New Forum Integrated Dice Roller

[Farcaster]

You asked for it. Now you've got it! For those of you who may not have seen the discussion in the Suggestion Forum about Play-by-Post Dice Rolling, we have recently added a new feature that allows you to roll just about any dice you can think of and have the results appended to your post. The dice parser understands standard dice notation and can make multiple rolls at one time. It does not yet do success based rolling, but you could still use it to roll the dice and then figure out the successes manually. So, here's how it works...

You may use this tag to roll one or more dice in your post in the format of: [roll=Dice]Action Description[/roll]. The roller understands standard dice expression syntax and always operates left to right. You can roll more than one set of dice at a time by using a semi-colon (;). Ex:

[roll=3d6+4;1d100;2d4*1000;1d4*1d8;1d10/2]Farcaster rolls a bunch of dice for fun[/roll]

Might produce:

Farcaster rolls a bunch of dice for fun: 3d6 (4,6,5 = 15) + 4 = 19
1d100 (63) = 63
2d4 (4,2 = 6) * 1000 = 6000
1d4 (1) * 1d8 (2) = 2
1d10 (8) / 2 = 4

The results are appended in a dice history box at at the bottom of the post, and the action is put in the post like this:

* Farcaster rolls a bunch of dice for fun *

Also, you can simply type "[roll=3d6]Farcaster rolls some dice[/roll]" for example and the parser will automatically fill in an action for you using your name.. Example:

* Farcaster rolls some dice *

If you edit your post, dice are NOT automatically rerolled even if you add or change the dice expressions. You'll now see a checkbox just below the title "Reroll Dice in Post." To have the dice rolled again, you must put a check in that box.

Enjoy!

[Freejack]

* Checking my dice pool *

So, how many successes did I make? Edit: 5 successes, pretty good.



Carl

[fmitchell]

* For reference ... *

Hm, the parser doesn't like "4d3-8" ...

* Here's one example: *

* And another: *

* And yet another: *

* Not even "4d3"? *

* How about "2d6" again? *

[kipling]

It might not like the spaces. I can't see your examples, so I don't know if they have the space.

* here's an example without spaces; don't know if it will work *

[fmitchell]

Hmm ... working now. Either Farcaster did some magic, or I forgot to check the "reroll" box a few times.

* One more roll ... *

Yep.

The point I originally wanted to make is that "4d3-8" is mathematically equivalent to 4dF, for all you Fudge/FATE players.

[Farcaster]

Frank,

Yeah, you do have to check the reroll box (I went back and edited your post and tried it myself). Also, it looks like it doesn't handle spaces well. So for now make sure your expressions don't contain spaces. You can do "4d6-8", but not "4d6 + -8".

[fmitchell]

Also, it looks like it doesn't handle spaces well.

Yeah, the version with spaces was a desperation move, after my original "4d3-8" didn't work. However, I think I put that in after I posted, so that's why it didn't show up the first time.

Hm, it's a shame "number of successes" isn't directly supported. Maybe a notation like 5s(3/10) ... five dice, success chance 3/10 (e.g. 8,9,10 on a d10). But there's also exploding dice, a la NWoD and Shadowrun, and Grimm uses a single d6 where 6 explodes, 1 explodes negatively, and 2-5 are 0 ... so maybe it isn't worth it.

For exploding dice, you could always roll your ordinary number and do a separate roll for possible rerolls (in the order in which they occur, if at all).

[Farcaster]

For success based stuff, I was thinking a notation something like 8d10>6. That would tell the roller to count the number of individual dice that were 7 or above. Theoretically, you could also use this for mass combat situations. For instance, I might want to roll attacks for a bunch of troops and see if any of them scored a hit against a fixed AC, say 14. So, I could write the expression as 15d20+3>=14.

That's not in there yet, of course, but I'd like to add it.

[fmitchell]

Unless you like writing parsers, or that's the last extension you intend to make, I'd suggest a functional syntax instead, e.g. "count(5d10, 8, 10)" to roll 5d10 and count all results between 8 and 10.

If you want to support exploding dice later, you can use the function "count(explode(5d10, 10), 8, 10)" where explode(D, T) returns a list of the original roll D plus additional rolls for each result meeting the target T, recursively.

The default syntax NdX would be syntactic sugar for sum(NdX) ...

Or maybe I'm thinking too much like a functional programmer here.

[boulet]

Or maybe I'm thinking too much like a functional programmer here.

Makes sense to me too. One just have to avoid ambiguous syntax, whatever the choice will be in the end.

[Jonathan Kwiat]

Well good luck with your pseduo-random number generator

that emulates dice.

[InfoStorm]

Now, what are the chances of getting the dice rolling scripts able to be accessed from the live chat room?

[nijineko]

it's all in the wrist... rolling, or typing....

tell you what, jonathan, you get farcaster to try out crystalball lite, and then see what he thinks about duplicating the features on the forum, and then we can talk some more. for that matter, try it out yourself. you might like it.

[Jonathan Kwiat]

Apparently there is need for cystalbalite dice and these dice on the forum.

Ah well, they can even be made in OpenOffice, a spreadsheet application.

[nijineko]

you missed that it is also windows compatible. ^^

and it's not just the dice rolling, or even that it's networkable. or the chat features.... it's the other features that make it so useful. how many dice rollers do you know that have the capability to roll up your random treasure for you? or xp? or even play a choose-your-own-adventure with you? or support event-based adventures? just one-crystalball lite. =D

check it out, then post about it. ^^ in the meantime, i think everyone will enjoy using the built in dice roller that farcaster wrote. i encourage them! for play-by-post, the board dice roller is what is needed. and a very nice feature it is too. i fully support it!