The Timestop D-20 is my favorite piece of gaming gear this year. A clock that tells time and pretends to roll dice. That’s all. It doesn’t need to do more than that. It won’t help me roll better in any Dungeons & Dragons game or other TTRPG, and it can’t replace real dice. The $160 D-20 is 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 RPG players are determined not to trust technology. They are not Luddites. Instead of carrying enough rule books to fill a cargo ship, they bring their laptops to the table. Dice aren’t just a tool for RPGs; they are a symbol. They represent the hobby of social storytelling and the theater of the mind.
I have a metric ton of dice already. The D-20 watch can be seen, perhaps, out of place, if not insulting. I took it to PAX Unplugged, a game convention in Philadelphia, for two days, taking it out for board games and RPGs alike. There had to be one player at the table who always said, “Oh, I have a watch that I use. I roll with this doohickey.”
Some won’t trust you, even though the gentle human running games were too kind to yell at me. But you can tell by the looks you get from strangers that they all wonder if I’m cheating. I was reading the numbers on the clock. Did I really achieve critical success, or was I fooling myself?
That didn’t matter during a session of a modern Cthulhu conspiracy game Delta Green. I’ve never been lucky in games. In three and a half hours, I managed only one roll on the D100. My character, a badass who worked as a claims analyst for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was shot point blank in the chest while trying to destroy an eldritch-powered particle accelerator.. My watch rolled over 86 on my Dodge check. The GM rolled a ten for his damage. I died suddenly. You really should play Delta Green.
The ID-20 doesn’t have the D100’s dice icon, although you can access it using one of two modes accessible via one of the side buttons. Otherwise, it can roll the D4 up through the D20 straight onto the big screen. Watching the little numbers dance for a millisecond before landing on the number is incredibly satisfying.
But the clock won’t work well in most modern RPGs with D&D dice mechanics. I’m a big fan of the post-Powered by the Apocalypse series of story-driven games. I’m currently making a play for The Wildsea with my home team. At PAX, I played a session of CBR+PNKa game designed for one shot using straight dice rolls Blades in the dark. You roll more D6s in that game, looking for a higher score. 1-3 are failures, 4 and 5 result in problematic success, and 6 is pure success. The D-20 clock allows you to roll multiple dice, but to combine them. When you want to roll a pool of dice, you roll over and over again, hoping to remember your results.
Many board games incorporate dice directly into the setting and theme. I played Wyrd Games’ Vagrantsong, a game about restoring humanity to the souls of dead passengers on a ghost train. Vagrantsong refers to dice as “bones,” a term so apt that using a digital dice roller would be anathema.
ID-20 is not a place to represent dice, but it has a heart of its own. It is 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 in a rich, orange light.
Devin Montgomery, the device’s lead designer, told me that the watch should mimic what was worn in the late 1970s when the first D&D box 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 on my arm with its simple loop band hitch.
The most annoying thing about the device is its cost. The metal frame feels premium, but at $160, it’s more than 16 times the cost of your basic set of dice. Other versions without a metal frame will cost around $100. Even that costs something like an old-school Casio with a special case to use.
I ended my PAX Unplugged run short. Poor food choices over the weekend left me with the worst food poisoning of my life. I needed to remove the watch from my wrist to prevent it from catching fire. It’s been a week, I’m still wearing it. It’s a symbol of happiness that I love. And while I’m not a goblin enough to strap my dice bag around my neck, I will randomly roll a D20 around my arm if no one sees me.
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