Confessions of a Game-Mistress

Obsessions do occasionally lead to success.

I spent a disturbing amount of time prowling the web in search of possible stand-alone USB capable dice programs, and found a few. I’ll be testing them out to be certain that they’re really stand alones, and to provide reviews. Here’s the ones I’ve found so far, and my quick impressions.

1) Dice-Roller - (aka Pixelweaver dice roller) I found a number of dead links to this little applet, which seems to be no longer supported on its home site. The only one that worked was the pcmag site. It’s as simple as it can get, and seems to be functional as a stand alone.

2) RDR3 - This one is also pretty simple, but required an installation. I pulled the exe out and it seems to be functioning separately, but I may have to pull this one.

3) Craig’s Die Roller - This one is also a simple point and click. I was amused by the license. Mast things are ‘creative commons’ or ‘rights reserved’. This is released under the DO WHAT THE F*** YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE. No, I’m not kidding.

4) TiraDadi - This simple roller also supports expressions, and it’s my favorite so far. Not the most complex, but it still has a small footprint, unlike our last contestant…

5) RPG Dice Roller - Created as a compiled runtime Filemaker Pro application, this is easily the most complicated thing I’ve seen that might work as a standalone. It’s HUGE (25 M for a dice program), but it offers preconfigured pages for several RPG systems including d20 and Fudge.

Near-misses - I saw a number of great programs out there that I’ll be saving for a laptop-based version of this article. It’s possible some might work as standalones, but for the purposes of USB implementation I had to require that the programs rely on no runtimes based in the system.