Troll, a Language for specifying Dice-rolls

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Abstract

Dice are used in many games, and often in fairly complex ways that make it difficult to unambiguously describe the dice-roll mechanism in plain language.

Many role-playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons, use a formalised notation for some instances of dice-rolls. This notation, once explained, make dice-roll descriptions concise and unambiguous. Furthermore, the notation has been used in automated tools for pseudo-random dice-rolling (typically used when playing over the Internet).

This notation is, however, fairly limited in the types of dice-rolls it can describe, so most games still use natural language to describe rolls. Even Dungeons & Dragons use formal notation only for some of the dice-roll methods used in the game. Hence, a more complete notation is in this paper proposed, and a tool for pseudo-random rolls and (nearly) exact probability calculations is described.

The notation is called "Troll", combining the initial of the Danish word for dice ("terninger") with the English word "roll". It is a development of the language Roll described in an earlier paper. The present paper describes the most important features of Troll and its implementation.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2009 ACM symposium on Applied Computing : Programming Language Track
Number of pages6
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Publication date2009
Pages1910-1915
ISBN (Print)978-1-60558-166-8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2009
EventThe 2009 ACM symposium on Applied Computing (SAC '09) - Honolulu, United States
Duration: 9 Mar 200912 Mar 2009
Conference number: 24

Conference

ConferenceThe 2009 ACM symposium on Applied Computing (SAC '09)
Number24
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityHonolulu
Period09/03/200912/03/2009

Keywords

  • Faculty of Science
  • Programming languages
  • Probability calculation
  • Games

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