Dice Roll Editor Screencast

June 17, 2010, John Lammers
Category: EpicTable Development   Tags: , ,

One of my goals for EpicTable is to allow you to play pretty much any RPG you want to play. Part of meeting that goal is supporting rich dice mechanics. If you’re rolling 3d6 or 1d20+5, you can just type that, but many games out there have some pretty interesting dice mechanics that really aren’t practical to enter as text.

Enter the Dice Roll Editor. This editor allows you to build a really wide variety of complex dice rolls. You can save these for easy access later, and ultimately, I’ll integrate the Dice Roll Editor with the Character Sheet Editor, and then you’ll really see something cool. But for now, I’d like to show you how to build a dice roll using the editor.

Actually, I’ll show you how to build several interesting rolls. Here’s a quick catalog:

  1. D&D attack roll (simple sum with modifier)
  2. D&D stat creation roll (“keep 3″ and “reroll 1s”)
  3. World of Darkness “9-again” roll (spawning and success counting)
  4. Don’t Rest Your Head, Discipline/Exhaustion/Madness roll (multiple dice pools of different color, success counting)
  5. My Life with Master roll to “resist the master” with Desperation (multiple dice pools of different die types, “drop 4s”)

I spent some time gathering screenshots, but while a picture may be worth a thousand words, in this case, a video is worth a thousand pictures. So, rather than a horde of screenshots, I have a screencast for you. Let me know what you think. Also, let me know what you think about the length of the screencast too. This one is just over 13 minutes. I have a feeling it should be a little shorter, so some of the later screencasts are apt to be more bite-sized–in the 2-5 minute range.

Credits and Sources: Die images and music by Brennen Reece.