D&D Dice Roller: Design

Being an East Coast resident in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s been a good couple months since I’ve been outside. Owtside?… Awootside?

In any case, our Dungeons and Dragons group moved our regular game online, using Roll20 for the VTT and Discord for audio. We’ve only had a few sessions, but we felt the dice rolling experience was rather cumbersome unless you set up your character sheet all the way. Keep in mind, we were playing without having purchased any of the Compendium sources. Also, being level 19, the sheer breadth of rule interactions were enormous. So for us, it was either typing /r [[2d20kh1]] + 8 for every attack roll with advantage or using the dice-roller pop-up that doesn’t factor in bonuses or special circumstances. However, it was when our Barbarian rolled four natural 1’s in a row that I decided it would be an interesting exercise to build a dice rolling application that offers a reasonable guarantee of randomness, with a UI that would work better for our purposes as an online D&D 5e group.

Requirements

Rather than building a grand mental scheme for an impossible project (something I’m very wont to do), I’ll keep an open list of requirements for the dice roller here, updating and adjusting priorities as I go.