Dice Roller

:discourse2: Summary Dice Roller adds a well-featured dice roller to your Discourse posts, for your forum-based game needs!
:hammer_and_wrench: Repository Link https://github.com/discourse/discourse-dice
:open_book: New to Discourse Themes? Beginnerā€™s guide to using Discourse Themes

Install this theme component

:information_source: Admins: Consider disabling the discourse narrative bot disable public replies setting after installing, as this theme component entirely supersedes the botā€™s dice rolling behavior.

:game_die: Basic Usage

The theme component interprets rolls formatted as [wrap=dice].

[wrap=dice]d20[/wrap]
[wrap=dice]d100[/wrap]
[wrap=dice]2d6[/wrap]

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You can roll multiple dice of the same type, apply additive modifiers, and automatically check the result against a success threshold:

[wrap=dice]2d6+3t12[/wrap]

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:woman_scientist: Advanced Features: Crits, Split Rolls

You can specify specific natural rolls to be treated as ā€œcritical hitsā€ with the crit= option. Critical hits are checked before the additive modifier.

[wrap=dice crit=1,100]1d100[/wrap]
[wrap=dice crit=1,20]d20+3[/wrap]

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If particular crit values are notable on your forum, an admin can add extra CSS to emphasize them. In this example, crits that roll a 1 are colored in red.

If youā€™re allowing multiple rolls to be checked against the same threshold, you can add the i Individual modifier in conjunction with t Thresholds. The number of successful dice that passed the threshold will be summarized at the end.

[wrap=dice]5d100t60i[/wrap]
[wrap=dice]3d20-5t0i[/wrap]

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:information_source: Currently, the pre-modifier rolls are shown. This may change in the future depending on feedback.

:no_entry: Restrictions

To avoid griefing with large post bodies, a maximum number of dice per roll is available in the theme settings for the admin to adjust. The default is 80 dice.

0-sided and 1-sided dice are not allowed. Rolling 0 dice is not allowed, and dice with more than ~67 million faces are not allowed for performance reasons.

:gear: Technical Details, and Cheating

Rolls are calculated in JavaScript using a RNG seeded by the postā€™s ID and creation timestamp, going in order through the post body. Roll values are not visible before the post is created.

Several special formatting styles are applied to rolls, to distinguish them from normal text in posts. This doesnā€™t stop people from posting images!

Roll values are not saved in the post body automatically. This presents a problem for archival needs. Solutions to this will require use of a plugin.

If you need to edit additional die rolls into your post, they must be added at the bottom to preserve the results of all previous rolls. Adding new die rolls at the top of a post will randomize the results of all the rolls. For this reason, having any erroneous rolls in a post will prevent all subsequent rolls from functioning.
The composer preview will tell you if your dice specification is :game_die: correct or :warning: erroneous.

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While these measures can help prevent accidental cheating, a determined cheater can try to predict when they should submit their post. If youā€™re considering this for anything valuable, have a trusted user who cannot receive the reward author the post, or use an independent source like https://random.org , which offers paid services for auditable drawings and raffles.

Remember to have fun!

Settings

Name Description
max dice
Translation Default
dice.result.success_count.one (%{count} Success)
dice.result.success_count.other (%{count} Successes)
dice.excessive.quantity.one Excessive dice quantity (max %{count})
dice.excessive.quantity.other Excessive dice quantity (max %{count})
dice.excessive.faces Number of die faces cannot exceed 67,000,000
dice.missing.faces Invalid die specification: missing number of faces
dice.invalid.generic Invalid die specification. Format: 2d20+3
dice.invalid.quantity Number of dice cannot be 0
dice.invalid.faces Number of die faces cannot be 0 or 1
dice.invalid.modifier Modifier cannot be 0
dice.invalid.threshold Threshold cannot be 0
dice.invalid.crits Bad numbers in crits attribute. (Should be crits=4,5,6)
dice.invalid.halt_after_error Rolling halted due to earlier error. Fix errors to view results.

:discourse2: Hosted by us? Theme components are available to use on our Standard, Business, and Enterprise plans.

Last edited by @JammyDodger 2024-06-12T08:02:47Z

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If anyone is interested in implementing a more versatile dice roller in Discourse using an AI persona, I did this on a community I manage and it works excellently. I set up an AI persona and allowed it to use the Random Picker tool, set the ā€˜max context postsā€™ setting to 1, and gave it these instructions:

I connected the persona with a user (in this case @dice), so it can be invoked in any post by saying something like @dice 3d6, and the bot will reply with the result. You can see it in action in this topic of my community (if youā€™re interested in tabletop gaming, feel free to join the community - itā€™s very new still).

Of course, this uses AI, so it requires an LLM API key. Iā€™m using GPT-4o-mini, so the cost is very low, especially for the volume Iā€™m looking at here.

4 Likes