The Timestop D-20 is my favorite piece of gaming gear this year. It’s a watch that tells the time and pretends to roll dice. That’s it. It doesn’t need to do any more than that. It won’t help me roll better in any game of Dungeons & Dragons or other TTRPG, and it can’t replace real dice. The $160 D-20 is also an expensive, limited device that’s not perfect for every game. Despite all that, I would wear it before any other expensive smartwatch.
Tabletop RPG players are keen not to trust technology. They’re not Luddites. Instead of lugging enough rulebooks to fill a cargo ship, they bring their laptops to the table. Dice aren’t just a tool for RPGs; they’re a symbol. They represent the hobby’s love of communal storytelling and theater of the mind.
I own a metric ton of dice already. The D-20 watch would seem, perhaps, extraneous, if not sacrilegious. I took it around PAX Unplugged, a gaming convention in Philadelphia, for two days, bringing it out for board games and RPGs alike. I had to be the one player at the table who constantly said, “Oh, I have a watch that I’m using. I’m rolling with this doohickey.”
Some won’t trust it, though the gentle folks running games were too kind to chide me. But you can tell by the looks you get from strangers that they all wondered if I was cheating. I was reading off numbers from a watch. Did I really roll a critical success, or was I bullshitting?
That didn’t matter during a session of the modern Cthulhu-conspiracy game Delta Green. I never have great luck in games. In a three and a half-hour session, I succeeded in only a single roll on a D100. My character, a poor sap who worked as a claims analyst for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, got shot point-blank in the chest while trying to smash an eldritch-infused particle accelerator. My watch rolled above an 86 on my Dodge check. The GM rolled a ten on his damage. I was dead in an instant. You really should play Delta Green.
The D-20 doesn’t have a dice icon for a D100, though you can access it through one of the two modes accessible with one of the buttons on the side. Otherwise, it can roll a D4 up through a D20 straight from the main screen. Watching the little numbers dance for a millisecond before landing on a number is incredibly satisfying.
But the watch won’t work well for many modern RPGs with long-eschewed D&D dice mechanics. I’m a big fan of the post-Powered by the Apocalypse systems for story-focused games. I’m currently running a game of The Wildsea with my home group. At PAX, I played a session of CBR+PNK, a game made for one-shots using the dice mechanics pulled straight from Blades in the Dark. You roll multiple D6s in that game, looking for the highest result. A 1-3 is a failure, a 4 and 5 results in a success with complications, whereas a 6 is a pure success. The D-20 watch lets you roll multiple dice, but only to add them up. If you want to roll a dice pool, you roll it repeatedly, hoping you remember your results.
Many board games incorporate dice directly into the setting and theme. I played Wyrd Games’ Vagrantsong, a 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 fitting that using a digital dice roller would be anathema.
The D-20 isn’t a stand-in for dice, but it has the heart of them. It’s an old-school device. It tells you the time and date while the dice roller is always on-screen. There’s a button to illuminate the electronic display in a rich, orange glow.
Devin Montgomery, the device’s lead designer, told me the watch is supposed to emulate the wearables of the late 1970s when the first D&D boxed sets hit the scene. I love the fact that I never have to worry about charging it like my Apple Watch Ultra. The watch band with the D-20 feels secure around my wrist with its simple loop band hitch.
What’s most annoying about the device is its cost. The metallic frame feels premium, but for $160, it’s potentially over 16 times the cost of your basic set of dice. Some versions without the metal frame will cost closer to $100. Even that is pricey for something resembling an old-school Casio with a very specific use case.
I ended my PAX Unplugged run short. A bad choice of meal over the weekend left me wracked with the worst food poisoning of my life. I needed to remove the watch from my wrist to keep it out of the line of fire. A week has passed, and I keep wearing it. It’s a symbol of my favorite hobby. And while I’m not nerd enough to tie my dice bag around my neck, I am to randomly roll a D20 on my wrist when nobody’s looking.
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