tenebrous-dicebot/README.md

matrix-dicebot

This is a fork of the axfive-matrix-dicebot with basic support for the Chronicles of Darkness 2E Storytelling System, with future plans to extend the codebase further to support variables and perhaps character sheet management.

Features

matrix-dicebot is a basic dice rolling bot. It currently has the following features:

• Rolling arbitrary dice expressions (e.g. 1d4, 1d20+5, 1d8+1d6, etc).
• Rolling dice pools for the Chronicles of Darkness 2E Storytelling System.
• Works in encrypted or unencrypted Matrix rooms.

Building and Installation

Running with Docker

The dice bot can run in a minimal Docker image based on Void Linux. You can either pull it from Docker Hub or build it yourself. The easiest way is to use the prebuilt image. It is updated on Docker Hub via a CI/CD pipeline. The latest tag always points to the most recent successful master commit and is considered unstable, while individual tags are considered stable:

• Unstable: docker pull projectmoon/chronicle-dicebot:latest
• Stable: docker pull projectmoon/chronicle-dicebot:vX.Y.Z

To create the Docker image, run docker build -t chronicle-dicebot . in the root of the repository.

After pulling or building the image, see instructions on how to use the Docker image.

Build from Source

Precompiled executables are not yet available. Clone this repository and run cargo install.

Building the project requires:

• Rust 1.45.0 or higher.
• OpenSSL/LibreSSL development headers installed.
• glibc (probably)

Why doesn't it build on musl libc?

As far as I can tell, the project doesn't build on musl libc. It certainly doesn't build a static binary out of the box using the rust-musl-builder. This appears to be due to a transitive dependency of the Rust Matrix SDK.

Any PRs to get the project or Matrix SDK to properly be built into a static binary using musl would be very useful.

Usage

To use it, you can invite the bot to any room you want, and it will automatically jump in. Then you can simply give a dice expressions for either the Storytelling System or more traditional RPG dice rolls.

The bot supports a !help command for basic help information about its capabilities.

The commands !roll and !r can handle arbitrary dice roll expressions.

!roll 4d6
!r 4d7 + 3
!r 3d12 - 5d2 + 3 - 7d3 + 20d20

The commands !pool (or !rp) and !chance are for the Storytelling System, and they use a specific syntax to support the dice system. The simplest version of the command is !pool <num> to roll a pool of the given size using the most common type of roll.

The type of roll can be controlled by adding n, e, or r after the number, for 9-again, 8-again, and rote quality rolls. The number of successes required for an exceptional success can be controlled by s<num>, e.g. s3 to only need 3 successes for an exceptional success.

Examples:

!pool 8     //regular pool of 8 dice
!pool 8n    //roll 8 dice, 9-again
!pool 8ns3  //roll 8 dice, 9-again with only 3 successes for exceptional
!pool 5rs2  //5 dice, rote quality, 2 successes for exceptional

Running the Bot

You can run the bot by creating a Matrix account for it, building the application, and creating a config file that looks like this:

[matrix]
home_server = https://example.com'
username = 'thisismyusername'
password = 'thisismypassword'

Make sure to replace the information with your own. Then you can run the "dicebot" binary. It takes the path to the configuration file as its single argument.

You can also run it on the command line with the dicebot-cmd command, which expects you to feed it one of the command expressions as shown above, and will give you the plaintext response.

Docker Image

A typical docker run command using the Docker Hub image should look something like this:

VERSION="latest"
docker run --rm -d --name dicebot \
-v /path/to/dicebot-config.toml:/config/dicebot-config.toml:ro \
-v /path/to/cache/:/cache \
projectmoon/chronicle-dicebot:$VERSION

The Docker image requires two volume mounts: the location of the config file, which should be mounted at /config/dicebot-config.toml, and a cache directory to store client state after initial sync. That should be mounted at /cache/in the container.

Future plans

The most basic plans are:

• To add support for simple per-user variable management, e.g. setting a name to a value (gnosis = 3) and then using those in dice rolls.
• Perhaps some sort of character sheet integration. But for that, we would need a sheet service.
• Automation of Docker builds and precompiled binaries.
• Use environment variables instead of config file in Docker image.