Hi,

I'm trying to set up a Savage Worlds game, and was trying out the dice roller.

When I enter d4,d6 in Manually enter dice entry, it does roll the two dice.

However, if I choose Keep Highest 1, it refuses to roll saying You cannot drop or keep as many dice as you're rolling. But I am trying to keep fewer dice (1) than I roll (2)!

What can I do?

The problem isn't that you aren't rolling 2 dice, it is that you are rolling 2 different dice... You can't roll a D4 and a D6 and ask to keep the highest roll...

Interesting to note... you can roll multiples of the same rule set in the one roll:

Dungeon Master rolled 3,6 using 2d4,2d6, dropping the lowest dice only with rolls of 1,3,6,1.
Dungeon Master rolled 4,17 using 2d4,3d20, keeping the highest dice only ((3,4,17,3,3)).

Yes, because now you are rolling 2 of each die type...  If you were to try to roll 2d4,d6 dropping the lowest, it would fail because there is only one d6 being rolled...  It doesn't matter that there are 3 dice rolled but that they are not the same... the d4 die can never be the drop (or keep) die to a different sized die type...   If you wish to use drop/keep, each manually entered die size must have 2 or more of the same die size...

If the request that the OP made was to actually roll a d4 and a d6 and keep whichever of those two different die sizes is higher, the rPol roller cannot calculate it...
This message was last edited by the user at 14:17, Sat 21 Oct 2023.

OP isn't rolling two dice, he's rolling 1 die, and then he's rolling 1 die again.

As he stated it: d4,d6. That's 2 different rolls done separately and printed out at once.

There IS an old fashioned way to drop the lowest: manually. Presumably you know if 4 is lower than 6?

I'm not at all sure why the system not doing it is a problem, but it worries me that it is.

For the same reason drop-lowest and keep-highest are nice features to have in the first place.  Why bother with those features at all?

It's more convenient to have the roller do it automatically, and there's so much it will do automatically that it's logical to assume "I'm not setting it up right" or "Something's borked" before assuming "It just can't do this."

More convenient to compare two single digit numbers from two different die sizes by machine...

As I say, it's worrisome.


Sure, lowest of several is handy and easier, but that's not the case here. 2 single dice, differing sizes IS the case here.

I truly think more effort would go into setting up the die roller to compare a single die to a single die, than would go into simply looking at the result of the single output line and picking the 6 over the 2.

That isn't convenience, quite the opposite. It's...worrisome.

More than likely he was looking for a way that the system would report just the single number as the result so that all of his players would do it exactly the same and he could easily see the result without having to look at both results each time...

For you, it is worrisome and that is your right but to others, being able to tell their players "this is how all dice rolls will be made" and having the roller do the comparison automatically is preferable...
This message was last edited by the user at 19:19, Sat 21 Oct 2023.

You're fixating on the wrong thing.  1d4 and 1d6 is a toy example.  Savage Worlds is a dice pool system, and you can end up rolling a dozen dice of multiple sizes.  The OP is trying to set up the default roller settings for a Savage Worlds game, and 1d4,1d6 is just the degenerate case being used to test the roller.
This message was last edited by the user at 19:24, Sat 21 Oct 2023.

Savage Worlds rolls look to beat a target number, usually 4, and the dice can explode, so I think there's utility in this. I find it strange the topic hasn't come up before with the number of SW games here!

Looks like more complex functionality than was originally envisaged, so probably more of a question of someone who knows the system drawing up a specification for special dice rolls for the Savage Worlds system (ie an addition to the Game System/Special Dice drop down) and posting it in RPoL Development for jase to consider.

Off the top of my head ... sure the 1D4, 1D6 case could work as is with Keep Highest, however once you start in with multiple dice (if such a thing has utility, whether in Savage Worlds or any other system) you have a logic problem for the programmer which would take additional controls to resolve:

• 1D4, 2D6 - is it supposed to keep the D4 result + the higher of the D6 rolls, OR the highest of all three ?
  
  
• 2D4, 1D6 - is it supposed to keep the higher of the D4 rolls + the D6 result, OR the higher of all three ?
  
  
• 2D4, 2D6 - is it supposed to keep the sum of the D4 rolls + the higher of the D6 rolls OR the higher of  the D4 rolls + the  sum of the D6 rolls, OR the higher of the D4 rolls + the higher of the D6 rolls OR the highest of all four rolls ?

Though by the time you'd finished selecting all the controls to handle that (bearing in mind I've only listed 2 dice types, but there could be more and in the absence of game system specific coding the above logic gets exponentially more complex), I think it'd be easier to roll each dice separately either as sum or Keep Highest, as required, and then do the comparison/addition manually.  :>

An excellent interim solution would be "keep highest 1 of 1" to work, so that when you have multiple dice of different sizes, you can use that to just present the highest of each size, even if one of those sizes has only one member.

This would be nice in the regular manual roller as well as for the Special Dice section...

When rolling an attack, I use the manual entry as 1d20+X,1dY+Z to roll To Hit,Damage... It works fine until you have advantage on the attack. You have to either roll the advantage attack together and a separate damage roll
Ex: Roll 1 - 2d20+X, Drop Lowest
Roll 2 - 1dY+Z
 -or- roll the base attack,damage and a separate advantage attack
Ex: Roll 1 - 1d20+X,1dY+Z
Roll 2 - 1d20+X

It would be easier to have the ability to roll the advantage attack (2d20 keep highest) and the damage (1dY) as one line...But I understand Skald's discussion on complexity so it may be too much for a simple roller to accommodate...  =)

I can obviously choose the highest of two, but if there's a feature for that, I'd like to use it.

The savage worlds system goes like this:
* you roll two dice, one is a d6, the other is your skill and can be different
* each explodes separately
* you keep the higher result

So it's not my idea, that's how it works. I can live with me and the players choosing the higher manually (or mentally), but I thought I was doing something wrong that it didn't work.

I'm not a code-monkey, so I have no solutions to suggest, but it seems like the current system is designed to keep the highest/lose the lowest roll in each specific category of dice entered, as opposed to analyzing the actual results of the rolls and figuring out which individual die of different categories got the highest result.

I'm pretty sure the code could be jiggered so there would be some combination of Boolean expressions that would let you accomplish that particular task...but for those of us who don't use Booleans on a regular basis, that would actually be more complicated than just making the individual rolls and sorting out the results ourselves...

And it might be a whole lot simpler than I'm envisioning (it wouldn't be the first time I've overcomplicated something computer-related...)  But my understanding of the special dice modifications is that they're supposed to make it easier (like automatically including a wild die in the D6 Star Wars system, instead of having players roll the rest of their dice and then a single die for the wild)...it becomes a questionable advantage to have it programmed if it takes more work to set up the roll than it does to "do it the old-fashioned way" and sort out the results by hand.

(If there is a simple option, please don't bother trying to explain it to me.  It'd be like trying to explain the Danish translation of something to me in Greek...I'm not going to get it...feel free to 'share with the class', but know that I'm going to look at the explanation like a chimpanzee being shown a calculus equation, my eyes will glaze over, and I'll promptly move on to the next thread I need to check...I'll understand the concepts, probably, but the fine mechanics of it will go right by me.  There's a reason I work in live entertainment and not IT or software development...)

I think I can think of something simple enough for you.  Just add a "pool()" modifier.  So if you want the highest individual die out of 3d6 and 4d4, just put "pool(3d6,4d4)" in the box.  Then you could use the widget that already exists for keep highest.

It would also be nice if Keep Highest and Keep Lowest could be set to keep as many or more dice than you actually have.  Because as someone else noted, in D&D 5e you can have advantage on attacks, and it'd be nice to roll damage in the same roll.  So you want "2d20,1d8+3, keep highest 1".  One of the d20's is going to be the highest, and the d8 is going to be the highest too, since there's nothing else to be higher.


Combining those two changes would cover a lot of ground.  Then you could do "1d20,pool(3d8,5d4)", set it to "keep highest 3", and get the 1d20 by itself, and the sum of the three highest dice from that pool.
This message was last edited by the user at 06:59, Sun 22 Oct 2023.