personal computer.
The extensions I use are Stylus and Tampermonkey. I load up/install scripts into them that I use for getting dice above/below the results or apply transparency to the popup/dice.
You can find those scripts and links to the extensions and instructions here: https://github.com/Azmoria/dndbeyonddark (you can go directly to the readme for the theme's in my signature).
There's some instructions there in the readme/a thread by Hyrkali in my signature but you can always send me a PM for more information or assistance. My discords also in one the readme's somewhere if you'd rather message me there. There's a lot of options so I can understand getting overwhelmed or lost at what does what.
The settings in the video other than the dice and background are pretty much default for the character sheet CSS theme. They can be adjusted quite simply in the Stylus extension menu once installed though and again happy to assist anyone that would like assistance just send a PM or message on discord.
All in that link you'll find the dice tray popout javascript, the dice speed javascript, 2 CSS theme's for dndbeyond character sheets/rest of the site that have the options for under/over and transparency.
4 i'm hit or miss on, but i can see how it would be something desirable more community wide
I agree that different people will want different things, but a thoughtful design wouldn't require it to be either-or outcome. For example, the icon at the start of the row under the Actions section could be made interactive, and clicking it would roll everything: to-hit, damage (on crit, additional dice are automatically rolled), sneak attack, etc. The results would be separated in the game log, so the parts that don't apply can be safely ignored. (Same idea in picture form: Interactive row icon.)
That wouldn't change that the entries under the to-hit and damage columns would remain interactive. No changes there! Players and DMs could roll how they want: separated or together.
5 i've never had an issue with. Even when playing on AboveVTT with a party of 5 it was barely any lost time. Certainly no more than actually rolling real dice. And that's on my PC or the smartphone app.
The amount of time "lost" to dice rolls is directly dependant on the number of people in combat. Some DMs tend toward 3–6 vs. 1–10 combat scenarios. Then, it's no big deal, admittedly. But sometimes, the DM will throw in a bunch of allies and mobs, and the Druid will cast Conjure Animals, adding 8 velociraptors (2 attacks each, all with advantage), and the Forge Cleric will cast Animate Objects on a fistful of gold coins, etc. At that point, there can be 20–50 creatures (and non-creatures for those Echo Knights) in combat, and the dice roll time really adds up. (Each roll takes about 3–3.1 seconds.)
35 creatures × 3 seconds per roll × 4 rolls per creature's turn (rough average) = 7 minutes of rolling each round, and that's assuming everyone is hyper-optimal with their rolling (we very much aren't).
As far as it not being any "worse" than rolling real dice, that's kind of the point of D&D Beyond, yeah? It got rid of the tediousness of creating character sheets, the need for pencils and erasers and paper for taking notes and tracking HP, conditions, inventory, etc. It allows you to use a search engine to find rules, stats, etc. instead of opening a physical book, flipping to the index, etc. The game log allows you to roll the clock back and see what happened accurately like never before. And, especially during the pandemic, people don't even have to get together in person to play.
In short: D&D Beyond's premise is built on the idea that the fun of TTRPGs doesn't have to be dependant on recreating every aspect of the 1970s–2000s gaming experience.
Note that every D&D Beyond competitor that I'm aware of chose not to create a physics engine to simulate the rolling of physical dice. They use various random number generators, some cooler than others, resulting in near-instant rolls, i.e., they realized that dice rolling (physical or simulated) is not, for everyone, essential for an amazing Dungeons & Dragons experience. I personally applaud D&D Beyond's approach. It offers some fun nostalgia. It's nifty! But I don't think it's fun to be forced, when every other bookkeeping part of the game has been streamlined, to only have the option to wait ~3 seconds for each die roll.
Nothing about what I'm suggesting would eliminate the current method of rolling. For some players, the current rolling experience is ideal! Roll to hit first, watch the dice tumble around, get the result, ask if that number hits, the DM says yes, roll your base damage, watch the dice tumble around, get the result, roll you Hex damage or Sneak Attack damage or Giant's Might damage or Hunter's Mark damage or Superiority Dice damage, etc., watch the dice tumble around, get the result and add it to the last result, and so on. Then, it's time for your second attack, and you do it all again.
Some players and DMs love this. I and many others do not. It's cool. Everyone is allowed to like different things! All I'm (and others are) asking for is the ability to streamline the dice as much as they streamlined the other aspects of Dungeons & Dragons.
Joining in a bit late on the subject, but I'd like to see a feature option where you can input the physical dice roll into the character sheet. So you roll physical dice, type it in the spec sheet for the result etc. Just because I prefer a physical roll and the use of a digital sheet.
I know it's faster to just calculate it yourself instead of having to input a number, but I'm just a bit paranoid I'll forget about a bonus or w/e that the sheet knows about haha.
Highly disagree with #4 here. Maybe there's a reason why I'm not rolling damage [unarmed grapple] or I need to add another modifier/spell [Absorb element], or I'm changing the damage type [Transmute Spell] Either way, speed is good, but shouldn't be the only thing.
If you implement that, it becomes a bad system. It causes issues when X, Y, and Z aren't part of it, or you have to ignore X, Y, or Z because of something else. Keeping it separate makes the game clearer: No hit, no damage roll.
I get that when D&D Beyond set out to create their dice roller, they wanted to recreate the experience of a player actually rolling a die, so the outcome is a physics engine slowed down to the pace of a realistic animation. It’s cute. Very nostalgic. It’s also disruptive in the extreme.
(1) Dice shouldn’t roll all over the screen/character sheet. It covers up the character sheet. Lots of players roll manual dice in dice rolling containers for this exact reason. Containerize the dice, please.
(2) Relatedly, dice shouldn’t roll UNDER UI elements. Right now, the dice often roll UNDER the dice result hover text in the lower-right of the screen. This means you have to dismiss the result to see the actual dice. This is very poor user experience. Block the dice from important UI elements, please.
(3) Dice shouldn’t roll OVER UI elements. If a die ended up on top of an interactive element, I shouldn’t need to first click the die to dismiss it before I can click what’s underneath it. Make dice a non-interactive overlay, please
(4) You cannot currently roll to-hit and damage at the same time. Some players prefer this. Others don’t. (Heck, my first DM back in 1998 had the rule: if you don’t roll your damage dice with your to-hit dice, you did no damage.) Check out the Beyond20 extension for good implementation of this. If a crit occurs, any additional damage dice immediately roll on their own after the fact and the total is added. It’s seamless. Allow combined hit + damage combined rolling, please.
(5) The dice take too long. The choice of a physics engine is cute. But TBH, the fun of Dungeons & Dragons was never the dice. They are part of the fun, yes, but they can also very much get in the way. When you’ve got 6 players, a Druid summoning constrictor snakes, NPC allies, and enemies, it can take forever to resolve each round. In the game I played today, we spent about a third of the time in combat waiting* for the result of digital dice to roll. Click. Wait… Click. Wait… “If an 18 hits, it did 6 points of piercing damage and 3 points of cold damage.” Click. Wait… “Does a 15 hit?” “Yes.” Click. Wait… “7 points of radiant damage.” The DM is considering house ruling that we use an instant-rolling alternative because D&D Beyond takes too long. Provide a quick-roll option, please. (You can keep the physics engine; just speed it up to about a quarter or half second per roll. Rule of thumb: the dice shouldn’t take longer to roll than an anxious heart beats.)
We are playing Dungeons & Dragons in 2022, not 1984. We are using electronic character sheets on laptops and smartphones. We are playing remotely over Zoom. We are looking up rules in digital books with a search function. If pencils and erasers and paper and printed books and in-person groups aren’t necessary for Dungeons & Dragons, which they aren’t or D&D Beyond wouldn’t exist, why do dice need to be simulated in slow-time? (Answer: they don’t.)
I’m sure you get some income from dice design sales. You can keep it! You don’t have the switch to a heartless random number generator (though I wouldn’t be mad). Surely, your designers are crafty enough to come up with dice designs that look BETTER when sped up. Just please: speed up the dice rolls, limit where they roll on the screen, and allow combined rolling.
Continue your wonderful tradition of making the annoying parts of Dungeons & Dragons go away. Realistic dice speeds should be your next target for optimizing. Dice are cool. Slow, limited dice are not.
(For players who want slow dice, let them keep it. Make quick dice a flipable setting switch. That could even create drama: the DM says “OK, slow roll this” to build tension on important checks like a 3rd death save.)
* The longer we spend waiting on dice to roll, the less time we have to narrate combat. Imagine if we could reclaim that wait time to be flavor time! Player clicks. DM seeing the results a split second later in the dice log: “Gjalp swings her ancient Glaive into the goblin. Viscera flies as the blade nearly severs its arm.” Group gasps. Player clicks. DM: “Almost without looking, Gjalp bashes the goblin with the butt of her glaive into the goblin’s skull, and, with a nauseating wet sound, the goblin drops.” Group cheers.
To the Developers:
Please please please see this, hear this, know this, and make this happen.
Agree to all of the above.
1, 2, 3) I think these are all the same issue - it seems you don't want dice on your sheet at all since much of the character sheet is interactable. I think these 3 are preference more than anything. I personally, for the most part, like dice rolling directly in the same window over the character sheet. Dice are already on a non-interactive layer, I can click through them no problem.
Although I also use an extension that allows me to put the dice over/under the results and provide transparency options so I can see everything anyway so it's likely less impactful for me. I also use an extension for when I want the dice separate from the sheet or added to a stream. These are all great options to have but I wouldn't want it limited to one of them. My own preference changes too much so I'm sure there's others out there that like it the way it is at least sometimes.
See spoiler of an example of a separate dice tray and sped up dice on my slow work laptop. Normally the dice take 5-10 seconds to give a result when not sped up on this computer. My personal computer has near instant dice rolls by default and I sometimes choose to slow it down to see the shiny virtual rocks in action. I would love something like this to be an option natively but wouldn't want it forced. There is a little bit of a hiccup because my laptop is not great and it doesn't like recording much lol - it's much smoother without OBS running.
4) I'd like this as well although beyond20 is a good work around in the mean time.
5) This is computer dependent right now (I actually have to slow down the dice on my personal computer) however you can manually change the speed of the dice with a bookmarklet, extension or directly in the dev console (faster or slower see above spoiler for faster example).
There are definitely QoL improvements that can be made available natively but I'm ok using work arounds for these issues until they can address them in a way that will please the most amount of people. Preferably options instead of one way or the other for 1,2,3. #4 I don't think there's a down side but some people would probably like the option togglable. In the same vein I think they should have a slider/options for dice speed instead of leaving it up to the system/browser to decide.
How to get your dice to look like the ones in my profile picture and a full site dark mode.
Tutorial thread by Hyrkali
1,2, and 3 are three sides of the same weird coin. I agree though that if i want to see the dice and my character sheet, i'm usually out of luck due to how these rolls are animated. The idea of a virtual tray has some merit though.
4 i'm hit or miss on, but i can see how it would be something desirable more community wide
5 i've never had an issue with. Even when playing on AboveVTT with a party of 5 it was barely any lost time. Certainly no more than actually rolling real dice. And that's on my PC or the smartphone app.
Thanks, @Jay_Lane for your reply! You've got some good stuff.
Yes, they are closely related issues, you're right. 2 and 3 could be considered subsets of 1. I was erring on the side of specificity for easier requirements doc generation by product managers. They're also broken down so the deliverables can more easily fit into a scrum sprint.
I agree, and I tried to convey that I want fast rolling as a toggle.
I didn't mean to suggest I wanted them in a separate window. That would be annoying (and basically impossible on mobile apps). I just don't want the dice to end up resting on important character sheet elements.
Please link to these extensions and any setting configurations instructions you recommend! 🥹
I have a pretty speedy laptop, but the dice still seem to take a set time to roll. It's approximately the same speed on both my iPhone and laptop, which render the dice at approximately the same speed as the dice rolling at the bottom of the screen during the D&D Beyond Dev Updates (Twitch and YouTube). (Here's a quick video: 3.0–3.1-second dice rolling.) Did you tweak something to speed the dice up?
When I'm not using Roll20, which only one of my games uses, Beyond20's UI kinda gets clunky. That said, I wasn't aware I was able to use Beyond20 without a virtual tabletop. I just tested it, and it works. Great suggestion! The extension also allows you to toggle "Use D&D Beyond's Digital Dice." I switched it off and the results were still sent to the D&D Beyond game log yet no time-consuming visual rolls happened. Once again, great suggestion!
While dice may go slower on a slower computer, I don't think the dice render faster without intervention. It's about 3–3.1 seconds. (See above video.)
Can you please link to any bookmarklets or extensions (besides Beyond20) that you're referring to? I'd also love to see the dev console modifications that can be made. (A brief search didn't show anything about speed.)
Thanks again for your input!
Yeh, for the most part I agree with you just was adding my thoughts =) - wasn't trying to argue any points if it came off that way. I think the secondary window for dice has a very niche purpose but I whip them out every now and then (streaming, dice roll sharing, or tableTV dice trays mostly come to mind). I agree it could not be the default option.
I speak to the dice speed in this thread:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/bugs-support/137396-digital-dice-are-rolled-super-fast
The bookmarklets (just create a bookmark name it w.e you want and paste one of the below in the URL section) I use are:
Faster dice:
javascript: (() => { window.requestAnimationFrame = function(e) { setTimeout(e, 1); } })();
Slower Dice:
javascript: (() => { window.requestAnimationFrame = function(e) { setTimeout(e, 16); } })();
I also set up a script for people to just install for the slower dice but it can be modified for the faster.
Alternatively you can just put the window.requestAnimationFrame = function(e) { setTimeout(e, 1); (minimum 0 where the 1 is) in the dev console on each visit to speed up dice if you don't want to use the bookmarklets or more permanent script.
The animations have a set number of frames based on how they get thrown/bounce around this just decreases/increases the time between frames which results in slower/faster dice animations. Generally browsers/systems will decide what the best speed is for a "smooth" animation so my laptop is significantly slower when I don't use this and the opposite for my personal computer.
The extensions I use are Stylus and Tampermonkey. I load up/install scripts into them that I use for getting dice above/below the results or apply transparency to the popup/dice.
You can find those scripts and links to the extensions and instructions here: https://github.com/Azmoria/dndbeyonddark (you can go directly to the readme for the theme's in my signature).
There's some instructions there in the readme/a thread by Hyrkali in my signature but you can always send me a PM for more information or assistance. My discords also in one the readme's somewhere if you'd rather message me there. There's a lot of options so I can understand getting overwhelmed or lost at what does what.
The settings in the video other than the dice and background are pretty much default for the character sheet CSS theme. They can be adjusted quite simply in the Stylus extension menu once installed though and again happy to assist anyone that would like assistance just send a PM or message on discord.
All in that link you'll find the dice tray popout javascript, the dice speed javascript, 2 CSS theme's for dndbeyond character sheets/rest of the site that have the options for under/over and transparency.
How to get your dice to look like the ones in my profile picture and a full site dark mode.
Tutorial thread by Hyrkali
Thanks for the reply @Wheezal!
I agree that different people will want different things, but a thoughtful design wouldn't require it to be either-or outcome. For example, the icon at the start of the row under the Actions section could be made interactive, and clicking it would roll everything: to-hit, damage (on crit, additional dice are automatically rolled), sneak attack, etc. The results would be separated in the game log, so the parts that don't apply can be safely ignored. (Same idea in picture form: Interactive row icon.)
That wouldn't change that the entries under the to-hit and damage columns would remain interactive. No changes there! Players and DMs could roll how they want: separated or together.
The amount of time "lost" to dice rolls is directly dependant on the number of people in combat. Some DMs tend toward 3–6 vs. 1–10 combat scenarios. Then, it's no big deal, admittedly. But sometimes, the DM will throw in a bunch of allies and mobs, and the Druid will cast Conjure Animals, adding 8 velociraptors (2 attacks each, all with advantage), and the Forge Cleric will cast Animate Objects on a fistful of gold coins, etc. At that point, there can be 20–50 creatures (and non-creatures for those Echo Knights) in combat, and the dice roll time really adds up. (Each roll takes about 3–3.1 seconds.)
35 creatures × 3 seconds per roll × 4 rolls per creature's turn (rough average) = 7 minutes of rolling each round, and that's assuming everyone is hyper-optimal with their rolling (we very much aren't).
As far as it not being any "worse" than rolling real dice, that's kind of the point of D&D Beyond, yeah? It got rid of the tediousness of creating character sheets, the need for pencils and erasers and paper for taking notes and tracking HP, conditions, inventory, etc. It allows you to use a search engine to find rules, stats, etc. instead of opening a physical book, flipping to the index, etc. The game log allows you to roll the clock back and see what happened accurately like never before. And, especially during the pandemic, people don't even have to get together in person to play.
In short: D&D Beyond's premise is built on the idea that the fun of TTRPGs doesn't have to be dependant on recreating every aspect of the 1970s–2000s gaming experience.
Note that every D&D Beyond competitor that I'm aware of chose not to create a physics engine to simulate the rolling of physical dice. They use various random number generators, some cooler than others, resulting in near-instant rolls, i.e., they realized that dice rolling (physical or simulated) is not, for everyone, essential for an amazing Dungeons & Dragons experience. I personally applaud D&D Beyond's approach. It offers some fun nostalgia. It's nifty! But I don't think it's fun to be forced, when every other bookkeeping part of the game has been streamlined, to only have the option to wait ~3 seconds for each die roll.
Nothing about what I'm suggesting would eliminate the current method of rolling. For some players, the current rolling experience is ideal! Roll to hit first, watch the dice tumble around, get the result, ask if that number hits, the DM says yes, roll your base damage, watch the dice tumble around, get the result, roll you Hex damage or Sneak Attack damage or Giant's Might damage or Hunter's Mark damage or Superiority Dice damage, etc., watch the dice tumble around, get the result and add it to the last result, and so on. Then, it's time for your second attack, and you do it all again.
Some players and DMs love this. I and many others do not. It's cool. Everyone is allowed to like different things! All I'm (and others are) asking for is the ability to streamline the dice as much as they streamlined the other aspects of Dungeons & Dragons.
Becoming @Jay_Lane is my new spiritual path. You rock, person!
Joining in a bit late on the subject, but I'd like to see a feature option where you can input the physical dice roll into the character sheet. So you roll physical dice, type it in the spec sheet for the result etc. Just because I prefer a physical roll and the use of a digital sheet.
I know it's faster to just calculate it yourself instead of having to input a number, but I'm just a bit paranoid I'll forget about a bonus or w/e that the sheet knows about haha.
Highly disagree with #4 here. Maybe there's a reason why I'm not rolling damage [unarmed grapple] or I need to add another modifier/spell [Absorb element], or I'm changing the damage type [Transmute Spell] Either way, speed is good, but shouldn't be the only thing.
If you implement that, it becomes a bad system. It causes issues when X, Y, and Z aren't part of it, or you have to ignore X, Y, or Z because of something else. Keeping it separate makes the game clearer: No hit, no damage roll.
I wonder if different digital dice sets have custom physics. Could make for a creative work around.
the dice are all reskins of the same basic shapes rolling in the same physics engine