Troll, a language for specifying dice-rolls

• Authors: Torben Ægidius Mogensen
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM symposium on Applied Computing
• Year: 2009

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.