Role Playing Rules Discussion

I just wanted to say that I don't think adding a dicebot to the forum is all that difficult a task, really... I had an idea for how even I can do it, without anything more than user access to the forum.

My idea is to write a program that regularly(say, every five minutes or so) grabs the recent comments page, and scans it for new comments in the relevant threads. It would then read each of those new comments, and scan it for certain codes, and if it finds a command to throw some dice, it would add a reply giving the result.

I envision the codes being something like {d20} or {2d6+7} or {d20+str} or similar, reply being something like "d20 = 13, 2d6+7 = 12, d20+str = 6+5 = 11". (This is mostly inspired by an IRC RPG bot I know.)

The latter example requires a bit of player cooperation, e.g. putting something like {str=5,agi=2} in an agreed-upon place (e.g. the first post in the thread?). If it can change during the game I guess I could make the bot keep track throughout the thread, letting later posts include something like {user:STR+=1} to change it. Hm, on the other hand, I'm not sure how this would work if one player controls more than one character, or the game moves between threads... I guess something could be worked out though.

Now, this idea might not be something you'll want to have in your RPG (I probably won't be joining it either way), or maybe the forum maintainers (I'm not sure who this is) won't accept having a bot like this constantly polling the site (I'm open to other approaches, but haven't found a way to get notified of new posts), but I figured I'd just mention that you could probably have a dicebot if you wanted one. (do you?)

(Just FYI, I've already got some code that parses the recent comments page. :P Should I spend time doing the rest? Does anyone want this?)

imo, it would be best if we could get a drupal module that parses stuff like:

[[2d6]] and make it {2d6 = 7} or something upon posting

hmm, maybe no module is actually required for this. perhaps this can be regular parsing.

You can also use http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/ and then all you have to do is post the link that shows the rolls. So, you can post the result, and link that result to the website with the rolls showing. That way it looks good in the forum, but can be verified by anyone.