What's New: Saved Dice Lists, Automatic Saving, and Where Your Numbers Come From
DnD Dice Roller has had its biggest update since it launched. You can now keep your dice lines on an account instead of in one browser, the save button is gone because the site saves as you go, and you can choose where your random numbers actually come from.
Here is what changed and how to use it.
Your dice lines can follow you now
The roller has always remembered your lines. The catch was that it remembered them in one browser. Set up your character on a laptop and your phone knew nothing about it.
There is now an optional account. Sign in and your dice lines are saved to it, so the same setup is waiting on any browser you sign in from.
You can keep up to 10 named lists. That is enough to hold a list per character, plus a few for the monsters you run.
- Name a list by typing in the box at the top of the roller
- Switch lists with the arrow on the right of that box
- Start a new one with the + on the left
There is also an entry called Local Browser. That is the old behaviour, kept: dice lines stored in the browser you are using and never sent anywhere. It is always available, signed in or not, and it stays separate from your account lists.
One thing worth knowing about Local Browser. It belongs to the browser, not the computer. Chrome and Safari on the same laptop keep separate lines, which is why it is not called "this device".
The save button is gone
There is no save button any more, because there is nothing to press. Change a line and it is saved. Rename a list and it is saved. Nothing announces it and nothing asks you to confirm.
This was the most common thing people got wrong. A carefully built set of lines, a closed tab, and no idea that a button somewhere had to be pressed first.
If you would rather nothing was saved at all, open the site in a private or incognito window. Everything works exactly the same, and it is all forgotten when you close the window. That is the cleanest way to use the roller on a shared or borrowed computer.
You will also find Backup and Transfer on the Settings page. It exports your lines and your roll log to a file, and imports them again. Useful for moving between browsers, or for keeping a copy of a setup you spent time on.
Deleting a list
There is no delete button either, and that is deliberate. A list with nothing in it is not a list, so removing the last line is how you throw one away. The roller asks first, and names the list it is about to remove.
Where your random numbers come from
Every dice roller has to get its randomness from somewhere, and most never tell you where. This one now does, and lets you choose.
Secure Enclave is the default. Your device's own cryptographic random number generator, the same one used for security work in the browser. It is instant, it works offline, and it is genuinely random. For rolling dice it is more than good enough.
NIST Randomness Beacon is the other option. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology publishes a fresh, cryptographically signed random value every minute, in public. Roll on it and every result shows the exact pulse it came from, with a link to NIST's own record of that pulse.
The difference is not that one is "more random". It is that the beacon is verifiable. You can check, afterwards and independently, that a roll came from a value published before the roll happened. Nobody has to take anybody's word for it, including ours.
Whichever you pick, the roller tells you which one produced the number you are looking at. It never silently falls back to something else without saying so.
You can switch between them on the Settings page, under Dice Randomness.
Smaller things
- Appearance settings follow your account too, so your colour scheme and day or night mode arrive with you
- Long dice list names are capped so they cannot spill out of the box
- The dice roll log and the roller sit on the same page as always, with no layout changes to relearn
Nothing was taken away
Everything the roller did before, it still does. No sign-in is required to use it, no feature moved behind an account, and the free roller is the same free roller. The account is there if keeping your lines is useful to you, and ignoring it costs you nothing.
Roll well.