Rolling online

This is a followup to my article about playing APBA by email or playing remotely.  A couple readers came up with some good hints that might be helpful for those who want to get the most out of playing APBA remotely.  Specifically, how to roll virtual ‘dice’ so that your opposing manager 500 miles away can see them too.

Steve Stein from the Transcontinental Baseball League, makes a suggestion about an AIM chat feature that I’ve heard about before:

“I use the boards, and we used a chat room to "roll" the dice – if you’re in an AIM chat room and type "//roll", a bot will generate a 2d6 result that you both can see.”

Dom Provisiero from the O.Z. League come up with a hint that was a new one on me:

“one of the ways we play long distance is to utilize an online program called ‘rolz’ which is a random dice roller program. Put the landline on speaker phone and you are good to go….both players can see the dice numbers on the screen.”

I’m pretty sure this is what Dom is referring to.  To save you a little bit of time, here is the code (I think) that will roll two six-sided dice: 

1d6;1d6

Here is a screenshot of the input screen and result (I won’t tell you how many times I had to roll to get that 66!).

The beauty of rolz.org is that you are able to play online so that your opponent can see your roll as well.  Pretty nifty program.

If anyone else has other cool tools they use, suggest them in the comment section!