Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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As others have pointed out, this is not a meaningful market size - you are not looking just at those who roll physically, you are splitting that down to AND who are also willing to use another camera for play AND who feel the need to prove their rolls due to lack of trust at the table AND who are not using dice that will cause the system problems AND who, despite Beyond working fine as is with physical dice, will magically get over their hang-ups against using the site AND now that they are over their reluctance, are willing to pay for a product they irrationally rejected on the grounds they wrongly believed Beyond and physical dice are incompatible.
Every AND decreases the expected benefit and there are a few here. No way this passes a basic cost-benefit analysis, especially when there is so much else that Wizards inherited broken or outdated and could be fixed to receive more bang for the buck.
I think you’re arguing against a purpose I never claimed. I didn’t present this as a tool to “prove liars honest” or solve trust issues at tables. Again, that’s a social problem, not a platform one. The concept is about bridging physical play with digital tools and trying to live share it with friends, not policing players.
DND beyond does not work well, or at all, with physical dice, they work "ok" with digital dice, when it works.
Calling players who never adapted to Beyond “irrational” isn’t analysis, it’s just dismissing player preference. Choosing physical dice or analog play is a preference, not a flaw. People aren’t wrong just because they don’t prefer what you do.
Saying Wizards “inherited broken or outdated systems” isn’t accurate. They bought functioning platforms, that success is exactly why WotC acquired them in the first place. Calling it “bad code” is just a convenient deflection for wotc coders. D&D Beyond and similar apps didn’t suddenly become broken after acquisition; WotC inherited complex systems their developers didn’t build or fully understand. That’s not bad code, that’s a knowledge gap on WotC’s side, specifically the coders.
D&D Beyond works exactly as well with physical dice as a traditional pen and paper sheet. It tells you what dice to roll, you can then do that physically. Players have been able to figure out how to read a character sheet and roll dice with that information since the game began. Yes, Beyond does not do anything extra, but “extra” is not the standard. The standard is “can this replicate the D&D experience,” which it obviously does.
I could pick apart the rest of your post just as easily. You can dismiss the “trust” element all you want, but that’s actually the only real utility of this idea - if you have trust, saying “hey, I rolled X” does the same thing as your idea, without the need for unnecessary complexity. It also is a well known fact Beyond has tech issues due to passing through multiple owners. It is why silly things happen like the forums code breaking the entire site. It why they are rebuilding the site presently. It also is a tad silly to say this site is”functioning” when it lacks basic features, such as its fairly useless search tools that can’t search within text blocks of spells well.
There are real things the development team can fix. That is far more beneficial to the user experience than something that requires a lot of work, will be limited in efficacy by the range of dice it must recognize, requires players to invest in outside tech to function, and can be just as easily accomplished by players just talking.
Fixing things like the broken search system helps everyone. This does functionally little and is only going to help a minority of a minority of a minority of players. It is not hard to see where the allocation of resources should go.
And you think a highly technical niche tool,written by a team that does not have a focus on optic recognition, would make this ... better.
If you think the digital dice are broken, push for fixes. If you don't want to, aim a second camera at your dice in your Discord game, and use OBS to picture-in-picture it. You're asking for a significant development cost for something no-one else is asking for.
As I said above, if you want this, use Arcane Eye and push for the ability to push it into the log through an API. WOTC is not a Swiss Army Knife, and you've already highlighted issues with things that ARE their core competency. This would be worse.
> That is far more beneficial to the user experience than something that requires a lot of work, will be limited in efficacy by the range of dice it must recognize, requires players to invest in outside tech to function, and can be just as easily accomplished by players just talking.
Is this towards sigil, spell table or this suggestion, or just “ideas are bad because the team is busy/there are better suggestions” again?
“We inherited problems” isn’t a proven fact just because it gets repeated every thread. Eventually it stops being an explanation and starts sounding like a mascot for stagnation. If problems are still around three years later, that’s not proof they’re impossible, that’s a knowledge gap. In most tech jobs, that gets fixed by replacing the people stuck on it, that dont have something better to support than "the code was bad."
As I suggested before, if the concern is “this suggestion is bad, think about the small, overworked team,” that deserves its own discussion thread, not derailing suggestions everytime one is made.
Ideas are bad when they take a lot of work, likely will have significant problems current tech does not fully do well, are outside of the team’s wheelhouse (as noted above, just because you can program doesn’t mean you can do the incredibly difficult task of a character recognition program), requires the end user to invest in a of niche additional tech, and serves a negligible population. Even if Wizards had a significant development team that could support a project like this, it still fails on all five points.
It is very clear you are not considering how difficult a project this would be, and how obviously little payoff there is. If your entire idea can be just as easily solved with someone saying “hey, cool, I rolled a 20” then adding a bunch of bells and whistles that ultimately produce the same result is superfluous and a waste of time and money.
> And you think a highly technical niche tool,written by a team that does not have a focus on optic recognition, would make this ... better.
Yes, I think the spelltable team could easily adapt this for dice and have absolutely no/ minimal problems. Wotc wouldn't even need to outsource it.
I can’t really take the “ideas are bad when workarounds already exist” argument at face value when Sigil was mentioned and praised under the same logic, while this suggestion gets ridiculed. If existing alternatives automatically invalidated ideas, Sigil wouldn’t have been pursued at all. Why rebuild DND beyond when dnd beyond exists?
I’ve already addressed the “too difficult technically” point. Maybe that argument worked pre-COVID, before thousands of camera-based apps became normal, not to mention Wizards already uses camera recognition technology elsewhere. At this stage, this sounds less like impossibility and more "I don't want to learn camera recognition"/a learning opportunity for developers to expand into adjacent areas of software design.
And there’s no need to turn this into an ethical cost-distribution analysis. I’m a consumer who has spent thousands of dollars on Wizards’ products offering feedback in a feedback forum, it's what this space is meant for.
If you wanted one, from a market perspective, even modest subscription fees gained would probably easily cover the costs of maintaining this feature or compensate/advance fees for training or classes for WotC coders who need to catch up on modern tech.
Spelltable hasn't been a problem, it's successful and they aren't even charging for that, and it's got many more areas for recognition problems that it overcomes than trying to scan 7 common die.
It is hard to believe you are engaging in good faith on a thread when you repeat claims already dismissed. SpellTable is a relatively easy image recognition - there may be a lot of Magic cards and printings, but each printing corresponds to a specific card. A fourth edition Unholy Strength looks like a fourth edition Unholy Strength.
As any dice gremlin knows (and as pointed out on this thread and ignored by you) “7 common die” is a fiction. Even among the most basic of dice you have weird variations of color (some of which are random based on two plastic colors being mixed), different fonts, different transparency levels, etc. And that is before you get into dice with more complex materials, like stone with its veins, weird shapes, non-standard numbering (like Roman numerals), the usage of words or images in place of natural 1s/20s, complex designs surrounding the numbers in the same color, etc. One could probably place limits on compatible dice to bring this more in line with a spelltable situation, but then you’re undermining the purpose of this tool and making it even more niche.
This is not “I spy a card that looks like Unholy Strength,” but “I spy an object. I recognize it is a die. I can filter out other information on that die and determine the number rolled. And I can do all of this without having seen this specific die’s template before.” That level of filtering and drawing conclusions is a huge distinction from being able to recognize standardized testing, and remains a problem for even significant players in fields like self driving vehicles - fields where billions are being poured into fixing these problems.
Hasbro is a relatively small company - there are companies that have spent entire the entire value of Hasbro (some multiple times over) on trying to solve this kind of computer vision problem. Pretty sure the answer is not going to be found here on D&D Beyond in a tool that has no intrinsic value a simple conversation cannot already do.
1. Addressing the bad faith claim
Disagreeing with your points isn’t bad faith. I don’t see any new claims from you. I gave it the benefit of the doubt and answered honestly.
2. Arcane Eye feasibility / cost exaggeration
You do realize Arcane Eye is *already* a real app built by a single developer, and it works. It's already been solved, I'm just asking Wotc to solve it or get arcane eye. It didn’t (I heavily assume) cost billions, and suggesting it would, while free tools like SpellTable exist, is at best, a glorified exaggeration.
3. Statistical / technical comparison
Detecting dice faces seems like is actually simpler than recognizing MTG cards on SpellTable. You’re working with 7 common dice templates, each with a standard number of faces. Even accounting for color or font variations, the pool of possibilities is tiny compared to the thousands of cards needed for SpellTable.
4. Closing neutral note
I’m not here to call anyone bad faith. This is a feedback space, and it’s fine to disagree, but rehashing old claims, accusing/implying bad faith for disagreeing, and then grossly exaggerating (costs to solve this) to discredit a suggestion doesn’t add to the discussion. Please stay constructive.
No point you could ever make would make this a good idea to implement over actually fixing bugs or implementing features they haven't yet from existing books. And even then, it still wouldn't be as useful as other features that don't have clean, easy replacements on the site already.
I saw Sigil mentioned. The idea of a 3D VTT, as opposed to all the 2D VTTs, was novel and could have been great if Hasbro wasn't responsible for it. Not comparable here.