I've never played a real rpg before but I'm totally up for it
You're only up for it because iago is playing.
How hard would it be to make some commands for an IRC bot to do this?
IE:
.roll 10-20
.roll 20d (20-sided die)
I think that would work really well, given we'd be doing it on IRC and all..
Not very hard.
I can talk with xar about getting the source to amee (a perl IRC bot), and if all goes well, I can edit the hell out of it (or just take the basics of it) and turn it into an IRC bot with whatever functionality we need.
It could probably be done with an xchat or mIRC script.
If you guys want to play Tunnels and Trolls, we need 2 (3, sorta) rolling styles:
1. xd6. Any number of 6 sided dice, sometimes dozens of them.
2. 2d6, doubles-add-roll-over. 2 dice are rolled. If they match [1 1, 2 2, 3 3, etc.], they are rolled again. If they match, they're rolled again, until 2 different dice are rolled. The total is taken. So if you roll 6 6, then 3 3, then 1 3, you get 22. If anything below 4 is rolled (1 2 or 1 3), it's a fumble.
3. This one isn't used very much at all, but xd6 doubles-add-roll-over. You roll any number of dice. Then you take all the 1's, 2's, 3's, etc, and roll each of them separately. And in each of those, you roll all the doubles, etc. Obviously, this could get very messy, very fast. It's only used for berserked characters. Here is the source to a C program to look after berserkers that I wrote some time ago (Actually, it was in Windows-style C++, but luckly I wrote C-like code back then and it was easy to convert):
http://www.javaop.com/~iago/BerserkerDice.cAnd by the way, for players, I don't want to have more than 5 players + GM. So hopefully we won't be leaving anybody out, but for now, it's first-time-first-serve.