The Virtual Dice Tray is a standalone Windows application designed to be a better set of polyhedral dice than real polyhedral dice. Let's look at some screen shots.

This shot shows a "dice bag" file for one of my many never-played characters (a psychic warrior, I think). As a standard document-view Windows application, the Virtual Dice Tray can save dice "documents" for reuse later. This, I think, is one of the major features that separates it from other dice applications I've seen around the net.

Dark-colored dice are drawn with white text for readability. The Dice Tray natively supports d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20 and d%. Dice with any arbitrary number of sides can be created by hacking the saved dice bag files, as detailed in the Advanced Hacks section of tips and tricks.

Dice are dragged from the toolbar on the right onto the main "tray" area. Several colors are installed with the application, and more can be added. The background color can also be modified to give each dice bag file its own color.

Labels and modifiers can be edited directly in the UI, or through a Properties dialog. The toolbar also features increment and decrement buttons for changing multiple modifiers by the same amount. For instance, if bardic music gives your character +1 to attack and damage, you can select all your to hit and damage dice and add 1 to each with a single click.

The Dice Tray is also useful for DMs. Here I have a file with many PC skills a DM might commonly want to roll in secret. Need the whole party to roll Spot checks? No problem. Click-and-drag in the tray area to select a group of dice. Use Shift-drag or Ctrl-drag to add extra dice to the selection, if necessary. Roll from menu, context menu, toolbar button, enter key or space bar. Floating text labels can be used to indicate what the groups of dice represent.

Once added to the tray, dice can be moved around by simply clicking and dragging. Dice being moved snap to nearby dice so they stay nice and neat.

As mentioned above, the modifiers can be edited in place. The labels can be edited in a similar fashion.

Dice can be grouped together by dropping them on each other or with the Group toolbar button. Groups of dice can be modified like single dice, and can also be set to ignore the lowest number for rolling character stats.

What do the users say?

• I use your Virtual Dice tray exclusively when gaming; it has been a real timesaver at the table. I’ve been singing the praises of your program since I came across it.
  - Brian P. Bobko
• We just had our third session, and I'm finding that my DM round during combat has been so very streamlined and simplified that I don't know how I'll ever DM without Virtual Dice Tray. After seeing how well VDT worked, a few of my players are going to start tracking their character stuff on a laptop. You've got a really kick-ass program here!
  - Dan Comstock
• I play D&D with a group that includes a DM with advanced degrees in both computer science and pure mathematics, as well as several other friends with superior math skills. I am, shall we say, mathematically challenged, and it takes me much longer to mentally calculate the die rolls for something like power attack. I downloaded VDT 1.0 and set up a dice bag for attacking with my character's primary weapon at different levels of power attack. Imagine my friends' surprise when I was suddenly able to instantly calculate precise attack rolls and damage results for four attacks per round this past weekend!
  - Joe Goss

How much can the new Virtual Dice Tray do during actual game play? How about tracking everything you need during an encounter with a complicated CR 13 monster?

Thanks to Dan Comstock for the sample dice file, created using the second beta release.