Inline Dice Results?

[waysoftheearth]

I don't know if US already supports something like this, but a pretty compelling feature would be inline dice results.

As a PBP ref I tend to roll all the dice and report the result to the players as part of my post -- something like "So and so attacks [1d20=15] and hits, causing [1d6=3] 3 hit points damage." would be typical. I've found this method speeds PBP play along considerably.

But, regardless of who actually rolls, the dicing part is invariably done by "some other system". I.e., not the forum hosting system itself.

A really cool feature to have would be another row of "post formatting buttons", perhaps under the existing dialog, imgurl, ooc, sheet, spoiler, and strike buttons, one for each die. I.e., d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, and d100 buttons.

When clicked, each button would insert a die result of the appropriate kind into the post as it is being written. I.e., clicking the [d6] button would call the US Dice Roller for a result, then insert the result into the post text, already formatted and hyper-linked to the "proof of roll" on the Dice Roller page.

Dice modifiers would be added manually (by the referee) after the fact.

Multiple dice would be rolled by pressing the button multiple times.

This feature, or something like it, would be a huge boon to the PBP ref, as he would no longer need to go off to an external system to perform die rolls.

Thoughts?

[Alethan]

I think there is some merit to the idea, though it might take a bit of work to pull off.

I used to PbP on a DDO guild website. We had a built-in dice roller. One of the problems with it (well... one thing that caused the roll to invalidate) was when someone would go back and try to edit the post with the dice roll in it. They might have been trying to edit something else (not the dice roll), but it caused problems, regardless. The guy who programmed it all had to figure out ways of making sure nobody cheated their dice rolls.

I think he eventually worked the bugs out, but it took a while. And after he passed on control of the board to someone else, the dice roller broke at some point and nobody knew what to do to fix it.

Since the US Dice Roller records all rolls, making sure someone isn't re-rolling dice wouldn't be an issue.

It would be easy enough to tie the dice roll to the person making it, but it might be more difficult to tie that roll to the specific character making the roll (in the US Dice Roller, you have one account, but you build profiles for multiple characters and can tie each character to a specific campaign ID; that way, the person who created the Campaign ID can see all rolls from all characters using that ID).

[waysoftheearth]

From my point of view it isn't important that dice rolls be linked to a particular character.

All I'm looking for is a convenient way to roll dice while authoring posts, without going off to another site.

If the game referee rolls all the dice, then cheating isn't an issue, unless you count referee "fudging" as cheating (which I sometimes do and sometimes don't).

All that would be necessary to ensure no cheating (e.g., by clicking the "d20" button 15 times until you get the result you want, or editing a post after it was first posted) would be to have a "roll count" for each game. Any roll that is not "the next consecutive roll" in this game is automatically suspect, and the game referee can treat it accordingly.

[Alethan]

But most of the games on US do have characters making their own rolls. In fact, at the moment, every game does. So it would have to be taken into consideration.

It is a similar issue, anyway. You'd have to figure out how to tie the roll to the specific game. The rolls do have a counter function on them already, but it is for all rolls; there isn't a different count for each game ID.

[waysoftheearth]

So it sounds like the trick would be modifying US Dice Roller to accept a game id as a parameter.

If that were done, then each game could keep track of its own roll count.

It wouldn't matter who clicked the [d20] button, the result would appear inline in their post, something like this:

[roll d=20 proof=link_to_us_dice_roller_log]13[/dice]

When the post was subsequently rendered, the [roll] tag might be drawn like this:

[Roll 127: d20=13]

or, more succinctly:

[127: d20=13]


Clicking on the "Roll 127" or "127" link would take you to the dice rolling log page for verification.

Meanwhile, everyone can see that if the previous roll was number 125, and this one is number 127, then roll number 126 is unaccounted for. The referee may or may not require an explanation for this anomaly.

[waysoftheearth]

It looks like each game already has a unique id; see here.

I wonder if the dice roller already keeps track of the number of rolls made for each game id somehow?

[ToniXX]

I agree that this would be a great feature. But, it would require HEAVY modification to the forum code. I don't know much at all about writing mods to the forum software, as I don't know PHP (the server-side language that the forum uses)

There seem to be a couple mods already written for this, but they are all old and either support older versions of the forum software or haven't been touched in a couple of years. Plus, any of them are not written for the US dice roller.

Again, a great idea but I don't see it happening here.

[Nuke66]

the current system is fine by me, TY ToniXX

[waysoftheearth]

the current system is fine by me, TY ToniXX

I'm new to these parts, so I don't really know what the "current system" is.

Can you explain how you do now Nuke?

Thanks

[Nuke66]

It's kinda the honor system. Roll, cut and paste to your post.

Never thought about rolling more than once and linking the best result. It is always searchable of course, but would actually require effort on a DM's part to root out any 'powergamers'

[ToniXX]

I wanted to take a moment and explain how I deal with posting and dice rolling at the same time.

First, it's most important that you use a modern web browser that supports tabs. Having multiple tabs open at the same time makes it very easy. So I have the forum open in one tab, and I'm composing a post there. In another tab, I have the dice roller open. I switch to that tab and roll the dice as necessary. I highlight and copy the results, then switch to the forum tab. I paste the roll result that I just copied into my reply, and continue on, repeating for each roll needed. Sometimes I'll open a third tab and pull up someone's PC sheet if I need to.

Note that in all browsers, a quick way to switch from tab to tab is by pressing control-tab. This is similar to pressing alt-tab to switch between applications (and all of this is assuming that you're using a Windows computer, as opposed to a Mac).

What I just outlined may sound stupid and obvious, but if you're not used to using multiple tabs, it may help.

[waysoftheearth]

Yeah, that is pretty much what I have been doing ToniXX, except that I've just been looking at the result on the dice rolling tab, and the manually transposing the result into my posts as "[1d6=5]", or whatever.

Thanks for the explanations.

[AQuebman]

I would also add that the US Dice Roller has had it's own share of slowdown issues etc... and i'd hate to see a deeper connection between the two cause the forums to lag down or cause major issues. Interesting concept in theory and I could see it being done but I think the tabs between the roller and the forums is tolerable for now. At least until we get a PhP whiz on the forums.