This challenge comes from ideas brought up in Stupid Roll 20 Tricks (and some clever ones) ; can someone figure out this issue? I'd like to use the trick below (" Reusing Rolls ") to combine two concepts. This is for GURPS, where what one is seeking is a 3d6 roll that is under the effective skill used in combat. So, for this example, assume a character with skill 14 in axe, who is targeting an arm (-2 to skill) and is making his attack deceptive (by taking a -2 to skill, it is -1 for the defender to defend if the attack hits). The net result is an attack with an effective skill of 10 [14 -2 -2]. The macro below actually does a lot of the math (I realize there could be dropdown lists to automatically calculate the penalties for striking at specific body parts...let's ignore that for now). /em swings his axe at ?{Hit Location} (?{Hit Location Penalty}) with Deceptive Attack ?{Deceptive Attack Level}, vs. Effective Skill=[[?{Base Skill}+?{Hit Location Penalty}+?{Deceptive Attack Level}*2]] &{template:default} [[ [[1d6]] + [[1d6]] + [[1d6]] ]] {{name=Axe Swing}} {{$[[0]] + $[[1]] + $[[2]]==$[[3]]}} This then produces a fairly nice output, as follows, albeit over two entries: Two issues: (1) I'd like to do this all as one entry, and (2) I'd like to show the margin of success in the "Notes" field. No idea how to do the either, really. At one point yesterday I think I managed to do #1 (and now I can't find that macro...grrr), but the Effective Skill was just unreadable (see below). It would be really cool if I could somehow put the description in the Purple box, and then the effective skill and the margin of difference in the "Notes" area part of the template. Even if I could just get the "Effective Skill" down in the notes, that would be an improvement (and not calculate the margin of success or failure, although I'd like that). Also, for a long host of reasons, we don't want just the inline roll, where the it displays only the total and you have to hover over it to see the die rolls, which is why I'm trying to use this trick; the GM would rather see each individual die roll and a total. And while you can do that with a macro that just uses /r 3d6 and such, that takes several rows, doesn't look as good as the template, etc. So the trick is trying to get the total, which is $[[3]] in the macro above, and compare it against the calculated Effective Skill , to give us the margin...and do it in a way that is displayable. Any thoughts on how to trick Roll20 into doing this? Any help would be GREATLY APPRECIATED. Scott C. said: Reusing Rolls Disclaimer: This trick takes advantage of emergent behavior that may not be intended and may be patched I can't take credit for this trick. Syneran discovered the capability . But, long story short, it is actually possible to reuse rolls with some small caveats. Here's a summary of the info discovered in the linked forum thread: The chat accepts the inline roll indexing used in the API (and apparently the roll parser itself), so you can do: [[ [[1d20]] + [[1d6]] + [[6]] ]] = $[[0]] + $[[1]] + $[[2]] And get an output that would read something like this: The limited part is you can't use those indexed rolls inside other rolls. So for instance, you can't reverse the above output like this: [[1d20]] + [[1d6]] + [[6]] = [[$[[0]] + $[[1]] + $[[2]] ]] Using the indexes appears to break any containing inline rolls, like so: Additionally, the indexing is line specific, so this also doesn't work: [[1d20]] + [[1d6]] + [[6]]
[[$[[0]] + $[[1]] + $[[2]] ]] These are pretty big limitations if you're just typing rolls into chat, but we can circumvent it through good use of roll templates. For instance, we could hid the actual roll in between roll template fields, and then present them in whatever order we wanted: &{template:default} [[ [[1d20]] + [[1d6]] + [[6]] ]] {{name=My Attack}} {{$[[0]] + $[[1]] + $[[2]]==$[[3]]}} which would give us this output: For those with API access, the API sees this message with the proper indexes showing, so any API that handles rolls should react to these indexed rolls just like they were regular rolls. What's it allow us to do though? There's several new things this allows the community to do that were previously locked behind access to the API. Character Sheets When making custom character sheets (or sheets for the repo), one of the big hurdles has been accomodating systems that require you to know multiple things about a complex roll. Something like say the success of a roll in relation to a target number, as well as the value of the roll itself. Or if a given number on a die counts as 0 (or some other number). General Macro Creation Now we can create macros that do our math for us. Total the damage from a complicated attack (or one that hit several times), display the parts of a roll so that what went into that roll is visible without needing to hover over it. And I'm sure folks will come up with quite a few other ideas that I haven't even thought of.