Drop/Keep Notation
GM: Alright, you step over the goblin’s corpse and go inside. There’s another one there. He hasn’t seen you yet.
Grindon The Brave: I guess I should have talked to the other one, you were right. This one i will just stealth and put him to sleep.
GM: It’s pretty dark in here, so I’ll give you advantage on a stealth roll
Grindon The Brave: Nice, “2d20kh”
GNOLL: [20]
GM: You are the night itself. You take down the goblin before it can even react.
Implementation Comparison
You might want to roll two dice and choose the higher or lower of the two in order to give you an advantage or disadvantage
There isn’t a consistent way to express this and some of them can be ambigious.
| Platform | Keep Highest/Drop Lowest | Keep Lowest/Drop Highest |
|---|---|---|
| Roll20 | 2d6kh | 2d6kl |
| Rolz | 2d6h | 2d6l |
| OpenRoleplaying | 2d6-L | 2d6-H |
| RoleGate | 2d6k | 2d6kl |
| Dice.Run | 2d6k | 2d6d |
| FoundryVTT | 2d6max | 2d6min |
| Avrae | 2d6k1 | 2d6p1 |
| DiceLogger | 2d6b1 | ? |
GNOLL Syntax
GNOLL’s Syntax is:
[𝑘𝑑] [ℎ𝑙] 𝑧 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑧 ∈ Z
+
e.g.
- 3d20kh2 - keep highest 2 rolls from 3 d20 rolls
- 3d20dl2 - drop lowest 2 rolls from 3 d20 rolls
- 3d20kl - keep lowest 1 (default if excluded) from 3 d20 rolls
‘Keep’ and ‘Drop’ are commonly used in feature documentation
‘d’ is sometimes avoided to avoid conflicting with the ‘d’ for defining a dice e.g. ‘d6’
GNOLL does not have this issue as a following term (l or h) are mandatory to avoid ambiguity.
Other Types of Dropping
Drop ‘Middle’
GNOLL does not allow dropping a ‘middle’ dice as it will create unintuitive rules for handling odd/even dice like “upper-middle” or “lower-middle”. Instead, you can reproduce this by dropping both sides of a roll.
e.g. 3d20dl1dh1
Drop Even/Odd
We suggest using Filters for this type of logic and other types of conditional removal.