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Lord.Sorasen
2011-12-08, 04:59 PM
So, I'm about to begin the journey of DMing a group online, and have been looking for the right tools for the job. Right now I am using maptools, herolabs, and the appropriate add-ons to make those things work. Both of these tools, however, lack a dice tool which I find satisfactory.

Right now I'm using dicetool, and before that I was just using This online dice program. (http://www.wizards.com/dnd/dice/dice.htm) Both of these sort of work, the former more than the latter, but the program I want ideally is a little more specific. I could easily work with what is given, but I'm wondering what other people know on the subject.

What I'm looking for is essentially a program that will let me input custom dice rolls and modifiers, and can give me the result of the original roll (for the sake of criticals) as well as the totaled result. I'd like to be able to save inputs that I will need to use more than once, and ideally name these inputs.

Now, I will be honest that my distaste for dicetools is almost entirely aesthetic. It allows me to place a custom input and gives me the result for the original roll and for the final added roll, and has tabs, which is unreasonably valuable, but gives results in multiple rows, which is clunky. The fact that you can't name your inputs makes looking for them on a list take almost as much time as just writing in the input or personally rolling dice and doing the math. Back to that "clunky" thing, an ideal dice roller would take up very little space, as I need to have maptools and herolab's tactical console open as well.

PeteAtoms
2011-12-08, 06:07 PM
Do you need to be able to share the program with your players as you use it? If so, there are a few plugins for various chatting applications and IRC channels you could use.

If you just want to be able to generate random numbers/rolls, you can easily make an XdY+Z function in a spreadsheet (excel, gnumeric, libreoffice, etc).

If you have a graphing calculator, it is also super easy.

AnyDice (http://anydice.com/)also has a roller that you can use to roll any kind of dice.

Swooper
2011-12-09, 05:37 AM
I like Invisible Castle (http://invisiblecastle.com/). I'm pretty sure it does everything you ask for, but I can't vouch for you liking the formatting.

Jokson
2011-12-09, 10:44 AM
You can use rolz.org, if you're playing in real-time. You won't have the problem of players re-rolling endlessly and then only reporting the one that lets them succeed, since you'll be able to see that they rolled 90 times in the little chat window.

Really, it's one of my favorites.

Of course, you could always go on IRC and use one of the dicebots there, but that's a totally different can o' worms.

Sgt. Cookie
2011-12-09, 11:44 AM
Try OpenRPG. It's exactly what it says on the tin, a virtual table top. Maps, dice, character sheets, you name it. Use traipese (or whatever its called) though, as that's the only one that works.

I've used OpenRPG myself, and it works rather well.