The Timestop D-20 is almost as good as rolling dice in D&D

the Stop time D-20 It’s my favorite piece of gaming gear this year. It’s a watch that tells you time and pretends to roll dice. That’s it. It doesn’t need to do more than that. It won’t help me roll better in any Dungeons & Dragons or other TTRPG, and it can’t replace real dice. the $160 D-20 It’s also an expensive device, limited, and not ideal for every game. Despite all that, I would wear it before any other expensive smartwatch.

Tabletop RPG players are careful not to trust technology. They are not Luddites. Instead of carrying enough rulebooks to fill a freighter, they bring their own laptops to the table. Dice aren’t just an RPG tool; They are a symbol. They represent the hobby’s love of collective storytelling and theater of the mind.

I own a metric ton of dice already. The D-20 might seem strange, if not sacrilegious. I took it on a two-day tour of PAX Unplugged, a gaming conference in Philadelphia, where I exposed it to tabletop games and RPGs alike. I had to be the only player at the table constantly saying, “Oh, I have a watch I’m using. I’m rolling with this doohickey.”

Some wouldn’t trust me, although the nice people running the games were too nice to scold me. But you could tell by the looks I received from strangers that they all wondered if I was cheating. I was reading the numbers from the clock. Was I a huge success or was I just hallucinating?

This didn’t matter during a modern Cthulhu conspiracy game session Delta Green. I haven’t had much luck in gaming. In a three-and-a-half-hour session, I managed just one shot on the D100. My character, a poor guy working as a claims analyst for FEMA, gets shot in the chest while trying to crash an eldritch particle accelerator.. My clock was over 86 when I checked my Dodge. The GM rolls a ten on the damage taken. I was dead in an instant. You really should play Delta Green.

The D-20 does not have the dice symbol of the D100, although you can access it through one of two modes accessed using one of the buttons on the side. Otherwise, he can move D4 up via D20 directly from the main screen. Watching the little numbers dance for a millisecond before landing on the number is very satisfying.

But the clock won’t play well with many modern RPGs that have long-avoided D&D dice mechanics. I’m a big fan of post-apocalyptic systems for story-focused games. I’m currently running a game Wild sea With my home group. At PAX, I played a session CBR + BNKa single-roll game designed with dice mechanics drawn directly from it Blades in the Dark. You roll multiple D6s in that game, looking for the highest score. 1-3 is failure, 4 and 5 lead to success with complications, while 6 is pure success. The D-20 lets you roll multiple dice, but only to add them. If you want to roll a set of dice, roll them repeatedly, hoping you’ll remember your results.

Many board games integrate dice directly into the setting and theme. I’ve played Wyrd games Tramp songA game about bringing humanity back to the souls of dead passengers on a ghost train. Vagrantsong refers to the dice as “bones,” a word so apt that using a digital dice roller would be anathema.

The D-20 is not a dice replacement, but it does contain a dice core. It’s an old school device. It tells you the time and date while the dice roller is always on the screen. There is a button to illuminate the electronic display with a rich orange glow.

Devin Montgomery, the lead designer of the device, told me that the watch is meant to emulate the wearables of the late 1970s when the first D&D boxed sets came on the scene. I love the fact that I never have to worry about charging it like I do Apple Watch Ultra. The watch strap with the D-20 feels secure around my wrist with its simple loop attachment.

What bothers you most about the device is its cost. The metal frame looks premium, but for $160, it’s probably more than 16 times the cost of your basic set of dice. Some versions without the metal frame will cost closer to $100. Even that’s pretty pricey for something that feels like an old-school Casio with a very specific use case.

You’ve finished your short PAX Unplugged run. A poor meal choice over the weekend left me with one of the worst cases of food poisoning of my life. I needed to remove the watch from my wrist to keep it out of the line of fire. It’s been a week, and I continue to wear it. It is a symbol of my favorite hobby. And while I’m not obsessive enough to strap my dice bag around my neck, I will randomly roll a D20 on my wrist when no one’s looking.