Happy Friday, Astralnauts.
Back in March, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we decided to open up all paid features on Astral and make them free for everyone to use until the end of April. Our goal was to help groups continue their tabletop roleplaying campaigns, even if they needed to play them while social distancing or self-isolating.
Now April is nearly over, but the need for remote gaming remains. The Astral team has decided to extend the offer of free Pro features through the month of May. We sincerely hope this extension will help folks who may be struggling with isolation.
Anyone already subscribed to Astral will still enjoy May for free, as we will automatically credit your account. Your next statement will reflect the credit applied.
We have seen an incredible amount of new GMs and players over the past month
and have been overwhelmed by your support and feedback. If you are enjoying
Astral and are in a position to help us offset our server costs at this time,
then we are offering a 30% discount on annual subscription plans purchased
before the end of May. Use the promo code PLAYATHOME
during checkout to
get a year of Astral Pro (originally $99.99) for just $70.
As always, thanks for being an Astralnaut. Game on!
We continue to address reported issues and requests. As always, we are very interested in your feedback.
More requests from the community were addressed this week:
Thank you to everyone who reported issues this week.
We continue to work diligently on your requests and feedback; please let us know your thoughts on Discord or the forums.
We continue to make progress on the performance issues related to high volume traffic. We’re monitoring some already implemented performance enhancements and will be iterating further on this in the coming weeks.
In an effort to be more transparent regarding the performance of the site, GMs and players will now notice a “Session Health” signal bar next to connected participants' names that will indicate the strength of that participant’s connection to Astral's servers. Each participant's connection health indicates their own latency to the Astral servers; the other players' connections are not affected. If your friend has a poor connection to the game, booting them from the game won’t help anyone!
We’ve completed brainstorming and testing for some advanced roll syntax features that we mentioned last week:
1
counts as two successes!dp
) flag, we can easily use multiple flags to define our ranges: 2d20dp<={Control + Engineering}dp=1
1d6>=3
)14
, any roll below 14 would add a success to the count (dp<={...stats…}
). If the roll is a nat 1, not only would it add a success for meeting the previous threshold, but it would add another success since it’s a crit! (dp=1
)e
, rr
, or ro
), all of the other flags will apply to your rerolled dice as well. So if you roll 4d6min3e
, your exploding dice will also have a minimum result of 3.cs
) and Critical Fumble (cf
)cs
and Critical Fumble cf
flags, we can define where our success and fumble ranges are, so that the die gets colored properly. Using our previous example of Star Trek Adventures, you actually want to roll lower, so we can invert the default success and fumble values by adding cs=1cf=20
to our list of flags. That makes our final roll: 2d20cs=1cf=20dp<={Control + Engineering}dp=1
cl
)cl
flag will automatically add similar values together from custom sided dice. As long as the numbers or letters/symbols are separated by a space, the numbers will get pulled out and added to the total number result. One use for this might be for challenge dice: 4d[0,0,1,a,1 A,1 A]cl
0, 1, 1, 1 A
would give you a final result of 3 | A
, instead of the existing result of 2 | 1 A
A1
steak sauce challenge die, you could leave out the space and the cl
flag would skip over the A1
when looking for values to split.m
)m
flag. 10d6m
will roll ten 6-sided dice, and group them into groups of 2 or more.10d6m3
to only match triples.10d6m>4
will only match pairs of 5's and 6's.10d6m4<3
will only match 4-of-a-kind rolls of values less than 3.max
/min
will use the index -- If you roll a 1d[a,b,c,1,2,3]max3
, the possible values would be a
, b
, or c
. The 3
is referring to the third item in the list, so max value for that die would be c
.e
, rr
, and ro
thresholds will always use the index of a custom die when determining whether or not to reroll. So a roll of 1d[a,b,c,e,f,g]rr>3
will reroll only on those sides after but not including the third item, in this case e,f,g
.4d[a,b,c,1,2,3]kl2
will keep the lowest two dice (2 is referring to the number of dice, not to an index). a
is the lowest value and 3
is the highest value on this particular die.1d[0,0,0,1,1,2]e
will only explode when you get a 2 (This custom die was created to facilitate the way they use evens/odds for their success thresholds)1d6dp=2dp=4dp=6dp=6e
(Note 6’s count for two successes, so we need to add that one twice). The e
still works as expected here, exploding only on a 6
.One advanced flag we were not able to finalize this week is the ability to count failures in addition to successes. dp
counts successes, but if a certain threshold of failure has dire tidings (20
in Star Trek Adventures, for example, introduces Consequences), they are not counted but simply ignored. This means as a player/GM, each die roll will need to be inspected to see if any 20
s were rolled). That doesn't vibe with our desire to make rolling as hands-off as possible, so we'll be working on a new flag to enable the counting of these failure ranges.
These advanced roll syntax changes will be available for testing in beta next week. We're continuing to monitor the Advanced Roll Syntax feature request, and we encourage everyone to share their use cases for the new flags and let us know what you think about these changes.
We're continuing to look at the forums for feature requests, support tickets, and Discord to hear what you all have to say. Please don't hesitate to reach out and voice your feedback. Our table always has an open seat, let us know what you think.
Thanks for reading and for being a dedicated Astralnaut! We look forward to bringing you more updates from the Astral Plane.
- Team Astral
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