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way this passes a basic cost-benefit analysis, especially when there is so much else that Wizards inherited broken or outdated and could be fixed to receive more bang for the buck.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Saying Wizards “inherited broken or outdated systems” isn’t accurate.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.