Dice pool

Notation, in one paragraph

Dice notation is two numbers and a letter: three d six means roll three six-sided dice. Everything after that is a rule. Plus two adds two to the total once, not to each die. The letters kh and a number keep that many of the highest, and kl keeps the lowest, which is how advantage and disadvantage are written. Greater-than-or-equal and a number counts every die that reaches it instead of adding them up.

You never have to type any of it. Every rule has a button, and the pool is written back out as notation above the buttons and as a plain English sentence below them, so the two ways of saying the same thing sit beside each other. That is the fastest way to learn the notation if you have been avoiding it.

Why it refuses rather than guesses

Type something the page does not fully understand and it says so and changes nothing. That is deliberate. A parser that took a good guess at two d six plus would quietly roll something, and the roll would look perfectly convincing, and the table would use it. Refusing is the only honest answer when the pool is ambiguous.

The same care runs through the rest. Exploding is capped so a run of top faces cannot hang the page, rerolling ones gives a single second chance rather than an endless one, and the result panel shows every face that was rolled, including the ones that were dropped, so the arithmetic can be checked by anybody who wants to.

Fair, and the same fair as the rest of the site

Every face comes from the browser's cryptographic random source with rejection sampling, which is the same generator behind the wheel, the coin and the dice roller. It matters more here than elsewhere: a d100 taken from a naive modulo of a random number is measurably biased towards its low numbers, and a game that leans on a d100 would feel it.

For two dice with a proper tumble and nothing to set up, the dice roller is still the page to open, and for the odds behind the common pools, the notation guide goes through it slowly.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.pool.last and pph.pool.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.