I have over 200 sets of dice sitting on my shelves. Some of them cost me £30 a set. I’m a dice goblin, and I’m proud of it. And for years, running games as a professional GM almost entirely online, I couldn’t use a single one of them. That’s the ache. It’s not even about clicking a button on a built-in digital roller instead of typing a number, that’s quick enough, but it always feels a bit soulless, like handing your luck over to a machine instead of trusting it to your own hands. Meanwhile my dice sit there, calling my name, while every game I run happens through a screen.
That’s the itch a growing number of tools are now trying to scratch, from a couple of different directions. Bluetooth dice like Pixels chase it by building the sensor straight into the die itself, so it reports its own roll without a camera involved. Webcam and computer vision software takes the other route, watching you roll your actual dice and reading the result straight into your game. No clicking a button, no handing your luck over to a machine standing in for the real thing. One early example, a Foundry and Discord app called RollSight, launched recently doing exactly this. I tried an early version of something similar myself, months into building Dice Link, and honestly it stung a bit at the time, we’d been at this for the better part of a year. But it’s a good sign for the category as a whole, not a competition to fret over. It means the industry has quietly decided that physical dice are worth building software around, not something online play just has to give up.
Why the ritual actually matters
If you play or run games in person, you already know this without needing it explained: a die that lands badly gets picked up, given a stern look, and occasionally put in time out. You can’t do that to a random number generator. The tactile, slightly superstitious relationship players have with their own dice is a real part of the hobby, and it’s one hybrid and online play has quietly asked people to give up for the sake of convenience.
Not that the fully digital side is worthless, far from it. I will never miss doing the maths myself when my sorcerer’s player decides that upcasting fireball in a small room is a great idea. That kind of automatic calculation is genuinely useful, and it’s exactly where a tool like Dice Link wants to sit: read the physical roll, then let the software handle turning 8d6 of fire damage into a number in Foundry, without you reaching for a calculator or your dice bag becoming decorative.
What we’re actually building towards
Speed and accuracy are the two things we’re chasing hard. The honest goal is a near-instant read at something close to 99.99% accuracy. We know that’s a bit of a pipe dream in practice, but aiming high tends to get you further than aiming safe.
Discord support, which RollSight is also leaning into early, feels like a smart call, and one we’d happily borrow with pride. A lot of online play happens as theatre of the mind rather than on a full VTT map, and that’s a huge, slightly underserved corner of the hobby worth building for properly rather than treating as an afterthought.
Where things actually stand
The Dice Link app itself is mostly built, a few gremlins left to hunt down, and our computer vision lead has started work on the recognition engine, the part that actually reads the dice. We’re already working through thousands of training photos, and building towards a system that keeps improving the more people use it. We’re aiming to launch our Kickstarter in 2027.
None of this is really about who gets there first. It’s about a hobby quietly deciding that the parts worth keeping, the weight of a die in your hand, the small superstitions, the sets you’ve collected because you liked them, shouldn’t be the cost of playing with people who aren’t in the room with you. If you’ve been holding onto your dice bag out of stubbornness while the rest of your game moved online, that stubbornness is about to start paying off.
If you have something to add to this, come along and join the conversation over on Discord.
