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.
Well - it's not a huge leap to just make a system that guaranteed works with a specific set of dice ... say they're blue with white numbers. Standardised. It may work with other dice, or you can buy these official DNDice for it. Bam. Business opportunity.
Not that I think you'd sell millions of dice that way, exactly.
But we're rollplayers. We like dice. And ... I mean I have to be honest, everyone I know hate to screen dice. They're useful, and we even vaguely compete to have the most interesting ones. But they're slow, and they feel clumsy, and they're just never as satisfying as the real thing.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
Which defeats the point of "I want to be able to roll my prefered dice"
What is the problem specifically? It's not "I can't use my favourite physical dice while playing online" because that is a trivially solved problem.
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That’s a good idea.👍
The “small, overworked team” argument is misplaced here. This is a feedback forum. What is the emotional shield/moral framing concept doing here, that feedback/suggestions shouldn't be applied because "the team is too busy"? No one, or rather, No one outside of WOTC, is asking them to code this for free, in their off time, at their own expense. Is the team that overworked, can you start a thread and pin it so people know it's a problem and can understand how to help get it resolved?
To Davyd, what exactly are you contributing by repeatedly saying “this is trivial” or “not worth implementing”? This is the fourth time you’ve dismissed the suggestion without adding any new reasoning or engaging with points already addressed, which is odd considering you have directly complimented and encouraged this concept in the recent past:
Repeating “just tell people your roll” overlooks that most digital quality-of-life features exist even though players could already do things manually, but why do this? It's about the experience, rather than any pragmatic reason. Workarounds have never stopped new tools from being developed. If "a workaround already existed” were enough reason not to build something, then Sigil never would've been a failure, due to 3D VTTs like Tabletop Simulator already being available which WOTC could've made modules/assets for and sold like hotcakes.
If new technical or usability concerns exist, great, that’s worth discussing. Otherwise, maybe WOTC could just do what they often do and acquire a great community app to get it in front of players, instead of leaning on the small, overworked team.
You realize even Arcane Eye doesn't fix the potential cheating concerns with lesser-known groups, right, and that reliability with metal and unusual dice drops?
Also, Arcane Eye requires a monthly subscription.
Clearly this is something that has a decent resource cost and isn't foolproof. Why would the Beyond team bother with it? What incentive do they have?
If there is a concern of players lying about rolls, that’s a social/group problem, not a D&D Beyond problem.
“Not foolproof”, based on 2026 Development Roadmap opening comments, that's exactly WOTC’s wheelhouse, nothing on Beyond works perfectly, and they clearly embrace operating in "not foolproof". By comparison, if this was pre-covid, before the video chat/camera use tech bubble popped, maybe, but adding something like this in 2026, camera integration options are plentiful.
Why would Beyond Team bother? The subscription model is already the incentive. Arcane Eye (the app itself) shows there’s willingness to pay for physical-to-digital dice integration. Offering something similar as an optional subscription (or fold into existing ones) could attract players who never fully adopted to Beyond because they prefer rolling physical dice.
This is a C-130 AWACS feature, and they want to build a Honda Accord.
But again, the problem is here responsibility. If D&D Beyond provided an API where a tool with an API key can add rolls directly into the log, then you can set up whatever system you want to read rolls, and push it to the log yourself. Including Arcane Eye.
D&D Beyond doesn't need to, and shouldn't build every tool under the sun. Like the SRD provides creators the ability to write for the D&D game, D&D Beyond needs to provide a legitimate and viable way for third party providers to integrate with the platform.
Everything else is up to your own imagination.