There is electricity in the air when you’re casting a level 5 Lightning Bolt; the whole table knows something special is about to happen when they see a player get 10 six sided dice ready, and seeing those dice bounce on the table can lead some parties to cheer (or jeer) as they stop moving.

One of our core focuses for Tabyltop is to enhance the social experience of playing, so rolling dice is something we take very seriously. How do we move rolling dice to an all-digital experience while keeping that visceral action from the real world?

Rolling Dice

When you’re deep in the trenches fighting that warband of Orcs, you don’t want to have to check your character sheet to see what rolls you have or type that into a note area each turn. You want to be able to grab those dice and go.

D&D Beyond has made this pretty simple by linking most of your character sheet to the die rolls, but its not integrated into your VTT and it doesn’t do some things well (like advantage, disadvantage, bless, guidance, criticals, etc.). Some other VTTs have integrated die rolling, but they rely on cumbersome macro setups that again don’t work well with advantage, disadvantage, crits) or require you to set up your character sheet by copying values from D&D Beyond.

Tabyltop’s Solution

We think we’ve found a good balance; one that brings that joy of rolling dice while making it easy to setup common dice rolls and view results easily.

Instead of macros, we have a dice roll builder, where you can add any number of dice of any type, and (if it’s a damage roll) set up the types of damage for each part of the roll.

If it’s an initiative roll, we know that, and we won’t make you do something special to get your character into the turn tracker.

If you have advantage or disadvantage, you can use your pre-created rolls without duplicating it, just indicate you have advantage and go.

Seeing Dice Results

Just as important as the rolling of the dice is being able to see results easily. With the excitement of rolling in the real world, it can slow down play to add up the values and proclaim the results. The dice rolling should be visible, but in the end we want to know we rolled a 43, and be able to see the results for a short amount of time in the history.

Seeing it in Action

We’ll be opening Tabyltop up to select beta testers soon, but sooner than that we’ll be posting some demo videos of features, including this one. Because we’re developing in the open, you’ll see changes over time as we iterate the product while taking into account feedback from our users.

We’re very excited to share more with you over the next few months. Welcome to the Tabyl.