When you watch a polished actual-play broadcast, the thing that makes it feel alive is rarely the camera. It is the layer of information floating over the table: dice tumbling across the screen, a chat feed scrolling by, character portraits glowing as each player speaks. These are overlays, and they are the difference between a webcam pointed at some friends and a stream that holds an audience.
The good news is that you do not have to design or build any of this yourself. Mini Kraken generates three overlays straight from your live campaign, ready to drop into OBS Studio as Browser Sources. This article looks at each one — what it does, why it helps, and how to get the most out of it.
A roleplaying session is mostly conversation, and conversation alone is hard to watch. Overlays solve that by surfacing the hidden, dramatic parts of the game so your audience can follow along:
Crucially, all three of Mini Kraken's overlays are driven by your real table in real time. You do not animate anything by hand. You play, and the overlays react. You will find them all in your campaign's overview, under the Overlays OBS section — each with simple toggles and a one-click copy button for its URL.
This is the showpiece. The dice overlay is a fully transparent screen that animates every roll in your campaign in real 3D, tumbling physics and all. Drop its URL into a Browser Source in OBS, and from then on, each time someone at the table rolls, the dice spill across your stream a moment later.
The detail that makes it special: each roll uses the dice skin of the person who rolled it. If one player runs a galaxy skin and another a molten-metal one, your viewers see that personality on screen, roll after roll. It quietly reinforces who is doing what, and it looks fantastic.
You also get an optional result display. By default the overlay just shows the dice, but you can choose to stamp the total on screen when they settle — a big centered number in the dramatic "Baldur's Gate" style, or a smaller, subtler one along the bottom. Centered totals are great for big climactic moments; many streamers leave the number off for a cleaner look and let the dice speak for themselves.
How to use it well: place this overlay across the full canvas so dice have room to tumble. Because it is transparent, it layers cleanly over a map or webcam without blocking anything important for long — the dice appear, resolve, and fade out of the way.
The chat overlay is a clean, read-only feed of your table's messages, designed to sit quietly in a corner and keep your audience in the loop. It is one of the most flexible overlays, with settings you will want to match to your layout:
How to use it well: decide what job you want chat to do. If you are also running the dice overlay, consider turning off rolls in the chat to avoid showing every result twice. If your table shares a lot of images and clues, leave attachments on so viewers can see what the players see. And if you want a minimal look, a short message count with a gentle fade keeps things clean.
This one adds a surprising amount of warmth. The voice overlay shows each player's character portrait, and lights up — with a little bounce — whoever is currently speaking. Quiet players dim slightly, so attention naturally follows the conversation. It is the same idea you have seen on many streams, but tied directly to your campaign's characters.
There is one requirement worth stating plainly: this overlay works through Discord. Your group needs to be in a Discord voice channel, and someone at the table must have the Mini Kraken Activity open inside that channel. That connection is what tells the overlay who is talking. If your table does not use Discord voice, the dice and chat overlays still work perfectly on their own — this one is simply an extra you can add when it fits.
You can shape it to your layout: arrange portraits in a horizontal row or a vertical column, change their size, toggle the name labels on or off, and adjust how strongly silent players dim.
How to use it well: a horizontal row along the bottom edge is the classic, readable choice and rarely gets in the way. Keep the portraits large enough to recognize but small enough to leave the scene uncluttered. The dimming is the magic — a moderate setting makes the active speaker pop without making the quiet players vanish.
You do not have to use all three, and you certainly do not have to add them all at once. A clean starter setup is just the dice overlay plus the chat overlay — already enough to make a session genuinely watchable. Add the reactive voice overlay later, once your Discord setup is in place and you are comfortable.
When you do combine them, think about overlap. Let the dice own the center of the screen, tuck chat into a corner, and run the voice portraits along an edge. Because every overlay is transparent and driven live, they coexist happily and need no babysitting once placed.
The point of a good overlay is to vanish into the experience. Your viewers should not think "nice chat widget" — they should feel the tension of a roll, recognize who just spoke, and follow the story without effort. That is exactly what these three overlays are built to do, and the work to set them up is a one-time job, not a per-session chore.
Set them up once, and from then on you are free to do the only thing that actually matters on an RPG stream: play a great game with your friends, and let the dice decide the rest.