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.

Virtual Tabletop Surface

I’ve integrated the tabletop “surface” functionality that some of you saw during the demos. This is the surface on which you can move game pieces, dice, etc. Check out the full-sized image (1165×973).

Beyond what I showed in the demo:

• You can create tabletops within tabs in EpicTable, just like you can with maps
• You can use fixed images for the tabletop background, rather than just textures, which is nice for gameboards.
• I added index cards as one of the objects available for use on the tabletop.

Dice (and other things) Panel

I created a dice panel at the bottom of the main screen. It’s actually for a bit more than dice, ultimately. It’s sort of a personal area for each player, analogous to the space you have in front of you at a physical game table. There’s a whole lot more to think about for this area, but for version 1, it holds dice. This is a more natural way to interact with the dice than the gallery-based approach some of you saw during the demo. You can move them around, duplicate them, change their colors. There’s a dice bag that serves as a source for dice, so if you’re playing Spirit of the Century, for instance, you can keep your polyhedral dice in the bag and pull out the Fudge dice.

Portrait Panel Improvements

The portrait panel had some resizing issues when I showed it during the demo. It also had remnants of unfinished features, like health and condition bars. Removing these half-baked features cleaned up the portraits considerably. You can also drag and drop them onto a tabletop surface in addition to the maps.

Character Sheets Queued for Post-Beta

I really want to get EpicTable in the hands of the community, and the character sheet support is the largest remaining task. So, while I’m still committed to character sheets and the character sheet designer, I’m going to wrap up what I’ve got and work on character sheets during the beta. Depending on how the beta goes, and what you folks tell me about what you want, I may release version 1 prior to integrating the character sheet work and provide an upgrade path. Don’t worry—I know the character sheet functionality is important to many of you. It’s important to me too! It continues to be a feature I’m excited about. I just want to get all the useful features already part of EpicTable into people’s hands.

Note: Due to a technical issue, the comments link below is broken. However, the discussion on this is NOT closed. You can join the discussion in the EpicTable forum.

Dogs in the Vineyard, in the words of its creator, is a game in which the characters are “God’s Watchdogs in a West that never quite was.” It’s a really interesting game, well worth the time to check it out for yourself.

In the screenshot above (you can click on that to get a better look), the tabletop shows a Dogs in the Vineyard conflict in progress. In Dogs in the Vineyard, conflict resolution is handled by a roll of the dice followed by a poker-like series of “raising” and “seeing”. The conflict starts with both the player and the GM building a dice pool from traits that are relevant to the conflict. You can see in this example that the player with the gold dice has managed to bring in a d8 to bolster 6d6. The GM, with the dark red dice, has 8d6 to bring to the conflict. Both roll their dice. Now, they take turns raising and seeing. In this example, the player with the gold dice says what his character is doing and puts forward a 4 and an 8 for a total of 12. The GM is unable to match a total of 12 with just two of his dice, so he has to put forward a third die. He puts forward a 5, a 4, and a 3, describing how the NPC responds. This continues until one side gives or is unable to match the raise.

I’ve greatly oversimplified the conflict resolution of Dogs in the Vineyard. It’s a really interesting mechanic, and it has the effect of making a player keep reevaluating just how far he’s willing to take a given conflict. The point, though, from an EpicTable development perspective, is that this is a game that requires more of the tabletop than just a landing spot for the dice. EpicTable supports that with a shared surface that allows you to place and move and roll dice. Along the way, I’ve added some creature comforts like different surface textures. What you see in this screen shot is a light brown distressed leather, which seemed more appropriate to the Western setting than a wooden tabletop. The red and gold dice are (to this colorblind developer’s eyes) matched to the colors of the Dogs’ coats.

If you’re interested in this kind of tailoring of the virtual tabletop to the game, stay tuned. One of my goals for EpicTable is to make it easy for you to create support for the games you want to play. In upcoming posts, I’ll talk about the options you’ll have for creating character sheets, adding your own surface textures, game pieces, etc.

Closing Thoughts

As always, I appreciate any questions and feedback that you have. Please chime in on the forum via the comments link below.

Credits and Sources: Dogs in the Vineyard is a game by D. Vincent Baker. Die images by Brennen Reece. Leather texture from iStockphoto.

In case you’re not familiar with Fudge dice, they’re six-sided dice with two “+”, two “-”, and two blank sides. Rolling four Fudge dice gives you a range from -4 to +4. Fudge is a “rules-light” game system originating in the 1990s. A number of game systems draw upon Fudge in one way or another. For instance, Spirit of the Century, a popular pulp RPG, traces its lineage back to Fudge via FATE.

Take a closer look at the screenshot (which you can do by clicking on it, if you haven’t already).

The speaker is identified

As you’ve seen in other posts, each persona in EpicTable’s roleplay-centric chat is identified by name and icon. In this example, you can see that each dice roll came from the GM.

Color schemes are supported

Here, I’ve played with a number of color schemes. “WhiteSmoke on DarkRed” is my default, and the big roll of d4s uses that scheme. The others used color schemes specified on the roll. I’m not happy about the outline and drop-shadow of the white die. My colorizing algorithm is doing that to high-brightness colors. I have some ideas to prevent it, but haven’t implemented them yet.

Modifiers are displayed.

Most of the examples here don’t use modifiers, but the second roll is a 1d20+6.

The sum of the dice is displayed.

This is handy if you have a large number of dice, like the d4s in this screenshot, or if you’re dropping some of the dice. I’m using the white d6 as the container for the sum of the roll…. I thought it would look cooler than it does.

Dropped dice are X'd out

In My Life with Master for example, you roll d4s and drop 4s. This screenshot shows a “12d4 drop 4s” roll. Notice that the sum does not include the dropped 4s.

Dice wrapping

This was one of those beautiful moments where code you wrote to do one thing drops seamlessly into another context and makes everything better. There was a bug in the line wrapping in the chat window when lots of dice were in play, and the layout code I wrote for the Dice Cup Designer dropped in and fixed everything. Woohoo.

Premise

In Don’t Rest Your Head, you play one of the Awake, insomniacs who have stopped sleeping entirely (they hope) and who have become able to traverse the portals from our world to the Mad City. Your character tries to achieve his goals (tied to what’s keeping him awake) before he falls asleep and becomes meat for the Nightmares of the Mad City.

I have to admit that I haven’t actually gotten a chance to play Don’t Rest Your Head yet, but it’s a bit of a perfect storm for me due to my love of…

• Dark City (think The Matrix with less philosophy and more Clive Barker)
• Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (The series is good; the book phenomenal.)
• the notion that exhaustion can make you supernaturally better at something (I’m rolling black dice most nights working on EpicTable. That might make more sense in a bit….)

Dice Mechanic

The dice mechanic used for conflict resolution in Don’t Rest Your Head fits the theme perfectly. The player rolls a combination of white, black, and red dice.

• White discipline dice reflect the character’s skill and are safe to roll.
• Black exhaustion dice let the player tap into his exhaustion to call upon extraordinary abilities; but it comes at a cost.
• Red madness dice allow the character to exercise overtly supernatural powers, but carry significant risk of the situation spiraling out of control.

The GM rolls pain dice, and when these dice dominate, win or lose, there’s no sunny outcome for the character.

Conflict Resolution

Conflict resolution is along two axes:

1. The person with the highest number of successes (1s, 2s, and 3s) wins the conflict.
2. The pool (discipline, exhaustion, madness, or pain) with the high die value is dominant and shapes the outcome, regardless of whether the character won or lost.

The player has some choice in how many of each color dice are brought to bear in the conflict. More dice means more chances to win the conflict, but more chance of the exhaustion or madness pool dominating the outcome. This creates a really interesting range of outcomes.

Character Creation, Hope, and Despair

The character creation process is also really engaging. Its questionnaire seems inspired by Spirit of the Century, but the result is wholly appropriate to the theme. There’s also an economy of Hope and Despair coins, which seems interesting and somewhat akin to fanmail or action points, but again, done in very thematically appropriate way.

Impact on EpicTable

From an EpicTable perspective, supporting Don’t Rest Your Head means support for mixed-color dice rolls and yet another reason to implement success counting. You can read more about this in my post on EpicTable’s Dice Cup Designer. It also means support for token pools (though my recent foray into Primetime Adventures had already planted that seed).

Closing Thoughts

The first nine pages of Don’t Rest Your Head are available on Evil Hat’s site, and they’re quite possibly the best nine pages of game material I’ve ever read. I can’t wait to play this game, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say once I get the chance. In the meantime, I’m going to grab some black dice and get back to implementing that success counting mechanic for EpicTable….

The dice cup designer won’t be the only way to create a dice roll in EpicTable. If you need a quick d20 or 3d6, there’s no need for the designer. But when you have to put together something really interesting, you can pop this open and build up a dice cup that does just what you need.

Dice Cup Designer In Action

The first screenshot shows the designer with a dice cup for the game, Don’t Rest Your Head (which I’m completely enthralled with—but that’s a topic for another post). As you can see in the screenshot, there are some things still under development. Here’s an annotated version of that same dice cup designer screenshot (click either for their full-size version).

As you click on a die in the lower pane of the designer, a corresponding die is added to the dice cup panel at the top. Hopefully, it’s clear that the dice in the top panel of the designer are to-be-rolled dice. That is, we’re building up a set of dice to roll, not actually rolling them yet. There are dice for all the well-known polyhedral dice, plus a Fudge die.

Dice Color Schemes

You can choose the color of the die to be added, as well as the color of the numbers. This can be totally aesthetic—choosing a color scheme that suits the game or your character. However, you can also use this capability to build dice cups for game mechanics that differentiate dice by color. In this example, I’ve build a dice cup for Don’t Rest Your Head with 3 white dice for discipline, 2 black exhaustion dice, and a single red madness die.

How many choices? I haven’t done the math. There are dozens of pre-defined, named colors that I think may originate from the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) specification. In addition, you can define your own by RGB value.

Special Evaluation Examples

Here are another couple examples. Note that the “Special Evaluation / Finishing” pane is used in both of these to accomplish the special handling needed for the roll.

This one shows a roll for My Life with Master, where the player has invoked the desperation die (the orange d6).

Rolling stats for a d20 character: 4d6, drop the lowest die.

User Experience Questions

Special Handling for Just Some Dice

There are some things that are making me scratch my head a bit from a user experience perspective. Take another look at that My Life with Master dice cup with the orange d6. The special handling clause “drop 4s” only applies to the d4s. My current notion for how to signal that is to let users select multiple dice in the dice cup and apply the “Special Handling” section to just the selected dice. That’s not horrifying, but it’s not apparent in the user interface once you’ve moved on to something else. Another notion would be to turn that textual representation into something more structured—basically, click a clause, and see the corresponding dice light up and the “special handling” selection updated accordingly. That’s a lot of work for something that’s maybe still not that intuitive. If you have suggestions, please let me know.

Evaluation vs. Resolution

Another issue I wonder about is how clear the line is between dice roll evaluation and resolution. The way I think about this, evaluation is anything I can do on the dice in isolation—in other words, doing helpful things like summing or counting or sorting dice. Resolution involves comparing the roll to other characters’ rolls, or to difficulties or targets set by the GM. I don’t want to get into the latter, because it’s very game system specific and situation specific. I don’t want the tool to ever get in the way of the GM, and I think this might be a case where trying to get the tool to do exactly what you want in every situation is more painful than helpful to the GM. Also, I have no interest in actually replacing the need for the rule books. EpicTable is an environment, not a game unto itself.

The Slippery Slope of Success (Counting Successes)

The grey area for me is a roll that where you count successes. For instance, if you’re rolling 12d6 and a success is a 1, 2, or 3 on each die, it’s pretty helpful for EpicTable to count those for you. I really want to do that, but different games have different success targets…and sometimes they change, so I’d need to also allow you to tweak the success target occasionally. There’s the first bit of grey.

The next bit is introduced by games like Don’t Rest Your Head, which evaluates individual dice pools in addition to the dice roll in its entirety. In the example I gave above, the dice cup had 3 discipline dice, 2 exhaustion dice, and 1 madness die. Well, in DRYH, successes are 1, 2, or 3, but it also matters which of those pools has the highest single die result.

For example, if I roll 1, 4, 5 white, 2 and 3 black, and 6 red, I have 3 successes, and the red pool (madness) is dominant, since it had the high roll. I don’t think I want to go that far. Enough games use successes that I really would like to implement something in terms of success counting. Game-specific stuff like dice pool dominance is a step too far, I think, even though it still stops short of resolution (because it hasn’t been compared to the opponent’s roll yet).

Beyond the Dice Cup Designer

So, beyond just building up an ad-hoc dice cup in the designer, what are your options in EpicTable? You may or may not have noticed the little dice cup icons at the top of the EpicTable window in previous EpicTable screenshots. Those represent dice cups that you’ve built and want to keep handy. In addition, EpicTable character sheets will support dice cups that incorporate character attributes. That’s a topic that warrants its own discussion. I’ll talk about how you can create dice cups for EpicTable character sheets in a later post.

Closing Thoughts

As always, I appreciate any questions and feedback that you have. Please chime in on the forum via the comments link below.

Credits: Die images by Brennen Reece.

Dice rolls already implemented in EpicTable

Simple rolls

For example, d4, 2d8, etc. EpicTable supports rolling any number of the following dice: d2 (maybe more properly called a coin), d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, d30, d100, and dF (a Fudge die)

Rolls with modifiers

Example: 1d20+5 or 2d4-1

Drop highest or lowest die

I actually don’t have an example of dropping the highest die, but dropping the lowest is fairly common. For instance, in d20 character creation, you sometimes roll 4d6 and drop the lowest die.

Drop specific values

In My Life with Master, you roll d4s and drop any 4s that come up.

Dice rolls still to-be-implemented in EpicTable

“Open-ended” dice rolls

In Savage Worlds, when you roll the highest number on the die (e.g., a 6 on a d6, an 8 on a d8, and so on), you can roll that die again and add it to the original roll.

“Mixed” dice

For instance, you might roll a d4 and a d6 together.

Specific die rolls

Sometimes a roll calls for a specific die. For instance, My Life with Master uses a different colored die for certain bonuses, and In a Wicked Age distinguishes between the d6 with numbers and the d6 with pips.

Die Selection and Dice Roll Evaluation

I use the term “die selection” to denote the process of selecting those dice that are applicable to the roll. For instance, dropping 4s for a My Life with Master roll and dropping the lowest d6 during d20 character creation are instances of what I’m calling “die selection”.

Dice roll evaluation is the term I use for applying any type of function to the results of the roll. For instance, many games simply sum the dice and add any modifiers to come up with a total. I’ve already implemented this behavior for EpicTable. Other games, like Sorcerer and In a Wicked Age, don’t sum their dice but compare them to other players’ rolls. To make this easier, EpicTable will provide a sort evaluator as an alternative to the sum evaluator.

What about resolution mechanics?

Resolution mechanics are the rules by which the success or failure of the dice roll is determined. For instance, the total might be compared against a target or against another player’s roll, or there might be a die-by-die comparison with another player’s roll. EpicTable is unlikely to include resolution mechanics. There are just so many dice mechanics out there, and so many variables that can go into resolving a roll, that it’s a job best left to the GM.

Where do the dice rolls go?

At this moment, EpicTable sends all dice rolls to the chat window. However, for the sake of secret rolls and for games with unusual dice mechanics, such as Dogs in the Vineyard, I’m likely to implement a dice table–a surface on which the dice can be placed and moved around.

How are dice rolled?

It’s possible to enter a dice roll directly from the chat window by typing “/roll 2d8“, for instance. However, I believe it will be more common for you to roll dice from predefined “dice cups” on your character sheet or by selecting dice on the tabletop and using a key or mouse gesture to roll them.

Call for feedback

That pretty much sums up where things stand with respect to EpicTable and dice. I’d love to hear your feedback. What have I forgotten? What other dice functionality do you need to play your game with EpicTable?