Roll / Keep Systems and Exploding Dice

[Girl-of-Dust]

Hi, I'm looking into the possibility of investing in the program for my L5R group and I was wondering if any R/K system can be created through the ruleset editor?

If possible, I'm also looking to create some sort of function or command that can do cumulative rolls (Exploding dice. For example, rolling 10 on d10 causes you to roll again. So a roll of 10 (reroll) 5 sums as 15 on 1d10.)
My uncertainty about this is the only thing really keeping me back from getting the program for myself and my group, so if anyone could help me out with this I'd be very appreciative.

[Zeus]

Hello and welcome.

Exploding dice are possible. Both the RoleMaster and Savage Worlds rulesets implement them. These are third party rulesets. CoreRPG (developed and supported by Smiteworks) also includes a Fudge Die implementation.

FG uses XML to define each ruleset's components (including die) and Lua script to implement ruleset logic. I would take a look at the Wiki and the Ruleset Developer guides and familiarise your self with FG's APIs before you making your decision. Whilst you can't change the 3D dice models, it is possible to override the chat window reporting so you can report any die face result as required. However implementing exploding die would require some level of programming skill/experience, even in FG, so if your prepared to roll up your sleeves with a little coding, I find most of the critical aspects of RPG game mechanics are possible with FG.

[Valarian]

There's an exploding die mechanic in my Conspiracy X (Unisystem) and Star Wars (WEG d6) rulesets too. See the link in my signature. Unfortunately, alternative die mechanic take some Lua code to register a dice handler and custom dice.

If you can explain the mechanic, someone can potentially help out.

[damned]

can be created through the ruleset editor?

Also there is not currently a ruleset editor.
Editing/creating rulesets is done thru coding in LUA and XML with your favourite coding tools.

[Mgrancey]

The Roll and Keep system uses Traits, which are generally speaking either Stats or Skills though there are also Honor and Glory stats but they are less commonly rolled (similar use as in Werewolf:tA). You usually roll the total of both and keep your Stat value (some are just a stat or another trait like Honor or Glory) ,which are added together to see if you meet the Target Number (TN), in addition there is PC enabled Raise system where the PC will increase the TN on their own for extra effects. Stats are limited from 1 to 5, while skills can grow more though it gets more costly. TN runs from 5 - Mundane (juggling one ball), increasing by 5, to 40 - Never Done Again (juggling 9 balls while a geisha nibbles on your ear).

Damage uses Stat and Weapon plus bonus dice from Raises and Techniques to determine damage, only this time you keep dice determined by the weapon and techniques.

L5R only uses d10s so on any 10 the die rerolls and adds back onto itself (keep rerolling 10s), still counting as only 1 die (same explode mechanic as Savage Worlds). No more then 10 dice are ever rolled. Void can be used to temporarily increase a Trait by 1.

As a warning my copy of L5R is from 1st or 2nd edition but so far as I know the mechanics are the same. Here is an example from the book:

Mirumoto Kuro wants to show off his skill with a katana for his new lord. He demonstrates a difficult kata in his lord's court. Kuro has a 3 Agility (stat) and a 3 Kenjutsu (Skill), so he will be rolling 6 dice and keeping the three best (because his Agility is 3) Kuro rolls the following: 3, 5, 7, 7, 8 and a 9, making his total 24 (7+8+9 are the highest three rolls so he keeps those.) 20 is Hard and 25 is Very Hard so up to you if you think he succeeded.

That was a simple roll, there are also contested which is 2 PCs/NPCs rolling against each other, standard resolutions.

[Girl-of-Dust]

Things changed in 4e, but you've got the basics Mgrancy.
I've done some basic coding before, and I'm sure with time I can pull together the details of the how.

I mean, I'm guessing I just need to implement a set of text commands to trigger the RNG with specific additional rules. (Something to signify the difference between unexploding and exploding roles.) The R/K is more what I'm a little concerned about, because I haven't seen any examples of other people implementing similar mechanics.

[Girl-of-Dust]

Oh and just to clarify this is how things go in 4e:

A samurai has an agility of 4 and a kenjutsu still of 2 with the emphasis in Katana.
When making an attack roll, the Samurai rolls his Agility + Kenjutsu while only keeping the number of dice equal to his agility. Because he has an emphasis any 1's will be rerolled once. (A 1 rerolled to 1 stays a 1.)

Thus 6d10 keep top 4, explode on 10s, reroll 1's once.
Not all rolls explode though, or will reroll 1s. Rerolling 1s only happens on skills the player purchases an emphasis in. Explosions don't happen when a player is attempting to use a skill they don't have. (An unskilled peasant attempting to use a kanata will only roll his Agility Keep Agility with no explosions.)

[Mgrancey]

Hmm. More complicated though I can see the reason for the non-explosions.

As far as the keeping the top numbers, I can't say specifically how to best handle it in FG and LUA, but generally speaking you would have a temporary array to hold all the results, use an function to sort the values from high to low, determine if dice rolled is greater than dice kept, then claim the first X positions that are being kept.

Alternatively you could make the array to hold only the values kept, compare them to whats in the array keeping and tossing out as necessary than just add up and output the array.

Off the systems I know, look at the World of Darkness stuff. Successes are compared to failures with 7 being standard difficulty. The sorting and comparing would probably be somewhat useful.

[Girl-of-Dust]

Hmm. More complicated though I can see the reason for the non-explosions.

As far as the keeping the top numbers, I can't say specifically how to best handle it in FG and LUA, but generally speaking you would have a temporary array to hold all the results, use an function to sort the values from high to low, determine if dice rolled is greater than dice kept, then claim the first X positions that are being kept.

Alternatively you could make the array to hold only the values kept, compare them to whats in the array keeping and tossing out as necessary than just add up and output the array.

Off the systems I know, look at the World of Darkness stuff. Successes are compared to failures with 7 being standard difficulty. The sorting and comparing would probably be somewhat useful.

I mean, a really lazy way would be to just set it to organize values from lowest to highest in output, everything explodes but players manually add top values to kept dice and only add 10 for explosions on non-explosion rolls.

[Girl-of-Dust]

I had a couple thoughts:

#1: Could we potentially create a visual distinction between the Kept Dice? (Like adding a slight highlight between the highest rolled dice as part of a theme edit)

#2: Can we add additional conditions to the /die command? If we could program additional functions such as
/die 6d10k4 (Like how the +N function is currently) Potentially adding on a qualifier for explosions or rerolling 1s?
Maybe adding on to the +N functionality we could do something like
k(x) - Keep
e(x) - Explode on X
rr(x) (Or just r(x) - reroll X
So the above roll I mentioned could look like

/die 6d10k4e10r1+0
A bit of a cluster, but it shouldn't be too hard to remember as a player if you are familiar with the mechanics already. It also provides the most amount of customization. (Which could be useful in cases where the explosion number is changed. I believe having a Kenjutsu skill of 7 in 4e actually lowers the explosion on Kenjutsu to 9.)