Dice tower

What a tower is for

A dice tower is a box with baffles in it. Dice go in the top, hit the baffles on the way down and drop into a tray at the bottom. Nobody at the table can set a die, nudge one, or claim a roll that hopped off the edge of the board and landed under a chair. The tower takes the argument out of the roll, which is why heavy war games and long campaign nights tend to grow one.

The other reason is noise. A tower makes a satisfying racket, and a table that can hear a roll is a table that knows a roll happened. That is a small thing until somebody quietly rerolls, and then it is not.

Drawn first, then dropped

This tower works back to front from a real one and ends up in the same place. The faces come first, from the browser's cryptographic random number generator, so every die really is one in six and no amount of watching the animation tells you anything. The fall is then simulated from a seed and replayed, and the dice that come to rest in the tray are painted with the faces that were drawn.

That means the tumble is decoration, and it is honest decoration: the collisions are real, the same seed always falls the same way, and the number you read is never adjusted after the fact. If you would rather skip the fall entirely, turn on reduced motion in your operating system and the dice appear in the tray at once.

On one device, at one table

Put the phone or tablet in the middle, press Space or the big button, and everyone reads the tray. There is no room to join, no code to type and nobody to sign in as. Your dice count and whether the sound is on stay in this browser, and the last ten rolls stay there too, so a reload does not lose the run of the game.

For a plain roll with more dice and more sides, use the dice roller, and for pools with modifiers, successes and rerolls the dice pool takes the notation. For something that has to come out of a bag rather than a tower, the bag of tokens does draws without replacement, which dice cannot do.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.tower.count and pph.tower.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.