After spending an inordinate amount of time reading the original thread I've come up with what I hope is a decent summary. To be clear, our goal is a straight-forward dice rolling system that includes features generally used across a large number of systems. At this time we have no plans or desire to create a whole dice rolling language, just add some shortcuts to help with what are otherwise painful tasks with digital rolls.
Original Thread:
<a href="http://community.roll20.net/discussion/208/dice-rolling-suggestions" rel="nofollow">http://community.roll20.net/discussion/208/dice-rolling-suggestions</a>
Summary of Planned Features
Prefix-Less Rolls
No longer will you have to type than whole extra 1 before the d to roll! Commands such as "/roll d20+d6+3" will work just like you've always dreamed.
Keep & Drop
As stated in the original thread our current keep/drop utility essentially provides two ways to do the same thing. 10d6k2 keeps the top two rolls and drops the bottom 8. 10d6d8 drops the bottom 8 and keeps the top 2. This syntax provides no way to drop high rolls. We're proposing extending the drop/keep syntax to include:
Keep Low - 10d6kl2 - keeps only the lowest two rolls
Drop Low - 10d6dl2 or 10d6d2 - drops the lowest two rolls
Keep High - 10d6kh2 or 10d6k2 - keeps only the highest two rolls
Drop High - 10d6dh2 - drops the highest two rolls
Alternatively instead of l and h we could use - and + after the d and k. Let us know what you think
ReRoll
Several systems require a re-roll on X feature. The re-roll system will allow specifying
re-roll of a specific value, multiple values, or values in a range.
10d6r - re-rolls all 1s
10d6r2 - re-rolls all 2s
10d6r<2 - re-rolls values less than or equal to 2
10d6r>2 - re-rolls values greater than or equal to 2
10d6r2r4 - re-rolls all 2s and 4s
Penetrating Dice
This extension to the explosion system adds a constant decrease on each re-roll for an
exploding die
10d6!p - every time a dice explodes a -1 modifier is applied to it (non stacking)
10d6!p3 - every time a dice explodes a -3 modifier is applied to it (non stacking)
Don't filter out . in math operations
Seems obvious but it was a bug in our parser numbers with decimal places and negative signs will now be supported correctly. I'm also whitelisting the modulus operator
Grouped Rolls
Several operations also make sence for groups of rolls, we are adding square bracket support for success, drop, keep, and reroll to be applied to a group of dice
[3d6, 4d8] > 2 - success check, note the use of a comma for seperation for success counts
[3d6 - 4d4]dl4 - drop lowest 4 rolls out of all 7 dice being rolled
[3d6 + 4d4]r2 - reroll any dice from either the d6 or d4 that come up as 1 or 2
Multiple Rolls
Run the same roll command a specified number of times
/roll3 1d20+5 - runs the 1d20+5 roll three times giving three results
Roll Sorting
Roll20 specifically does not sort rolls as we realize roll order is important to many systems. There are a few systems out there that have a very good reason to need sorted rolls for things like comparing individual dice from different players.
sort[3d10+2, 4d8, 5d3] - sorts the results of the entire set of dice into one array. Math operations are applied to each individual die
Best/Worst
Compare two roll groups and show the result of whichever group was better or worse
/roll [1d12!+2] b [1d6!+2]
/roll [1d12!+2] w [1d6!+2]
Roll Builder GUI
Coming Soon to a VTT near you!
Virtual Dice
Coming Soon to a VTT near you!
Additional Suggestions
The following are other ideas that we like too but aren't going to make the initial cut. We have a lot to do and most of these are significantly more complex than just tweaking the dice syntax. We will keep them on our list!
Campaign wide / Global Macros
Integration with Dicenomicon
Pre-built decks of dice faces to use for counters / dice pool
Variables in macros
Ability to import and export macros as a plain text file.