In many White Wolf games, including WoD games and Exalted, you take the
value of an Attribute, and the value of a Skill, add them together, add
any bonus dice, roll them all, and then add modifiers as appropriate.
Earthdawn also adds the value of an attribute and a skill, but then it
uses that total to look up in a table what dice to roll. We
should be able to easily easily type something akin to "/roll dexterity
+ acrobatics d10 + 5" that will let us spontaneously combine whichever
attribute and whichever skill we need at the time. Unlike other
systems, where one skill is dependent on exactly one attribute, games
like this use the most circumstantially relevant attribute and the most
circumstantially relevant skill to make the roll. In short, the roll you
are going to need at any given time is entirely up to the storytelling
whims of the GM, or the cleverness and creativity of the player. But this isn't just inconvenient to anticipate; it's
inconvenient numerically, too. Because any attribute can be combined
with any skill, the total number of macros you would need to write is
the total of the number of attributes multiplied by the number
of skills! The total number of possible rolls is simply pathological!
Expecting players to macro this is completely unreasonable! Players
need to be able to grab their character's attribute value, skill value,
and bonus dice, total them, add modifiers, roll them, and compare
against a target. And they need to be able to do it efficiently, because
they will need to make another roll with completely different stats
next turn, in the same format. Requiring players to reference their
character sheet with symbols like "@" and "%" just will not cut it.
Doing rolls like this manually needs to be efficient to type, because
players will have to type it a lot; and there really isn't any other
choice.
