A dice roller inside google sheets (Available and in testing)

[darkade]

Hi! I’m Anya! I’ve played for a few months in a few games with The Gauntlet and I just put online a free dice roller compatible with Google Sheets and the character keepers. It’s called Yonder Dice Roller for Sheets

Basically install an add-on that activates a sidebar in sheets and from there you can roll.

Right now it supports PbtA and FitD games. For PbtA this means you click a stat and it will roll 2d6, you can select advantage, disadvantage and other modifiers as required. For FitD it’s similar but it will roll a d6 for each point in the stat.

The nice thing is that you are probably already using a character keeper, so this also adds a _rolls sheet to write down everyone’s rolls. Here’s some screenshots for the Thirsty Sword Lesbians keeper

0. Once installed go to the Extensions > Yonder Dice Roller menu > PbtA

1. This will open the Yonder sidebar

Write your character name. Select the range with your stats in the sheet, and click Get stats from range

2. And get your stats in the sidebar

3. Once you click on one of the stats the roll will appear both in the sidebar and in the _rolls sheet

And that’s about it! With the coming Gauntlet Con coming I hope you could find it useful. Get it here!! https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/yonder_dice_roller_for_sheets/52635364892

The rest of this post is some other examples

Other games

FitD

Here I’m using the Blades in the Dark keeper, I made a small amendment to the stats, in Column AS I added this formula =COUNTA(AK3:AN3) that counts the number of checks in the boxes. Yonder only works with numbers

Forged in the Dark games tend to have a lot more rolls, so it will automatically show them in rows of four. Note that I checked Stat names in first column to indicate that my stats are in a column instead of in a row

Once again when you roll you will see the result, you can choose Push yourself or Devil's Bargain to add those dice to the pool. Here I checked Push yourself so it’s a three roll

And if I were to click on a stat with 0 like Command it will roll two dice and keep the lowest

You can see the numbers in dice figures, I’m using the Dicier Font by Speak the Sky

PbtA + Extra bonuses

This is the keeper for Flying Circus (the game uses 2d10 instead of 2d6 but I made this keeper, it’s pretty and wanted to show off)

For The Studend playbook Flying Circus has additional skills, that you can add to your roll. Here I’m showing Engineering and Economics.

And a roll with Disadvantage and adding Engineering.

Contact & Future

As I said it’s available! So you can test if you’d like, and let me know if it works for you or if you’d like to see something else added.

In the close future I plan to add full support for flying circus, which is what I am testing in my personal games. And at some point polyhedral dice to make it as system agnostic as possible.

Hope you like it!

Again, you can get it right now for free here https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/yonder_dice_roller_for_sheets/52635364892

And find me here https://anya.reyescon.de/

[Paul_T]

That’s very impressive! (I didn’t test it; I’m just going by your screenshots and descriptions.)

I know some people have security concerns about using macros and things like these in a spreadsheet. Do you know if your add-on has the same potential issues, or avoids them?

[darkade]

Totally valid concerns. These are the permissions the Add-on needs:

- View and manage spreadsheets that this application has been installed in
This means the add-on will only ever be able to read and write to sheets you’ve enabled it for. It can never has access to your google drive since there’s no permission granted for that

- Display and run third-party web content in prompts and sidebars inside Google applications
This is to show sidebars and in the near future dialogs in the center of the screen. I think it requires permission because in the end it’s kind of an embed and sandboxed web page, meaning it doesn’t has access to any other part of your browser, and again, will only ever execute in the sheets you’ve enabled it for.

Coping and pasting code you don’t understand is never a good idea, and granting permissions you don’t understand even less so. But this being available in the Google Workspaces Marketplace means that the permissions required have been gone over by someone at google of course I’m required to say that this not google affiliated or endorsed or anything. But it’s a layer of security

[edige23]

This is very cool-- I know the issue we had earlier with rollers built into sheets was that each person using the sheet would see a different random result when a roll was made. Great to see something which solves that. And the sheets look great. Amazing work!

[darkade]

Thanks! And yes, there should be no problems with rolls appearing different for different people. I’m also working to show a small “toast” with rolls in the bottom right corner, but it’s glitchy right now, and it technically isn’t in /real time/ rather it checks for new rolls every 30 seconds

I’ve been using this for a couple of months now, and it works for us, hopes it works for the community!

[darkade]

I just added the capability to roll any dice combination. This will not add any kind of modifier, but if you need other rolls they are possible now :3

A 5d20 roll

A roll with multiple polyhedral dice

[Deodatus]

You are sooo cool! Many thanks!

[Anders]

I did a very quick-and-dirty test for a Blades keeper, and it seems to work really well!

For FitD games (and the occasional PbtA game), you’ll probably want to add a dummy stat to the keeper so you can roll something other than your actual stats. In BitD you occasionally roll your crew’s tier, or the quality of a cohort, or something else that’s not directly one of your stats.

I think it would also be useful to allow for adding other modifiers than Push/Devil’s Bargain, for those games that have other modifiers, or name those modifiers different things. Maybe the names of those checkboxes could also be read from the sheet? Just a thought.

From just a brief test, this looks like an awesome addition to character keepers. Many thanks for doing this!

[RichRogers]

This is very exciting @darkade, thanks for sharing! I’m going to integrate it into a character keeper now for testing.

Rich

[darkade]

Thanks, @Anders! In order:

• For things like quality or other “improvised rolls” as I call them, you can click the R button on the bottom right corner, that should open a menu that lets you roll, say 2d6, or 20d20

• Yes for PbtA “Extra Bonuses” are already implemented, I should be able to add it to FitD
  

Thank you very much, for your feedback, I’ll see if I can add the Extra Bonuses to FitD

[darkade]

Thanks, @RichRogers!! Let me know if there’s something you see missing and I’ll see if I can fit it into Yonder!

If you find something that plain doesn’t work or you think should be different, please let me know.

Just yesterday I added more dedicated support for Flying Circus with the OK of Erika Chappell. So I’m actively developing, it is what I am using for my own games after all

[darkade]

Thank you @Deodatus If you are able to test do let me know your feedback!

[Anders]

Cool! Yes, the improvised rolls work. Would it be possible to have them be FitD style rolls (pick highest) in the FitD version of the roller?

That’s a very minor thing since it’s easy enough to pick out the highest, but just for consistency.

Another question: It seems like the roller is tied to the user, which makes it tricky for me as the, uh, keeper of the character keeper to set everything up for the players. Is this correct, or am I missing something again?

[RichRogers]

@Anders

Another question: It seems like the roller is tied to the user, which makes it tricky for me as the, uh, keeper of the character keeper to set everything up for the players. Is this correct, or am I missing something again?

Yes, I noticed that, too. When I make a Character Keeper, I can’t really “set this up” for folks to make it easier for newbies to use.

[darkade]

Could you expand a bit? Yes, the add-on is tied per user right now, but I’m not clear on what would be "expected behavior " I do have an idea, but I’m not sure if it’s what I am understanding or what you mean and I wouldn’t want to bias you

On the other hand

@Anders

Cool! Yes, the improvised rolls work. Would it be possible to have them be FitD style rolls (pick highest) in the FitD version of the roller?

It’s possible but my intention with the polyhedrics is to keep it as “agnostic” as possible, but a thing that could solve it would be to sort the dice so that the highest is always to the left and you can see it a glance instead of looking for it

[Anders]

Sorting the dice would make that even easier. Like I said, it works fine now for FitD as you’re not rolling fistfuls of dice.

What I mean is that as the GM, I’d like to be able to set up the diceroller sidebar for each player character, partly because not all players who use a character keeper are necessarily proficient enough or comfortable enough with Google Sheets to do so by themselves, and partly just to save time.

Also, not all sheet designs work naturally with the dice roller, like if stats you may need to roll are spread out more, or if a FitD sheet has the abilities used for resistance rolls inbetween the groups of actions but you don’t want it that way in the roller. That’s easily solved by having a part of the keeper where the stats are copied to, but that again makes it tricky for the player to handle this on their own.

Does that make more sense?

[darkade]

Yup, pretty similar to what I understood.

Ok, the problem is divided in two parts:

1. Installing the add-on, AKA, make it so that it’s accessible to everyone using the roller. This unfortunately is not possible, because of the nature of permissions and add-ons. Everyone needs to install it, but once installed it is installed. I really hope it could work some other way, like installing it to the document instead of per-user, but alas

2. A game master section should be possible and it is what came to my mind first reading your comment. The only major hurdle I’m seeing is that you would need to provide every player’s access email (at least for the time being) so that they are able to see what you’ve pre-filled. “Claming” pre-gen characters would be far trickier given the limitations of sheets

I’ll think about this one to see if there’s a workaround to “claim”, but I totally see your point.

I will deploy sorted dice and other extra bonuses for FitD during the week :3

[Anders]

I don’t think installing the add-on is as big of a deal, since it’s something you only need to do once.

Maybe if you could edit the stat lineup (names and number of stats) from inside the sidebar that would make things easier? I dunno, that’s just a stray thought.

Either way, having this available is sure to improve the gaming experience of many people. Thanks for making it, and thanks for taking the time to listen to my confused complaints.

[darkade]

Nah I don’t think you are confused, I’m really sorry if I came across that way. It’s more that developing is my dayjob, and I find it better not to say what I think until I tease out everything from users, because otherwise they tend to answer “what I want to hear” instead of what they are actually looking for

Editing the stats, in a similar way to extra bonuses for PbtA should be possible. It was actually the first way I implemented it, but I wanted to tie it closer to the sheet. Given this feedback I think there might be an in-between way that I’m not yet seeing, but it’s very worthy to explore

Your feedback is very appreciated and I think adding these changes would improve Yonder a lot, thanks!

[Anders]

Happy to help!

I do think reading the stats directly from the sheet will be the best solution most of the time, but I think it could be useful to have the option of doing it some other way for when it doesn’t work that well.

For example, a more complex game like Legacy: Life Among the Ruins has several sets of stats that it usually doesn’t make sense to group together, and the dice roller could actually help with keeping things more readily accessible there.