About
DiceBot is a Discord bot that I made sometime in 2018 for my friends and I so it would be easier for us to play Dungeons & Dragons virtually (this was before we knew about Foundry). We had used Roll20 prior but we felt that its user experience was very clunky and that too many convenience features were hidden behind their paywall. In addition, I had organized a West Marches-style campaign (a larger scale, drop-in/drop-out sandbox style campaign), and it was easier just to have everyone join a Discord server rather than having them go through the process of making an account for another website.
Features
Dice Rolling Grammar
The one feature that I’m probably most proud of is the bot’s context-free dice grammar. I wanted to make something more useable than Roll20’s dice grammar - particularly the ability to “roll” dice that can’t be represented by the standard platonic solids (for example a d2 for coin flips), and more robust mathematical operations (PEMDAS). In addition, it also has premade commands for things like character creation stat rolls.
Hilariously, I made this prior to actually knowing was a context-free grammar was - I didn’t actually learn about it until a few years later in school!
Rules Reference
Something else that was useful was having a full reference to spells and equipment used in the game rules. In Roll20, we had to manually enter in everything our characters had if we wanted the rules for a spell or piece of equipment to be easily accessible. If we needed to reference something new, we would to manually search for it on D&D rules sites or look it up in the Player’s Handbook. For DiceBot, I created a json database for spells and equipment and added a command to allow users to quickly search for and display spells.
Acknowledgements and Further Reading
- Context-free Grammars: Stanford lecture on context free grammars.