If you’re the type of player who constantly shows up to your Dungeons & Dragons campaign without a set of dice, then you may want to look at the Timestop D-20. It’s a beautifully lo-fi watch with three main functions. It tells you the time and the date and—most importantly—it rolls digital dice.
The $160 D-20 watch seems expensive, but it has appeal beyond many other simple digital vintage timepieces. It includes an orange backlight for reading in dim, dungeon light. While it won’t track your mile times, the D-20 does feature the random number generator on the watch face. The D-20 proudly displays the symbols for a D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, and D20, which you swap between with the press of a mechanical switch. For D&D 5E players, you can set it to roll with advantage or disadvantage on the D20. The watch will let you know when your crit succeeds or fails with a small sword icon in the top right corner.
Better yet, it could potentially be useful beyond D&D. There’s an “Advanced Combat Mode” that lets you roll up to 12 dice at once. You can also set it to roll a random number generator for any die up to a D100, so all those Delta Green or Call of Cthulhu players may also want to slap this old-school timepiece to their wrist.
As much as I like the look and function, the D-20 may not be a good choice for my current TRPG, Mythworks The Wildsea, which uses a dice pool system where you try and get the highest number by rolling more D6s. Devin Montgomery, D-20’s lead designer, told Gizmodo over email that he tried similar systems and more for adding modifiers, but found it wasn’t intuitive.
“Advanced Combat Mode just shows the combined total for multi-die rolls,” Montgomery said. “We looked into separating them out and other things like adding modifiers, but found that it made the interface more complex and less intuitive. Each roll takes less than half a second, so when we need to know individual die outcomes for something like Magic Missile, we do three separate rolls. It’s worked well in our campaign.”
In a blog post from September, Montgomery wrote that the project sprung out of a pandemic-era obsession with D&D and electronic tinkering. He went with the segment LCD wristwatch because it was born around the same time TSR released its Dungeons & Dragons book by TSR in 1974.
The first few watch prototypes were housed in 3D-printed shells with ever-shrinking boards and components. The final version has a water-resistant housing with mechanical buttons for selecting die types or changing the time.
Timestop promises a 3-year battery life before you need to replace the CR2025 watch battery housed in the rear. Montgomery said the current firmware is fixed and stable, so at least you won’t have to worry about updating the watch even after years of use.
Despite its very old-school aesthetic, the watch isn’t nearly as cheap as some vintage $20 Casio you can find online. The base black resin model costs $100, but the special orange version costs $120. For stainless steel, you’ll need to fork over $160. The stainless steel version is currently available, but the cheaper models won’t start shipping until January next year. As of writing, the original 1,000-unit run of the metal watch may sell out soon. If you can wait until January, I suggest opting for the cheaper black resin model. With black plastic, you’ll at least feel like you’re handling a real D20.
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