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.
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.
/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.

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

Willpower
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.

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

Specialties
To invoke your Specialties, use dot-notation.
/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.
![Botch: Roll with
densities={[4]}
Specialties](/_astro/botch-roll-specs.B1r2XscC_Z1Ch95n.png)
/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.
![Beat: Roll with
densities={[4]}
Specialties](/_astro/beat-roll-specs.DzqFAw-r_Z10lIMt.png)
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.
![Ambiguous traits cannot
densities={[4]}
be rolled](/_astro/ambiguous.C80bJwVh_Z1TELMO.png)
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.