Sidebard next to the tools you already use
Written by the person who makes Sidebard, which is a reason to check every line of it. Where a rival does something better, it says so.
The one-paragraph answer. Sidebard is a Windows program that sits beside a table of people in the same room, listens through a microphone, and offers the DM cards — a monster’s turn, the damage, a rules answer with the SRD passage attached, a map of the room you just described. It is not an online tabletop, it does not hold character sheets, and it does not run your game. If your players are in four different cities, you want a virtual tabletop. If you want something to be the Dungeon Master for you, you want one of the AI game masters. Sidebard is for a DM who is already talking, and would rather not stop.
What Sidebard does not do First, so you can stop reading here if one of these is a dealbreaker.
- No online tabletop. There is no shared canvas your players connect to, no tokens they drag, no fog of war they reveal, no drawing tools, no measuring, no dynamic lighting. Sidebard can put a map on a screen in your room. It cannot put one in front of a player three time zones away.
- No character sheets. Sidebard keeps a party roster — names, hit points, armour class, the handful of modifiers it needs to check a roll, typed in or imported from D&D Beyond. It is not somewhere to level up, manage inventory, track spell slots in detail, or build a character.
- No play-by-post and nothing asynchronous. It works during a session, while people are speaking, and not otherwise.
- Windows only. Windows 10 or 11. No Mac, no Linux, no iPad, no browser version. That is a real limitation and not a coming-soon.
- Not every rule. It answers from the SRD 5.2.1 and quotes the passage. Anything outside the SRD — a class from a hardback, your own house rules, another game system entirely — it will decline rather than invent.
- No marketplace, no modules, no community content. Nothing to buy inside it, nothing to install, no add-on ecosystem.
- Version one. It has been run at a real table and the spoken chain works, but it is new. Some rooms come back as a map you would not have drawn. A noisy table is harder for it than a quiet one.
What it does that the others do not
- It listens at a physical table. No one types anything. You say “fourteen slashing” because you were going to say it anyway, and the hit points come off. Every other tool on this page needs somebody to operate it.
- It offers; it does not act. Everything arrives as a card you accept with space or dismiss with esc. Nothing changes and nothing reaches your players until you press a key. The failure mode of a wrong suggestion is that you ignore it.
- Rules answers carry the passage. A rules card shows the SRD text it came from, so you can read it and disagree with it in the two seconds you have. It declines questions it cannot source.
- It notices things you did not ask for. A monster’s whole turn rolled and waiting when its turn comes round. Concentration remembered. A duration counted down. Nobody clicked anything.
Against virtual tabletops
Roll20, Foundry VTT and Owlbear Rodeo solve a problem Sidebard does not touch: getting people who are not in the same room around the same map. If that is your problem, one of them is the answer and Sidebard is a curiosity.
The table below scrolls sideways — there are four products in it.
| Roll20 | Foundry VTT | Owlbear Rodeo | Sidebard | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best when your table is | Remote or hybrid | Remote or hybrid | Remote, set up in a minute | In one room, talking out loud |
| A shared map your players use | Yes, with tokens and fog | Yes, deeply, plus lighting and modules | Yes, deliberately simple | No. A picture on a screen in your room |
| Character sheets | Yes, many systems | Yes, many systems | Light | No. A party roster only |
| How work gets done | You and your players click and type | You configure it, then click | You drag things | It hears you and offers a card |
| Runs without anyone touching it | No | No | No | Mostly. One keypress to accept |
| Where it runs | Browser | Your own server or their hosting | Browser | Windows 10 or 11 only |
| Roughly what it costs | Free tier; about $5.99–9.99 a month | About $50 once, then you host it | Free tier, paid plans above it | $2, $10 or $20 a month by hours of microphone time |
| How mature it is | Well over a decade | Years, huge module ecosystem | Years, small and stable | Version one |
Prices are theirs to change and were last checked in September 2026 — check their sites before you decide anything on the strength of this row. Roll20, Foundry VTT and Owlbear Rodeo are their owners’ trademarks and none of them are connected with Sidebard.
They can live together. Nothing stops you running your maps in a VTT and having Sidebard listen to the four people sitting with you. They do not talk to each other, though: Sidebard will not push a token into your Roll20 game, and its players’ screen is a web page on your own Wi‑Fi, so a remote player cannot open it.
Against AI game masters
AI Dungeon, DungeonsDeep and the tools like them do something genuinely different: they generate the game. An AI narrates, invents what happens next, and plays the world at you — which is the whole appeal if you want to play without a DM, or on your own at one in the morning.
Sidebard has no opinion about your story unless you press a key to ask for one. It never narrates to your players, it never speaks aloud, and it never decides what happens. The humans at the table make the game; Sidebard does the bookkeeping and the looking-up.
| AI game masters | Sidebard | |
|---|---|---|
| Who runs the game | The AI, or the AI and you together | You. Always you |
| Who it is for | Solo players, or a group without a DM | A DM with players in the room |
| What it produces | Story, prose, the world’s replies | Cards for the DM: hit points, a turn, a rule, a map |
| Do players see its output | Yes, that is the point | Only what you accept, and only a map or a picture |
| Rules | Improvised in the fiction | Quoted from the SRD 5.2.1, or declined |
| Roughly what it costs | About $10–50 a month, by tier | $2, $10 or $20 a month by hours |
To be clear about the AI part
Sidebard is not an AI-free tool and does not pretend to be. It uses speech-to-text to hear the table, and language models to decide what to offer, to draw maps from a description, and to sketch an NPC. What differs is where that sits: it is aimed at the DM, one card at a time, with a key to refuse it — not at your players, and not at the story. It can still be wrong. The design assumption is that it will be, often enough that refusing has to be one keypress.
The privacy policy names every company the audio and the text reach, and what they may keep.
When not to buy Sidebard
- Your table is remote. Buy a VTT. Sidebard has nothing for you.
- You want something to DM for you. Buy one of the AI game masters.
- You are on a Mac. It will not run. There is no date for one.
- You want deep automation, modules and system support. Foundry, and it is not close.
- A microphone is not welcome at your table. That is a completely reasonable position, and most of Sidebard is the microphone.
- You need it to be finished. It is version one. Wait a few months and read what changed.
If none of those apply — if you run a game at a kitchen table and the thing you lose most to is looking something up while five people wait — watch a minute of it working, and then read what a first session looks like before you spend anything.