Character Roller

by Mike Green

A d20 ablity score generator and all-around Swiss Army Knife for RPG geeks

I started this project as a quick way to generate ability scores for NPCs, and I ended up with a decent CLI dice roller in the process. I expect it'll only appeal to RPG geeks who also dig the command line.

NOTE: This program requires an Internet connection. It utilizes the TrueRandom library to get actual random numbers from Random.org.

The quickest way to install Character Roller is via Rubygems:

[sudo] gem install character-roller

You can also install from this repo's master branch:

git clone https://github.com/mikedamage/character-roller.git
cd character-roller
bundle install
rake build
rake install

Alternately, bin/dice can just be run from the project directory once dependencies are installed.

bundle install
./bin/dice 4d6

bin/dice is the main executable. You can see which commands are available by running dice help. Get detailed info on a command by running dice help COMMAND.

Commands:
  dice ability_score   # Rolls an ability score (4d6, discard lowest, re-roll 1s)
  dice ability_scores  # Rolls 6 ability scores
  dice bonus SCORE     # Show the bonus granted by an ability score
  dice help [COMMAND]  # Describe available commands or one specific command
  dice roll NdN        # Rolls N, N-sided dice and returns the total result
  dice version         # Display version information

Options:
  -s, [--show-results], [--no-show-results]  # Show each die roll result

dice's default behavior depends on its arguments. Given none, it prints its version and exits.

$ dice
Character Roller v0.1.2

Given a "ndn" string (i.e. 4d6), dice will roll and show you the resulting sum:

$ dice 4d6
15

If you use the roll subcommand you can get more details, like the result of each individual die roll:

$ dice roll 4d6 -s
[4, 5, 1, 1]
11

You can also add a bonus to the randomly determined total:

dice roll 8d12+12 -s
[10, 10, 1, 7, 11, 9, 2, 2] + 12 = 64

You can generate a single ability score (roll 4d6, re-roll 1's, and drop the lowest die):

$ dice ability_score --show-results --bonus
[3, 4, 5] = 12	(+1)

Generate all 6 of a character's ability scores at once:

$ dice ability_scores --show-results --bonuses
[6, 6, 6] = 18	(+4)
[3, 5, 6] = 14	(+2)
[2, 3, 4] = 9	(-1)
[3, 5, 6] = 14	(+2)
[3, 4, 6] = 13	(+1)
[4, 5, 6] = 15	(+2)