Rolls

The guides until now have led you through character creation, character adjustment, and Trait + Specialty management. Now is the time to see how that all comes together. Most dice bots have no concept of what your characters have. To use them, you have to remember (or look up) your characters’ Traits and enter a raw number. While Botch and Beat allow that same kind of use, they also allow you to invoke your Traits and Specialties directly.

Tip

Botch and Beat behave differently here! Be sure to click the tab for the bot you use.

Basics

The /roll command has a pool parameter where you enter your dice pool. This can be a number or, optimally, an Attribute + Ability/Skill equation.

Botch (WoD)

/roll pool:Foo+Bar difficulty:6

This will roll the sum of your character’s Foo and Bar Traits, at Difficulty 6. Botch counts the number of successes, subtracts 1s, and presents you with a total. At the bottom of the output, it shows you the Traits that went into the roll, making it easier for you, other players, and Storytellers to see what the roll was about. As a bonus, you don’t need to look up your Traits! Botch tracks it all for you.

Beat (CofD)

/roll pool:Foo+Bar

With this command, Beat will roll your Foo and Bar traits. Any 10s rolled will automatically explode.

Note

Explosions are represented by a number enclosed in brackets. In the screenshot above, you can see we had two explosions.

Tip

Traits are case-insensitive. The bot accepts Foo, foo, FOO, FoO, etc. You can also put spaces between the traits and the plus sign (e.g. Foo + Bar). Finally, you can subtract Traits or even raw numbers (e.g. Foo+Bar-2).

Willpower

Botch (WoD)

Adding the special Trait, WP, adds Willpower to your roll, granting an un-cancelable success and deducting a point of temporary Willpower from your total.

Note

Botch will not prevent you from using Willpower if you are empty. This is a design decision to accommodate games with certain house rules.

Beat (CofD)

Adding the special Trait, WP, adds Willpower to your roll, granting three bonus dice and deducting a point of temporary Willpower from your total.

Note

Beat will not prevent you from using Willpower if you are empty. This is a design decision to accommodate games with certain house rules.

Specialties

To invoke your Specialties, use dot-notation.

Botch (WoD)

/roll pool:Dexterity+Brawl.Grappling difficulty:6

As expected, this rolls Strength, with Specialty Vicious, plus Brawl at Difficulty 6. Any 10s rolled will count for double successes.

Beat (CofD)

/roll pool:Dexterity+Brawl.Grappling

In this example, we roll Strength plus Brawl, with a Specialty in Grappling. Because we added a Specialty, Beat rolls one bonus die.

Shortcuts

Let’s face it: typing out Dexterity+Brawl.Grappling is tedious. It looks nice but isn’t much of a time-saver, especially if you’re on mobile. Luckily, you will rarely need to type the full names of your Traits or Specialties. Instead, you can give an abbreviation, and so long as the bot can unambiguously match that to a trait, it will figure out what you want.

Here are some examples:

Abbreviation	Expands to …
stren	Strength
inte	Intelligence
b	Brawl

Again, these are just examples! You aren’t limited to these exact abbreviations. You could just as easily write intel for Intelligence. The only requirement is that the abbreviation is unambiguous.

What does that mean? Say you write str. That can expand to two different Core Traits: Strength or Streetwise. You can’t give stre, either, because it still matches either of those Traits. Thus, you have to either write (minimally) stren for Strength or stree for Streetwise.

Note

Shortcuts work with Custom Traits as well, which means that your own shortcuts might be different than the examples above. For instance, if you have a Custom Trait called “Barter”, then a simple b will no longer auto-expand to Brawl.

Specialty shortcuts

Shortcuts really take off with Specialties. Using our Brawl.Grappling example from before, we could write b.g instead. Only, we don’t even need to type that much. What if we only have a single Brawl specialty? We could write b.: Since b expands to Brawl, telling the bot we want to use a Specialty (which the . does) means it will auto-expand to the only Specialty available. (Of course, if you have multiple Brawl Specialties, the rules about ambiguity apply, as normal.)

It goes the other way. If we only have one Specialty called Grappling, then we could type .Grappling and leave out Brawl altogether. If we only have one Specialty that starts with the letter G, then we could just type .g.

And if we only have a single Specialty across all our Traits? Then all we need to do is type a . by itself. The bot will figure it out.