Running Bacchanal dice rolling online?
I am potentially looking at running a game of Bacchanal (warning, NSFW - but I'm not going to be discussing the game itself in this post, just its rolling mechanics) with some friends. However, the rules very much rely on being able to pass dice around and know which die is which in the set.
For example, on a typical round, the player might have 4 Wine dice (d6s), a Satyr (d8), Minerva (d6) and Bacchus (d8) in their glass, and the result of their action depends on which of those dice shows the highest number (with special rules if the two highest numbers are a tie). The roll may result in them removing a die from their pool and/or adding another die to the pool - and there are finite numbers of each, so keeping track of the location of each die is important.
At the moment, I can see two ways of doing this:
- Keep a list of who has which dice in text format, and update it each turn, then have the players roll the dice individually (which could be done on any dice roller), but this is rather cumbersome.
- Tabletop Simulator, with the dice being colour-coded, but this requires everyone to have a copy of TTS and be able to run it, which may not be viable.
Given this will probably be happening on Discord, option 3) would be some kind of custom bot, but that's probably more effort than I want to put in.
Is there an online system out there which would allow:
- Individually labelled dice (so we can distinguish between dice of the same size)
- Tracking dice being passed between players pools
- Ideally, rolling the whole pool at once
Posted May 12, 2020, 9:37 AM UTC
I think this could be done on Roll20 fairly simply with Roll tables for the rolls, and then use the virtual tabletop to represent areas and tokens as to who has what dice. Sure sounds easier than a notepad, once set up, and Roll20 is free, and runs in the browser.
You'd essentially create a roll table for each dice type and have them made like normal dice (i.e. a the wine dice would have the options [1,2,3,4,5,6] as a normal d6). Then the roll tables could be used as the unique dice and be rolled as normal, and you'd clearly see which dice you'd roll.
The roll syntax for this would be:
With a bit of tweaking, that works great! thanks!
The tweaks needed (in case later people come along and want to do this):
The syntax for rolling on a table is "4t[wine]" (t instead of d).
But actually it can be made even better by ignoring the syntax - if you make images for each of the numbered sides, then you can make rollable tokens on the board. Selecting a group of them and clicking "multi-sided" -> "random side" in the context menu that pops up will generate a random side.
Which means I can distinguish them via colour or name labels, and move them between people's pools easily.
Yeah, I edited the post, used the wrong syntax first.
Oooh yeah that's much better, I just don't use them too often so forgot the image things that makes it easier.
Yeah multi-sided tokens/ tokens with rollable tables makes for a more coherent experience. Just draw on the map a section for each player and it will turn out great.
If the game have a pile of rules, you could create Handouts in the Journal tab where you can copy-paste the game rules and make it visible to all players, so then the rules are easily accessible insider Roll20.
And with the tokens, I'd give all players the right to control them to make things easier, if it's a shared pool of dice that everyone interacts with.
You can also create a second Page that you have set up to be at game default, if cleanup to start a new round otherwise takes time. That way you can just move the player ribbon to the "clean" page and have everything ready to start a new round/game.