Virtual Dice: List of the Best 8 iPhone RPG Dice Rolling Apps

We have covered a lot of different dice rolling applications for role-playing games that are available in Apple’s App Store on this site. Over the past year that the app store has been around, these apps have started to fall into two main groups, namely, the Simulation group and the Random Number Generator group.

The Simulation group of apps seek to re-create the look and feel of rolling polyhedral dice. They often have beautiful graphics and sounds and can be quite fully features. The Random Number Generator group, by and large, are only interested in presenting the user with the calculated number of an equation.

We, in our gaming group, have players who prefer one or the other from the various groups, so we are going to do four of each.

Pip Pip is our favourite dice roller, and in the interest of full disclosure, members of our gaming group have beta tested versions of this app. We like the light weight file size, the realism of the rolling and the really simple layout of the app. All you do is add and subtract dice from the ‘table’ and roll away. This app assumes that you are capable of adding the bonuses, etc, yourself to the roll and doesn’t muck about with storing complicated formulas for various rolls.
dynamicDICE Another dice rolling app that we have really liked in our gaming group is dynamicDICE. This app has beautiful graphics (probably the best in this group) and a pretty simple interface. This app also doesn’t need you to add groups of dice together to get the final result. Although the mechanics of adding dice to the table are not as simple as Pip, it is still pretty easy to use in the end. dynamicDICE also allows multiple ‘tables’ and gives you the ability to customize the die and table colour.
The Dicenomicon If you are looking for an app that will allow you to enter extremely complicated formulas and save them, this is your app. Dicenomicon has an incredible scripting engine that allows you to make very complicated die rolls with a single tap of the screen. What is also impressive is that they have added all the obscure dice as well (d30, d24, d16, d14, d7, d5, etc…). It is possible to write up scripts that can generate complete NPC’s in a single roll (although you will need to wait a while for the result…).
Mach Dice This app was one of the first true 3D dice rolling apps, but in many ways it has been surpassed by the previous three. There is no scripting, only the standard 7 die set and a handful of tables. This app is simple and has some nice backgrounds that you can use for the different tables as well.
Quick Roll This is one of the better apps that simply generate random numbers according to a formula that you set. One of the things that we quite like about this app is that you can set numerous rolls that you make frequently and access the results with a single tap of the screen. Quick Roll also allows you to set up multiple characters each with their own set of saved rolls. One of the things that we didn’t like was the way that it uses a pop up message to inform you of a result. We feel that a message on screen that didn’t need another tap to clear would have been better. Overall, this is our preference for this genre of RPG Dice Roller.
d20 Gaming Dice Set Pro This is another great example of a random number generator RPG dice rolling app. The interface is really clean and simple and adding in modifiers is a snap. This app doesn’t allow you to save any of your roll combinations, so if you use a large number on average, you could be doing a lot of data entry. At the end of the day though, we are not sure that this app is worth its asking price.
RPGame DICE This is a very straightforward app. You simply click on the dice that you want rolled, and it adds this to the total. Only three dice at any given time can be selected. While this may be a bit over-simplistic for some, others might appreciate the real-time feedback of this application and the simple results view.
Dice Bag Included because it was the first app and the only dice rolling app for gamers that was available with the launching of Apple’s App store. This is probably the most simple an app can get. You click on a die, it shows the result. No more, no less. The images are simple plastic die images and there is not a lot going on. While this may be seen as the poor man’s dice rolling app, it does have a certain charm. In the end it is free, and worth every penny…