Tech Week: Quick Dice Roller

I have been looking for the best dice rolling app for my Kindle Fire, and finally have found one: Quick Dice Roller from Ohmnibus. 

My search has had me download many dice apps, but it has been hard to find one that handles my needs. Most have been 3d dice programs that let you roll D&D dice by shaking. They look nice, but are slow and frankly if I wanted to roll realistic 3d dice I would roll... actual dice!

Most apps are aimed at the D&D player, offering the polyhedral set, but with no options for other games. You might find a roller that does another system, such as a World of Darkness dice pool app, but nothing else. I play a lot of Savage Worlds and found only one dice roller for it, but it was difficult to use, and kind of ugly to look at. All I want is a flexible roller that has a roll history, and is simple in design and fast. Free would be good as well.

Enter Quick Dice Roller. It handles dice for lots of games. Shadowrun, new and old World of Darkness, D&D, HERO, Dystopian Ward, and a bunch more. It can be adapted to other games. This is because it uses a programmable dice model. You build the die and how it works from a number of functions. Oh, BTW: It's free!

WARNING: THIS IS NOT AS HARD AS IT SOUNDS!

To use it you open up a new dice bag to hold the dice for your game. Next, define a die. To do this you give the die a name and description, and then enter in the function to make it work. Functions can be as easy as:

1d20

That rolls a d20. Want to add a modifier, you can do that in the formula. Perhaps your attack with a longsword is d20+4.

1d20+4

To roll a six-dice pool in New World of Darkness, with a target of 4:

nwod(6,4)

See, easy. It does get a little bit more complicated for other die rolls. I made a dice set for Savage Worlds that rolls a die (such as a d8) and a wild die at the same time, explodes them as necessary, and then tells me the biggest result. The formula is:

max(expup(1d8),expup(1d6))

All of this is explained on their wiki, with plenty of examples. Also, if you join the Google+ group for the app you can get help on how to write a formula, ask questions of the developer, and suggest new features to him. He seems like a good guy.

Get the App from the Google Play Store, or from the Amazon App Store.