What is "Roll Your Own (RYO)"?

One aspect of gaming that many people love is the real-life rolling of dice to determine outcomes based on chance. Rolling up a character or rolling to see if your character succeeded when picking a lock or rolling to see how much damage was caused by a succesful attack..

How It Works

When a die/dice roll is needed, the game will prompt the player to roll one or more die of a certain type. If the roll is being made to determine success or failure, then the player will also be shown a percentage that represents their chance of success, something like "You have a 50% chance of success." If the roll is being made to determine how much damage an attack causes or something like that, then you will simply see the RYO control telling you how many dice to roll and what type.

An input control will allow the player to type in the number that they rolled. If the player doesn't have the required type of dice then they can just "guess" a number. They could also choose to have the computer "roll" for them.

The Underlying System

You may be thinking that you could easily cheat the system by typing in a number that you believe to be the "high roll", but that's where we change things up a little. You see, we've swapped all of the numbers around, so that you don't know exactly which numbers are the "winning" numbers. This does take away an aspect of dice rolling, knowing what you want to roll, but we still feel that allowing players to play with their own dice is worth the effort.

The technical details are beyond this guide, but we will provide a brief explanation of how this system works.

Rolling for Success / Failure

Let's say that the player is given a 50% change to succeed at some action and that their "roll" is going to determine their success. In standard tabletop game, they might roll a 6-sided die and aim for a value of 1-3. In this case, RYO would take the numbers 1-6 and randomly assign 50% of them to be a success and the remaining would be a fail. Each roll would result in a new random set of values and the player would not know which were success and which were fail.

• Roll of 1 equals success
• Roll of 2 equals fail
• Roll of 3 equals fail
• Roll of 4 equals success
• Roll of 5 equals success
• Roll of 6 equals fail

Rolling for Random Outcome

Dice are also rolled to determine other outcomes. Let's say we rolled once to determine if our attack hit the enemy, but now we want to see how much damage the attack did. We would then do another roll and this time the values represent how many points of damage we did. The values might be distributed like this. Remember that each roll changes the distribution of values randomly.

The player is instructed to roll 1d6 for damage.

• Roll of 1 equals 5 points of damage.
• Roll of 2 equals 2 points of damage.
• Roll of 3 equals 6 points of damage.
• Roll of 4 equals 1 point of damage.
• Roll of 5 equals 3 points of damage
• Roll of 6 equals 4 points of damage.

Dice Notation

Dice notation (also known as common dice notation, RPG dice notation, and several other titles) is a system to represent different combinations of dice in tabletop games using simple algebra-like notation such as 4d6. Dice notation can be very complex, but for the purposes of this game we keep things fairly simple.

How to read dice notation

Standard Notation

Dice notation is most commonly made up of 2 values. The two values represent how many dice to roll and what type of dice to roll. In most notation, there will also be the letter "d", which stands for "die", the singular of "dice".

So 1d6 would be saying to roll one 6-sided die. 2d4 would mean, roll two 4-sided die.

Percentile Dice

There is another type of dice notation used in our game and that is the percentile dice roll. Since we tell the player their odds as a percentage, we designate percentile rolls as 1d100 to make it more easily distinguishable. If you have a set of RPG dice, then you know how this works already, but if not then keep reading. Using two 10-sided die requires setting one die as the "ones" and one die as the "tens". You roll the dice and add the results. The "tens" represent the values "10,20,30,40..." the "ones" represent "1, 2, 3, 4...". So a roll of 5 and 9, if 5 was the "tens", would eqaul 59.

Some 10-sided dice come already showing the "tens" and the "ones", so you don't have to remember which is which.

Examples of Dice Notation

Notation	Range	Description
1d6	1-6	Roll one six-sided die.
3d6	3-18	Roll three six-sided die.
1d100	1-100	Roll your percentile die/dice.