RPTools.net

I know this is the most trivial of all maptool functions in terms of everyone uses it, but since the move to the new host there is AFAICT NO place where basic die rolling itself is documented anymore. I wanted to just plain roll some dice and take the highest N dice, but having not ever actually had to do that before I have no recollection of HOW it is done, and amazingly enough there is absolutely no way to find out!

I can go watch a video tutorial, but to be honest that seems pretty awkward as the only documentation for this. Neither the docs on googledocs nor the macro wiki seem to have bothered with this either. Just so basic nobody thought of it.

It was on the main site until the site was a couple days ago.

But you know the good thing about a Wiki, if you see a deficiency you can add something
The wiki depends on people contributing to it.

I'm sure Trevor has the pages for the parser and dicelib. It'd be nice to know what the old one said when writing the new one...

Yeah, I didn't want to just add it in, basically because I don't know that I actually know the correct and complete information. lol. I'd add it in a heartbeat, but what do I add? I'm sure the pages from the original site probably do exist someplace. Maybe on Trevor's hard drive? I don't recall that it was all that complex, but maybe someone with the whole skinny on that can post.

I suspect anyone coming along and wanting to use maptool for the first time would appreciate knowing! The tutorials are great, but as reference material video isn't the greatest, hehe.

I'll try the wayback machine when I get back from the Superbowl party later tonight. I'm not a football fan, so I'll be back by 8PM.

Out of curiosity, is the output of the /help command current?

I don't know about the /help command, but I have updated the wiki with a page on dice rolling that is, as best I can tell, correct.

Holy crap! I didn't know most of those options existed! This changes everything!

By the way, are you going to include secret and gm rolls?

Some questions:

1. Is it possible to keep tallying number of success for increments of a number? For example, SW has raises for values that are increments of 4 above the TN. How could I count the number of raises as successes?
2. How can I assign the number of successes to a variable and/or run IF/SWITCH options off of the number of successes? Essentially, I'd like to have macros that run scripts based on the number of raises.

I don't think there are any built-in functions that count raises. What I did for SW was this:

1. Roll the dice - using, say, 1d8e for a roll (we'll leave the Wild Die out, but that's just a 1d6e roll) and applying all the modifiers as necessary.

2. Get the total from the roll.

3. Subtract 4, and then divide the remainder by 4 (or, if necessary, use a different target number) to get the number of raises.

I have a SW campaign configured to handle that stuff - it does not do any targeting (I could, but I don't feel like it), but it does handle the roll combinations.


As for the /roll and /rollgm stuff, those are actually chat commands, which should probably be a different page.

Edit: and since I'm at it, here's that page.

Ah, thanks. As I suspected, I was only aware of a few of the most common options. This helps a lot.

Hi all,

So the wiki documentation is great but my players and I are trying to figure out how to do multiple rolls on a line, and see what we rolled like

Bob Basic Attack: [1d20+5] Damage: [2d6+7]

would out put something like

Bob Basic Attack: 15+5 = 20 Damage; 2+6+7 = 15

It might not be possible, but when we played the other night using this for the first time everyone was rolling really badly (just happens) and people started saying things like ah are we rolling d10s, and Tristan you should go rewrite their rand function so that it is really random!!! (I assume your just using the java one, and it should be fine.)

Thanks a lot,

Tristan

To find out what you rolled, you can use the [1d20+5] and then hover the mouse over the result. The number is on a light gray background, which means there is a tooltip that will show up if you hover over it for a second. The tooltip will have the details.

Alternatively, you can do [e:1d20+5] and the e: at the beginning is a "roll option" for expanding the results.

Regarding the random number generator, you might want to do a search for that. It was just being discussed last week, and it has come up in the past. It is using a high quality random number generator, according to some folks who have looked at the code and know such things. Several of us have done some pretty extensive testing and the distribution of numbers is correct over large samples. It's pretty easy to write a macro that loops and rolls 10,000 d20s and calculates the average, and it is correct.

The only irregularity I've found is that it sometimes seems "streakier" than my experience with real dice. Proving or disproving that is really hard, since it's, you know, random... At worst it is a very limited and subtle effect, and it might not be true at all. For all practical purposes, as best any of us can calculate, it is working correctly.

I think it is mostly a psychological effect, rather than a real discrepancy. But perception is reality in many cases, so...

Thanks Lindharin,

I figured there was a way, but we just didn't see it when we where playing, but I just tried and it is there.

Oh yeah I assume the random thing is fine. We used to use OpenRPG, and there was a night that I rolled like 10 1's on a 1d4 and got REALLY annoyed, so I started ranting about getting a proper random function out of numerical recipes in C, or any half way decent Monte Carlo book and going in and changing the code.

I mean if some one decides they are not happy with the rand function and wants some help with a new one I can help, but I don't care enough on my own.

Tristan