[DitV] Playing in AIM chatroom

[cglasgow]

For those of you not familiar with AIM's die roller syntax for their chatrooms, it works like this:

//roll-diceX-sidesY to roll X dice with Y sides each.

Forex -- "//roll-dice8-sides10" just threw down 8d10.  Voila.

You can see the inconvenience here re: trying to play DitV in such an AIM chatroom.  With that many separate line items for each person's die roll, and then the bidding, well, the lack of a tabletop with dice sitting on it can make it hard to keep track.

Does anybody know of a DitV variant where all the dice are the same size?  Failing that, anybody know how to roll dice of different sizes in one simultaneous pool in AIM chat?   Failing that, a good online die roller site where everybody can see what the rolls were, and allows for DitV-style "throw a handful of dice of many different sizes simultaneously"?

[lumpley]

I do know of such an online die roller. It's freaking awesome. Someone at Story Games made it. I can't ... remember ... who.

Rrg.

Help us out, somebody.

-Vincent

[Dave Cleaver]

I think you're thinking about Graham's dice roller.

http://www.catchyourhare.com/diceroller/

[lumpley]

That's the one! Thanks Dave.

[Darren Hill]

Wow, that is awesome.

[Archer5280]

This actually looks like a great tool for DitV.

Just an FYI, there is an outstanding dice roller at http://invisiblecastle.com/rolldice.py. It's basically the dice roller for OpenRPG with a web front end.

[EarthSea]

Archer5280,

I've actually been looking at OpenRPG but I was having trouble seeing how the mechanics might be made easier.  I guess it's the same problem as in an AIM chatroom: how do you sort, store, and display the dice you've rolled?  The way I thought might work, but it's a little kludgy, would be to copy and paste from the OpenRPG roller and then copy dice from your turns:

Florence: (4d6+4d6).ascending()-> [2,3,4,5,5,6,6,6] = (37)
Eddi: (5d6+4d6).ascending()-> [2,4,4,5,5,5,6,6,6] = (43)
Eddi: Raise with [6,6]             ==>      2,4,4,5,5,5,6 remain
Florence: See with [6,6]         ==>       2,3,4,5,5,6 remain
Florence: Raise with [3,5]       ==>       2,4,5,6 remain

That way you don't loose track of the die you have.  I had problems with adding more dice when the conflict escalates or personal items come into play that add die from a sort ascending stand point.  You can of course just sort them by hand.

I'd be interested in hearing of how people keep three way conflicts and all of this book keeping straight on line.

[Archer5280]

how do you sort, store, and display the dice you've rolled? 

Yeah, that is definitely a problem. In fact, it may be so big of a problem, it could threaten to derail my play-by-post game.

Here is what I'm working on, although I haven't yet tried it in practice:

http://www.pbphouse.com/wiki/doku.php?id=archer:west:conflicttracker

Be sure to scroll down to see the Example.

You really need something like a Wiki technology to do it. (You could use mine! ) It's basically just a table version of what you had above.

[Filip Luszczyk]

I have no experiences with AIM play (I did play via Irc once), but I've been playing DitV via Skype, and I suppose that to some extent my experiences migth apply here.

We've been using Gametable to represent, well, the table (although I'm considering moving to MapTool, as it seems it offers equivalent options and I've been told it's more stable). I've made pogs with numbers from 1 to 10, in four colors. We've been rolling the dice in small batches (we had dice macros for 1-3 dice of every size prepared, so that was one click per roll), and drawing the pogs from the bar to the map after every roll. Everyone had his own color of pogs, so it was instantly obvious who owns which dice. Then, we've been manipulating the pogs on the map like they were dice on a table.

It worked very smoothly (it was even faster than playing DitV with real dice, actually), and it gave us the sense of actually moving the dice around. Comparing it with Irc play, I can't really imagine going back to copying the numbers after every Raise or See.