Timestop D-20 is about as good as Rolling Dice in D&D

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

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

I already own a metric ton of dice. The D-20 watch would seem perhaps sidelined, if not blasphemous. I took it to PAX Unplugged, a gaming convention in Philadelphia, for two days, demoing it for both tabletop and role-playing games. I had to be the one player at the table who was constantly saying, “Oh, I have a watch that I use. I roll with that doohickey.

Some will not trust him, though the gentle people who conduct the games were too kind to rebuke me. But you can tell by the looks you get from strangers that they were all wondering if I was cheating. I was reading numbers from a watch. Was I really a critical success, or was I wrong?

That didn’t matter during a session of the modern Cthulhu conspiracy game Delta Green. I never have much luck in games. In a three-and-a-half-hour session, I managed just one throw of the D100. My character, a wretch who worked as a claims analyst for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was shot point-blank in the chest while trying to break up a particle accelerator that had entered a horror. My clock rolled over 86 on the Dodge check. The GM rolls a ten for his damage. I was dead in an instant. You really have to play Delta Green.

The D-20 doesn’t have the D100’s dice icon, although you can access it via one of two modes accessed by one of the buttons on the side. Otherwise, it can scroll D4 up through D20 right from the main screen. Watching the tiny numbers dance for a millisecond before landing on a number is incredibly satisfying.

But the clock won’t work well for many modern RPGs with long-shunned D&D dice mechanics. I’m a big fan of post-Powered by the Apocalypse systems for story-focused games. I’m currently running a game on The wild sea with my home group. At PAX I played a session of CBR+PNKa game built for one-shots using dice mechanics pulled straight from Blades in the Dark. You roll multiple D6s in this game looking for the highest score. 1-3 is failure, 4 and 5 result in success with complications, while 6 is pure success. The D-20 clock allows you to roll multiple dice, but only to add them up. If you want to roll the dice, roll it repeatedly, hoping to remember your results.

Many board games incorporate dice directly into the setting and theme. I played Wyrd Games’ Vagrantsonga game about returning humanity to the souls of dead passengers on a ghost train. Vagrantsong calls the dice “bones,” a word so apt that using a digital dice roller would be anathema.

D-20 is not a substitute for dice, but it has the heart of them. This is an old school device. It tells you the time and date while the dice roll is always on the screen. There is a button to illuminate the electronic display in a rich, orange light.

Devin Montgomery, the device’s lead designer, told me the watch was meant to emulate the wearables of the late 1970s, when the first boxed D&D sets hit the scene. I love the fact that I never have to worry about charging it as mine Apple Watch Ultra. The D-20 watch strap feels secure around my wrist with its simple band clasp.

The most irritating thing about the device is its price. The metal frame looks premium, but at $160 it’s potentially over 16 times the price of your basic dice set. Some versions without a metal frame will cost closer to $100. Even that is expensive for something resembling an old-school Casio with a very specific use case.

I broke my PAX Unplugged. A poor food choice over the weekend left me with the worst food poisoning of my life. I had to take the watch off my wrist to keep it out of the line of fire. It’s been a week and I’m still wearing it. It is a symbol of my favorite hobby. And while I’m not geeky enough to strap my dice bag around my neck, I have to randomly roll a D20 on my wrist when no one is looking.