Dice Rolls for Role-Players

I realize that the title of this post is a bit of an oxymoron, because a Real Role-Player of course doesn't roll dice often. ;)

But in the cases where the Real Role-Player does roll dice, wouldn't it be nice to have a computer program to forget at home rather than some even more easily mislaid dice?

The Perl 6 Advent Calendar provided some inspiration for this post.

A problem with many minor programming examples you see on the net, is that they do not take into account the needs of a role-player. Role-players play many different systems, with different criteria for success in dice rolls. D6 (the regular six-sided cubic dice used for playing Monopoly, Yahtzee, etc.) are not used much in the majority of systems.

Therefore, I'll look at the Storyteller System, which is used in the World of Darkness series of games.

The general principle is that you have a pool of dice to roll, and you count your successes, which in this system is the number of dice that have a value greater than or equal to a given target number for the roll. The standard target number is 8 in most implementations. Five successes in the same roll is an exceptional success. Obviously, it's nice to have many dice to roll!

Here's a real Perl 6 program that works with Rakudo today: it accepts two command line parameters, the first being the size of the dice pool, the optional second parameter defines the target number for success:

---

use v6;

subset D10 of Int where 1..10;

sub is_success (D10 $roll, D10 $target) {
    my $n = 0;
    if ($roll == 10) {
        say "10 again";
        $n += roll 1,$target;
    }
    $roll >= $target ?? $n + 1 !! $n;
}

sub roll (Int $poolsize where { $_ > 0 }, D10 $target? = 8) {
    my D10 @rolls = (1..10).pick($poolsize, :replace);
    say "Roll: " ~ @rolls.sort.join(",");
    [+] @rolls.map: { is_success $_,$target };
}

given @*ARGS.elems {
    when 2   {
               say "Target number: " ~ @*ARGS[1];
               continue;
             }
    when 1|2 {
               my $n = roll |@*ARGS>>.Int;
               say "Successes rolled: " ~ $n;
               $n >= 5 and say "Exceptional success!";
             }
    when *   {
               $*ERR.say("roll.p6 poolsize [target]");
               exit(64);
             }
}

---

Thanks to moritz++ for ironing out two annoying mistakes!

Here are a few usage examples:

---

$ perl6 roll.p6
roll.pl poolsize [target]

$ perl6 roll.p6 5
Roll: 1,2,7,8,9
Successes rolled: 2

$ perl6 roll.p6 5 2
Target number: 2
Roll: 1,2,2,4,9
Successes rolled: 4

$ perl6 roll.p6 5 4
Target number: 4
Roll: 6,8,9,10,10
10 again
Roll: 8
10 again
Roll: 2
Successes rolled: 6 - Exceptional success!

---

There are no comments in this piece of code, I want people to try to understand it as-is, based on the Perl 6 Advent Calendar. If you have any questions, comments, corrections, etc., don't hesitate, just write!

In my next blog entry, I'll pick the program apart and comment on what I've done and why, and who knows, maybe someone has come up with an elegant solution to the same problem.