I've Been Playing for 30 Years, and These Are the Dungeons & Dragons Accessories I'd Use on Game Night

Chessex has been making D&D accessories for a long time now, and the Pound 'o' Dice is probably its best deal. For just 20 bucks you can get 100 dice to start your collection. These are considered to be factory seconds, and don't come in full-color sets, but they're perfectly good dice to use in any game, especially at this price.
If you are looking for something a little fancier you can always try the Wiz Dice Cup of Wonder, a 35 dice set (seven sets of five) that has a dice shaker and mimic box included. 

We've all had this problem: You're walking down the round, and suddenly someone is challenging you to a game of D&D. You can't just say no, but you also don't have any dice to make the right choices. Well, Rolacrit has devised a new way to help you prepare. They're called spell component dice, and they come in the most used spell varieties. You have the standard seven dice set, but there's also a set of 9D4 for Magic Missile, 8D6 for Fireball and 9D8 for Cure Wounds. Each dice set is contained in a small capsule that can hang off your keys with a little clip. That means no matter what kind of surprise D&D action is happening, you'll be ready to sling some dice and make a difference.

D&D Beyond is a companion app for playing the game in the physical world and our top pick for best online D&D tools. In it, you can create up to six characters for your Fifth Edition games, and purchase digital copies of your favorite companion books. You can also access most of the basic rules and spells for free to help you get started on the game.

There are several levels of subscription too, if you want to up your game. The Master Tier -- $5 a month ($30 for six months or $55 annually) allows you to share features from sourcebooks and adventure books with your entire group, rather than requiring everyone to buy their own copy and it's the one we recommend.

D&D is a traveling game. Unless you are the forever DM (sorry if you are), you are likely going to different people's houses to play, and you need to take your stuff with you. Like its namesake from D&D, the Bag of Holding can carry way more than it looks like it should and make traveling to your game way easier. 
There was room enough for six books, my laptop, minis and a ton of dice. There was even room for a bottle of water and a game mat on the side. The bag is full of little pockets and hidey holes to help organize everything. It's not the cheapest addition to your gaming experience, but it is an excellent one.

If you're the kind of D&D player who loves writing an in-depth backstory, takes careful notes during each session and enjoys a well-organized character sheet, the Field Notes 5E Journal was made specifically for you in mind. These small notebooks take everything that makes a normal Field Notes journal great, with its simple yet portable design, and they add character sheets and designated pages for inventory and notes you can keep as a single campaign journal.

As someone who plays multiple games with different groups of friends, I find these journals super helpful for keeping my character organized. There's even a journal for Game Masters with extra details to make running the game easier as well.

Let me start by saying that these are an indulgence, but one I have fallen in love with. There are two parts to these connected dice; you'll need both to make it work. First is the Go Dice ($100), a set of D6s that can be controlled by an app on your phone. The second is the RPG bundle listed here. This lets you put five of the dice inside a polyhedral case -- the last D6 doesn't need a case; it's already a D6 -- and the app recognizes them as a D20, D8 and so on.

The coolest part of this is that the APP connects directly to Discord, Roll 20, and FoundryVT, so you can roll the physical dice and see the result in your digital game. One of the things I miss most about playing on a virtual tabletop is the physicality of rolling the dice, and these dice bring it all back.

Theater of the mind is a fun concept but it's a hard sell when your spells require you to know exactly how many feet away a target is in any given direction. Having a good battle mat can make it a lot easier to imagine the course of a battle or the layout of a town. This set comes with several maps with imagery on them to better set the scene and some handy clips to stop the mat from rolling up. It also has dry-erase markers so you can sketch on top of it.
There are three maps in the set, each with a scene or blank space on either side as well as a grid pattern to easily measure the 5-foot spaces between characters.

Any resin 3D printer is going to give you excellent miniatures for your D&D game. The details are fantastic and it takes very little time to print six to eight minis in one go. If you don't know where to find models I would recommend MZ4250's patreon page where for as little as $1 a month you can access hundreds of 3D printable mini files or, if you want something more bespoke you can try Hero Forge, an online mini generator. Hero Forge lets you buy the physical minis or have the STL to print for yourself.

If you are looking to build larger set pieces then check out our best 3D printers for even more choices.

When you reach later levels of a campaign, the conditions on your characters and monsters start to stack. Sleep, blind and "on fire" are just some of the conditions that can occur regularly. These color-coded rings sit around a standard mini base and make it easy to see which condition each character is suffering from. 
I really like this particular set as it has blank rings and a white marker so you can create your own conditions and the box has a color key so you can see what each condition is at a glance. This is especially helpful when you're stacking rings on top of each other. 

If your games are more traditional and you don't use D&D beyond then you might need a case to take with you to your GM's house. This neat folio case has room for your dice, minis, a Player's Handbook and your character sheet. The character sheet storage is especially helpful as it has a clear plastic cover you can mark with a dry-erase marker. This makes it easy to mark temporary hit point loss and other non-permanent conditions.