The Day of Thunder

[Kaijarisuigyo]

The secret is letting dirt pile up for two years so the before/after difference looks far more impressive than if cleaning was done regularly.

And then there's the code of the L5R 5th ed roller, that I haven't dared look back at yet, but can likely summon demons if read aloud...

[Otaku]

That sounds like an additional feature, not a bug. It’s all about marketing.

[Jiyo Sora]

And then there's the code of the L5R 5th ed roller, that I haven't dared look back at yet, but can likely summon demons if read aloud...

It's them damn funny dice FFG likes selling to people

[Kaijarisuigyo]

It's them damn funny dice FFG likes selling to people

Not really. The Star Wars roller is quite straightforward for example, while also technically being all special dice.

No, the issue is that, for all other kinds of rolls, the process is as follow:
1. Pick which dice to roll
2. Get result

While, for L5R 5th, it's:
1. Pick which dice to roll
2. Get first result
3. Reroll some dice of your choices, possibly several consecutive times.
4. Choose dice to keep
5. Choose each explosion to keep, possibly several times (as explosions keep exploding)
6. Finally get result

And there, I'm not even discussing the shenanigans like the ishiken shifting the values of their dice instead of rerolling them.

[Jiyo Sora]

Don't spoil my shouting at kids to get off my lawn with your facts!

[Kaijarisuigyo]

Some work to make rolling several different things consecutively a bit less of a hassle:



Not perfectly sold on that solution (takes too much space on screen for a first), and it will likely need to be reworked/replaced. Still better than the clumsiness of many extraneous clicks of before.

[Kaijarisuigyo]

This one a bit technical. It definitely looks the part and even ends up with Excel. It's nonetheless an attempt at making bookkeeping of events a bit less of a pain for GM.

The idea is that GM can prepare rolls with some default values:


That will then give them two things.

The BbCode to put on their events for players to interact with. Something like:
Click here to roll.

As you might have seen if you've been curious enough to click, such a roll is already configured with some values, some editable (the description), some set in stone (the campaign).

As for the other url, they can use it to track rolls specifically tied to that tag.
On that page, they will also be able to export all rolls at once as a file that can then be imported in something like Google Sheets for easier processing.

[Kaijarisuigyo]

Reworked the filtering interface a bit.

Can now filter and export all rolls, within the scope of a given campaign, whose description contains a certain word.
Interface is not super awesome at the moment, with the Export button only showing up once at least one filter is in. But can be fixed later, if this proves to be a useful feature.

Example: Here's all the (things looking like) damage rolls of the Tales games, on the web, and once exported.

Tags are still there, though I'm more and more convinced they are an "engineer solution", i.e. too complicated to be used in practice, and might be removed in a future update.

[Kaijarisuigyo]

Adding complicated things is easy. Time for the actually difficult part: Rework them into something usable.

First, after way too much beating around the bush, I've simply added the tag field to the rollers:



This allows GM to just ask players to tag some rolls with something extra, the same way they ask them to roll under a specific campaign name, so they can more easily filter rolls related to, for example, a specific event. Example. Far more flexible than the previous approach.

Yes, it means the form is even bigger than before. But haven't really found a way around that. Maybe simply reducing padding so it seems smaller without actually dealing with the multiplication of fields?

Worst case, this isn't a huge change and be removed easily. And the removal can also be undone easily, as it's the magic of code, everything is versioned and be done/undone/redone almost endlessly with little hassle.

Additionally, you can also not only search on a specific word in the list, but also exclude one. What's the point?

Well, a lot of people already put "fluff" in their fluff roll description. So, might as well weaponize it by giving a way to GM to just exclude all explicitly fluffy rolls easily.

Speaking of fluff-y, those are basic PSQL full text searches. Short version: There are clever enough to deal with some minor orthographic variation but not that much. Like, if you search for "damages", they will also retrieve rolls with "damage" (no s). But if you search for "dommages" because you're feeling quite French today, it won't work.

As for tags, they behave exactly as campaigns (case sensitive exact match).

[Nozomi]

Yes, thank you for taking the time and effort to look into this. I might be able to kick in a little. Not much. Disposable is kind of tight for us these days, but either way it sounds like you guys have a plan in mind. Thank you for the time you put into this.

Orokos' situation was unfortunate.

[Kaijarisuigyo]

Thanks.

Feeling a bit like I've hit a wall though. I.e. screenshots have multiplied as actual changes became scarcer (a habit inherited from livelihood), and there don't seem to be anything I can do to make Sakkaku better than it currently is.

Maybe it's perfectly natural. Maybe Sakkaku has indeed reached its final form, and every attempt at improvement will actually just make it worst. Numerous good sites have died from their failure to just stop at their optimal state, becoming Swiss Army knife that do everything badly when they used to be good hammers, ideal to deal with specific nails.

And that might be true on the rolling side of things. In absolute, can't really do better than "if you wish to roll 7k3, enter 7k3 and press Roll".

However, my guts feeling is that the listing and aggregating of results is missing a few key features that would make GM bookkeeping far easier. Not necessarily something complex. Just an extra lever, an extra button, somewhere, which would help tremendously with some repetitive, uninteresting task.

No idea what sadly. As discussed, coding the easy part. It's lazy work, akin to farming in a video game. Knowing what to code, here lies the challenge.