Hc Svn Dracones - Finding other DMs

If anyone reads Latin, These are uncharacteristic waters. So I used roll20 to fail succeed in glorious victory (Yea that’s it!) this Saturday to DM a Hc Svn Dracones game. A great deal of what I wanted to do was not limited by what I could do, and more by what I know how to do and had time to do. Roll20 is a fun app, but there's a logistic problem: Roll20 is only vaguely setup to run HSD. To make it run right, there's work that needs to be done. My first limitation is that there are uncharted waters, and I only have <x> time to get <y> ready every week. I'd love to know where to find other active DMs for HSD and trade ... tools of the trade with them. Is there anyway to seek out DMs, and not just players? My second to -be honest- is that while I'm thoroughly impressed Roll20 has a API, and not opposed to porting my not trivial skills with C++ to Java to just volunteering code or templates? (Have I said I do open-source work just for grins?) There's no real intensive for a HSD DM to pay the $10 or $20 a month to access non-existent material support, and I'd be paying a monthly subscription for the privilege to spend my time to do work for someone else on top of the work to just run the game . I'm not above just doing charity, or even kicking something over to maintaining the data-base for me. I am "above" paying for the privilege to do charity. Sorry, that's not exactly a nice and polite thing to say, but there it is.

There's groups for GMs as well as groups for GM+Players. For example, there's a GM's Academy somewhere around here, and there's a group that focuses on supporting GMs and Players looking for text-only games. 'Campaign' doesn't have to mean 'game', it's just a collection of people with a private forum and a meeting space available for realtime chatting. Roll20 is a game-agnostic Virtual TableTop interface. To run just about any game on roll20 requires work ahead of time. It's part and parcel of being a gamemaster. Perhaps an every-other week schedule would grant you more prep time? No one is expecting or asking you to write code for anyone but yourself, and even that isn't really an expectation. There's tons of mentors who never contribute scripts and that's ok. The money paid for a mentor subscription goes towards the paychecks of those who are coding and doing other full time work for Roll20. It isn't just maintaining the database as you put it. The benefits of being a mentor are more than just the API access in campaigns you create. You get 20 times the storage space for your art assets for your games, custom character sheets in your games (useful since you're playing a new, niche, system), access to free tokens made available to mentors, along with other benefits. $10/mo or $100/year gets you the best toys for your campaigns. But you can run games just fine with a free membership. Give it a solid chance! ^_^ I wish you the best of luck, and hope you come to enjoy your stay here at Roll20.

Thank you, I'm a little harsh. I'll gladly grant you that. The system is more flexible then I gave it credit for at first glance. I'm going to object to help being a GM in general on general principle. Now that I know to look for it, I'll seek out the academy. It's making HSD work specifically I require help on. I'm not just being lazy. :P Roll20 flexible, but it's only flexible as it knows how to be. The tools are only useful as there is stuff to use them on. For all roll20 resources, DMing a HSD game to spec is a DIY from the ground up thing. Being sci-fi and hexed based hasn't help, but like I said: I'm looking for DMs to help build that up directly or between us. I'll even grant I was pleased to find the interface counted success. The primary use I'd have for expanding the code base would be making the type of die rolled understood as a variable -in fact, that's a stat in HSD-, along with the number of dice rolled. So far my attempts with Roll20 text parsers treats 'roll x number of y dice' as a error. HSD has something like 20 base stats that can be used with ad-hoc and as appropriate with I believe 30 different skills. In varying combinations. Which is far more intuitive then it sounds. There's no easy way to cross link or alias stat and skill rolls without manually typing everything out. 500rolls later or 4different macros for variations of the same thing is going to get old fast. If you really want an explination, there's actually a video on it...

Heh. I think you need to hit the wiki and read some of the getting started stuff. Wiki link is in the blue black bar at the top of the page. Pay particular attention to <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Dice_Reference" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Dice_Reference</a> Rolling dice is as simple as '/roll 1d20+3' (Roll a d20 and add 3 to the result) or '/roll 10d10&gt;8' (roll ten d10s and count rolls of 8+ as successes). You can even pull attributes from the character sheet and do something such as '/roll (@{Social}+@{Streetwise})d10&gt;8' (pull the attributes Social and Streetwise from the triggering charactersheet, add them and roll that many d10s and count rolls of 8+ as success). You can also do inline rolls [[1d20+3]] [[10d10&gt;8]] [[(@{Social}+@{Streetwise})d10&gt;8]] would be the earlier examples done in a concise format. Have fun reading ^_^

Stephen W. said: The primary use I'd have for expanding the code base would be making the type of die rolled understood as a variable -in fact, that's a stat in HSD-, along with the number of dice rolled. So far my attempts with Roll20 text parsers treats 'roll x number of y dice' as a error. If you tell us what macros you've tried, perhaps we can help you come up with something that works. There are other systems in use which have "die size" based on a character attribute, so you're not alone there.

I stand corrected. I will thank you both. Having been told it should have worked I went back and retested. I must have missed entered something three or four different time. (go me ....) Last Saturday I ended up with three different version of the following. (A d8, a d10, and a d12 version.) /em @{selected|character_name} fires. /roll {@{selected|Mind:Acuity}d12+@{selected|Ranged-Combat}}&gt;?{Modifier|8} I went back and added a 'roll' attribute, and gave it a value of 20, and the following worked: /em @{selected|character_name} fires. /roll {@{selected|Mind:Acuity}d@{selected|roll}+@{selected|Ranged-Combat}}&gt;?{Modifier|8} If you want to help me solve the problems directly, I'm not going to complain. Who wouldn't? Honestly, I'm just giving out relevant information as to why I request what I request because "Why do you need it?" is a obligatory question that comes next. -------- The next core problem is either aliasing something like the Mind:Acuity to 'ma' for explicit rolls, -OR- making a macro to query what stat should be used with what skill. I have a idea how make a small GUI to do exactly what I need on demand or through a character sheet database ... that bring me back to my "not nice and polite" comments though. My problem isn't that I couldn't use the extra shiny, it's that I'm paying so I can do all the work to make the shiny things useful or offer up 'If you come after me, here's all the ground work laid for you already.' Show me how I'm wrong, I'll apologies further, and start budgeting $20 a month.

Stephen, The most dynamic solution to your dice problem is something like this: /roll {?{Trait Level|1}d?{Trait Die Type|8}+?{Proficiency Bonus|0}}&gt;8 Make that macro and share it with your players. It will work for any roll. The macro will ask you how many dice you're rolling, the die type, and your proficiency bonus and then make the roll vs an 8 difficulty and return the successes. A more complex solution would involve a custom character sheet that would allow you to use radio buttons to select your trait and die type and proficiency bonus and then roll based on the selection.

Ok, I'll stop dancing around it, a effort has been made to understand my issue and is noted. For that, thank you. (I'm try not to be ungrateful, I swear!) So, on detail. If that was all I required sir, I could use the dice rolling button or just type '/roll 1d8+1'. The stats are wordy. Their is not "just" dexterity or strength. Theirs one dexterity of mind, (Mind:Dexterity), dexterity of body (Body:Dexterity), dexterity with money matters (Economy:Dexterity), or dexitry when moving through society (Community:Dexterity). The stat boxes are effectively a tiny spreadsheet table or -in program lingo- a multidimensional array. There is no "Roll to (Coerce/Debate/Inspire) them." There is "I want to use slight of hand (Body:Dexterity) to do a magic trick cheer this guy up." or "I want to dazzle this guy so much with my wit (Mind:Dexterity or Mind:Presence) he doesn't notice his day is so bad anymore." All of those example would use the inspire skill. Naratively it makes sense to do these thing. The stats are the fuel to use a skill, the skills are the actual action. What I was trying my best to work out is a player just selects a skill a stat to use it with. Then the GUI or nested macro works out the number, type, and bonuses to roll. Techically it's just three database lookups (The stat giving the number of dice, the dice tied to the stat, and the modifier for the skill). Talking Roll20 into doing is proving not to be simple. Roll20 has a huge verity of things it can be flexible with ... If this is one of them, I haven't found it. Edit: The original question was just me looking for otheres to divide and conqueror the workload of making the game work in a system that doesn't directly support it.

If I had to hardcode this in C++11 or C++14? It would look something like: enum class stat_type : unsigned char { mind = 0, body = 1, economy = 2, community = 3 }; enum class stat_trait : unsigned char { dexterity = 0, resilience = 1, acuity = 2, strength = 3, presence = 4 }; enum class skill : unsigned char { booksmarts = 0, medicine = 1, command = 10 /* I'm not listing all 30 just for this. : P*/ }; struct roll{ unsigned char number; unsigned char die_type; unsigned char modifier; } roll Get_Roll(enum stat_type type, enum stat_trait trait, enum skill sk){ unsigned char stats[][] = {{2,1,2,2,1},{3,2,2,2,2},{1,2,2,2,2},{1,1,1,2,2}}; unsigned char dice[] = {10,12,10,8}; unsigned char skills[] = {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 /* etc. */}; return roll( stats[type][trait], dice[type], skills[sk] ); } So ... If I said roll Body:Acuity + Command to use "Brace for impact!" in the middle of combat the players would type "/roll ba+cmd" or select the boxes for the stat "Body:Acuity" and for the "Command" skill in a GUI. The function call would be "Get_Roll(Body, Acuity, Command);" to get 2d12 + 10. In case that makes sense to people as crazy as me. :P

Cracked it, sorry for the spam, and thanks for the time. :) Just have to break the macros I have in two and play off the nesting mechanics! (Sorry to make everyone dance, like I said I was just looking for someone to split the workload. Got that question asked and answered.) "/roll {@{selected|Mind:Acuity}d@{selected|Mind-Dice}" becomes 'ma'. "+@{selected|Ranged-Combat}}&gt;8" becomes 'ran'. To roll Mind:Acuity + Range Combat it's "#ma #ran". To give it a difficulty mod of +1 it becomes "#ma +1 #ran" Woooo! Don't mind the crazy DM, he's just happy. :)

I'm starting to get the feel there is an expectation mis-match here. Roll20 is not a video game. It is a virtual tabletop. All this stuff you're saying you need the game to support? Everyone for every game has to set up macros and whatnot. The dice engine is fairly robust, and the macro system lets you do roughly what you described above. You could tell players to roll two (or more) stats and they could, via a variety of methods, press buttons to roll those stats without a lot of typing. The exact details of implementation would vary depending on how you wanted to do it. I don't know how your dice work, precisely. It sounds like you can have variable numbers of dice of varying sizes? If that's the case, your Attributes&Abilities sheet (for each character) is going to be a touch messy at first glance. Using your earlier example, I'd set up Attributes like such: Body.Acuity.Dice 2 Body.Acuity.Size 8 And then over in abilities, I'd have one named 'Body:Acuity' set to /me rolls for Body:Acuity: [[ @{Body.Acuity.Dice}d@{Body.Acuity.Size}&gt;8 ]] And I'd do the same for each and every stat/skill/whatever in the game. Set all the stuff on the Ability side to be 'Token Action's, and then all your player has to do is select their token (after you've set the token to 'represent' that character journal, given the player permission to control journal) and press the Body:Acuity button and you'll see ' Character rolls for Body:Acuity: [[SOMENUMBER]] ' where somenumber is how many successes. If you have static, variable, success threshholds per character, make that an attribute too. If it's non-static, you'd do this instead: /me rolls for Body:Acuity: [[ @{Body.Acuity.Dice}d@{Body.Acuity.Size}&gt;?{Number to meet or beat?|8} ]] which will prompt the user for a number, and the |8 sets that to a default option of 8 and then give you the same output as before. This isn't as pretty as some other possible solutions, and you can't add the dicepools together, but this way works, is free , and is the most flexible solution that doesn't require API.

Sorry, your reply snuck in whilst I was typing and testing that what I was suggesting would work :&gt;

Don't worry, I'll still thank you for taking the time to help. Thank you. :) (Also #2 reason I only asked for find other DMs. HSD is actually very intuitive to use, it's inner works are a arcane secret though. ;) )

Given how few GMs I think you're going to find, you may just have to settle for getting help from people who are Roll20 (semi-)experts but know little/nothing about your system ^_-