One thing we found we were lacking in our Covid-19 online play was a basic dice roller.
Doesnt need to be anything fancier than roll20’s where there are just some buttons to click on and off (to indicate which dice to roll) and then a popup saying the result where everyone can see. (or just the DM if they are rolling behind the screen)
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This feature has been discussed in other threads and random places, but somehow has never had a thread to itself. Thanks for making this, I should’ve made a thread forever ago.
Unfortunately this feature is probably never coming to Shmeppy. Shmeppy is a very focused product and only tries to solve a few things for its users, Shmeppy wouldn’t be the way it is if this weren’t true. Dice rolling is just pretty far away from Shmeppy’s core feature set, and I think it’s fairly tidily solved by the many Discord bots (and other communication-platform bots) out there.
Indeed, I often hear (and see) people use these same bots with Roll20 and other platforms that implement dice rolling, because those platforms didn’t implement it in quite the way they want. Funnily enough, a friend of mine just now (while I’m writing this message) sent me a screenshot of them with two computers in front of them, one displaying Roll20 and the other displaying Google Hangouts (or another teleconferencing platform).
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A die roller is a great idea. It’s the one feature that would enable me to move play from Roll 20 entirely to Shmeppy.
I love the die roller within the chat side bar Tableplop have implemented, something like that would be really smooth, round out the features and allow users to play entirely in one window!
Many communication platforms have dice rolling either easily added or built-in (like Discord’s Avrae or Google Hangouts /roll). In this case, users aren’t really adding another tool to their piles, since the communication platform (which you needed anyways) has it built-in.
For a communication platform that doesn’t have an integration, there’s independent tools like teal multiplayer dice.
I’m interested in hearing about why integrating dice into Shmeppy would be much better than using one of these existing options. Personally I’ve always just used physical dice in my online games, so I haven’t felt this desire myself.
Notably, while “keeping everything in one window” is an upside that I don’t want to discount, it feels like a fairly weak upside on its own. Like it would be justify some cost of a feature but dice rolling or (especially) dice rolling plus chat would be a lot of effort and add a lot of new UI complexity.
If you’re going to do anything like the above, may it make more sense to use a Discord integration to Schmeppy? They’ve got a bunch of stuff, including voice support, and seems to specialize in integration. I’d also put this down the list.
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When I play online with different groups we tend to play PbtA games. We always use Discord for voice and as you say that has a bunch of dice bots which can be used.
What I often find is groups default to Roll 20 for everything apart from voice because it handles drawing maps adequately (but not anywhere near as well as Shmeppy) and you can roll dice in it. Sometimes we put character sheets in there, sometimes we don’t - it’s not a deal-breaker.
When we have used Shmeppy and Jamboard for maps and Discord or a website for rolling dice, these tools are awesome but the issue a lot of people seem to have is that there are too many windows open and it gets awkward.
To move away from Roll 20, my use case is I want to be able to quickly draw shared interior and exterior maps with tokens and roll dice in one place. Discord can sit in the background providing voice chat, and you can have your character sheet/rules in one window, and everything else contained in Shmeppy - it’s just a nice streamlined way to play.
It genuinely is a case of having less windows to flick between. It’s not that there aren’t ways around the issue and although dice rolling isn’t a must have it just makes life easier.
I’ve tried a lot of VTTs and collaborative map making tools, and Shmeppy is head and shoulders above them all for interior / dungeon maps. I genuinely love it, and try to promote it with or without dice rolling 
There are as many ways to play as there are players, so it could be that people who want dice rolling in Shmeppy are in the minority. I guess whether it adds enough value to make it worth the investment remains to be seen!
Discord integration to handle voice and dice rolling etc would be really, really interesting.
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This is a really heartening response to this feature request. Every map-making solution seems to eventually become Roll20, which is far too bloated to be useful or fun. Bravo!
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If you want to have a Dice Roller a quick solution would be Tiny D20:
I think the thing that is lacking however is that no one else can see your roll. A ‘public rolling’ app is quite difficult to find and get running. I know Discord and other chat rooms have tools like /roll but they are slow, cumbersome, have issues with users not knowing all the weird additional commands and completely lack any GUI features.
Maybe at some point there will be a decent 3rd party group dice roller app.
Our combo with Shmeppy is Avrae in Discord + D&DBeyond. Even for total beginners, it has been pretty straightforward. We’ve got new players, as in completely new to D&D, up and running with full character sheets and in Discord in less than half an hour. Takes a bit of coaching, but it’s not too difficult to grasp.
And actually shmeppy is probably the easiest. People take to it very quickly, in my experience.
I just came to the forum to search and see how a die roller (or if) its being developed. Been running my 5e Dnd Game and LOVE Schmeppy’s ease of use.
Due to the fact that my work buddies use Teams to play our game for voice - I was hoping to see one in development. Although there are LOTS of alternative products - a simple text box in the top right of the window thats lets people roll dice would be really helpful for my game.
A) when I want to roll a complex set of dice and sum it /roll 10d8+5
B) when I want to see what players are rolling.
C) To help players who are bad at math (I know… i know).
Please consider adding one to the game that helps deal with more complicated rolls
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I love shmeppy too. I too crave a shared dice roller supporting complex macros. Here are two stand alone shared experience dice rollers that handle macros and complex rolls.
rolz.org (also does chat and journaling, beware of journaling though easy to get locked out of it)
blacklich.com (the phone app is stronger than the web version)
The design goals of Shmeppy are succint. What makes Shmeppy great is why we don’t expect to see things like dice rollers, initiative, dynamic lighting etc. If I win the lotto I know where my first call will be!
Shared dice rolling is so important for our group. It has never been a trust issue. A few night’s ago a player made a huge roll, everyone cheered on line. The player screamed! Hahaha.
On the one hand, I agree that Shmeppy is a focused product and the lack of a dice roller, for me, does not necessarily take away from that. On the other hand, Shmeppy already has the shared experience aspect, and a simple text-based dice roller is rather simple to program, I actually made one myself a while back. So, while I don’t think it’s a requirement by any means, I do think it would be a nice-to-have. Shmeppy is about streamlining the tabletop map experience, and reducing the number of apps you have to have open to play is just one more way to improve that experience.
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That is great! Nice roller.
I love the Linux machine on the same site. What language did you compose the dice from?
Thanks! Pretty much all of the stuff on my site is all Javascript and CSS.
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Shmeppy now has a dice roller! Just deployed it to the main site.
Having a built-in dice roller would make online sessions way smoother.
Switching between windows or using other tools just to roll a die gets annoying and can totally mess up the flow during a game.
What’s worked for me is using simple online dice rollers. They’re super easy to use and don’t clutter up your setup. If you’re the one running the game, you can just share the results with everyone, or let the players roll their own to keep things fair and straightforward.