iPhone: Dice Bag

[bryant]

rob_donoghue noted the existence of a dice roller app for the iPhone, and lo, it is true: there is Dice Bag. Here is a short review.

First, the interface is as follows.



Your die rolling options are literally what you see: 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 1d10, 1d12, 1d20, 1d100, 3d6, and 4d6 drop the highest. (I'm assuming. A better icon for that would have been to make the other dice showing fives, and cross out the die showing a six.) You press the screen at the die type you want, there's a dice rolling sound, and the result appears in the lower right corner.

The info button (i) gives you an info screen informing you that it's called Dice Bag and Jeff LaMarche wrote it.

So limited and bare bones. But it does roll dice, so it's gonna keep living on my iPhone. Also, I dig the icons considerably.

What would make this rock a lot: one tap = roll the dice. Double tap = bring up a little config screen, which provides configuration.

"I would like to roll 6d6, and please count the number of dice that beat a four. Sixes add and roll over."

"I would like to roll 5d10, and keep the three highest."

What do you have to cover? FUDGE, Hero, Shadowrun, a couple of flavors of World of Darkness, L5R, Cinematic Unisystem. Should be doable with some decent UI work.

Comments

[bryant]

Alas no. Also a flaw. I mean, if I'm rolling up a character I don't necessarily care if my 8 was a 6, 1, 1 as opposed to a 4, 3, 1, so not a major flaw, but still.

(Does anyone actually /do/ that any more?)

[kodi]

I'm more concerned about "I seem to have rolled a 4 on 3d6 - did I accidentally roll d20 instead?" I don't need to know what values each die rolled, but it's really handy to get feedback about what selection I made, since a 4 can come up on any of the available selections.

[bryant]

Ah! The color of the roll changes to match the color of the die.

[head58.livejournal.com]

For some games like Savage Worlds the individual rolls are actually what you look for, not the total. You'd need to work that out in your config screen, yeah.

[bryant]

I think it's better to collapse if possible. E.g., for Hero, you need to know how many dice rolled sixes and ones as well as the total value -- but you can collapse all that down to "34 damage, 6 killing."

[head58.livejournal.com]

In Savage Worlds (which is on my mind because I've been listening to Agon podcasts) you need the highest die, and you also need to know if any of the other dice is the highest value possible, so that it might explode.

hmm, you'd also need to have mixed dice pools. Like 2d8 and 3d6 at the same time. And what I'm saying above is if you got an 8 on one of the d8s you'd also want to know if you got a 6 on the d6s, because that could explode and be higher than your 8 in the long run. That could get complex in the coding and need a special app just for SW dice.

Some things are, I think, just easier with small chunks of plastic.

[bryant]

Yeah; conceptually, though, you do that as:

1. Roll all dice.
2. Explode dice at max value.
3. Report the highest number (preferably with breakdowns, cause people get curious).

So 1d6 + 1d8:

Original roll: 6, 5
Reroll the 6, get a 4
New roll: 10, 5
Report: "10 (6 + 4)"

Check out the PocketDice link I posted -- it's pretty normal for die rollers to handle that kind of special casing. You gotta do "reroll max value rolls and add" for, oh... Feng Shui, Savage Worlds, and Shadowrun off the top of my head.