Astral Pro Extended Free through May

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.

Help support Astral

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!

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Changelog

We continue to address reported issues and requests. As always, we are very interested in your feedback.

Enhancements

More requests from the community were addressed this week:

• Added D&D 5E Simple Sheetless Quick Start as a template option for D&D games
  • Shoutout to community member DM_NoKazoo for this submission!
• Added Expanse RPG as a separate system from Modern AGE
  • This keeps the Expanse template out of your Modern AGE games
• Added some more performance tips to the knowledgebase performance article

Fixed

Thank you to everyone who reported issues this week.

• Fixed an issue where participants online status would change repeatedly
• Fixed Action Bars not displaying reliably for players
• Fixed issues with the Pathfinder 2 Template Character missing checkboxes
• Fixed an issue where players could possibly join on the second map

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In Progress

We continue to work diligently on your requests and feedback; please let us know your thoughts on Discord or the forums.

Sitewide Performance and Responsiveness

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!

Advanced Roll Syntax

We’ve completed brainstorming and testing for some advanced roll syntax features that we mentioned last week:

• Multi-Flag Rolls
  • For Star Trek Adventures, a 2d20 game, you might need to fix an engine breach before your ship explodes! You need to roll less than or equal to the sum of your Control and Engineering skills, and rolling a nat 1 counts as two successes!
  • Multiple flags lets us define several dice pool thresholds in order to account for multiple successes or degrees of success.
  • Using the newly minted Dice Pool (dp) flag, we can easily use multiple flags to define our ranges: 2d20dp<={Control + Engineering}dp=1
    • Previously, you could only define one threshold, by adding a comparator after the die (e.g. 1d6>=3)
  • Each roll will add one success to the success count for each threshold it meets. So if your Control & Engineering skills added up to 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)
  • For multi-flag rolls that reroll (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.
• Critical Success (cs) and Critical Fumble (cf)
  • Previously, the minimum of a die was considered a “fumble” (Would display red in chat), and the maximum of a die was considered a “crit” (Would display green in chat)
  • Using the new Critical Success 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
• Combine Like (cl)
  • The 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
    • A roll of 0, 1, 1, 1 A would give you a final result of 3 | A, instead of the existing result of 2 | 1 A
  • If you were rolling an 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.
• Match (m)
  • If you need to show matching rolls separately from other results, you can use the m flag. 10d6m will roll ten 6-sided dice, and group them into groups of 2 or more.
  • You can provide a group count argument in order to enforce minimum groupings, like 10d6m3 to only match triples.
  • You can also provide thresholds that need to be met in order to be counted as part of a matching group. 10d6m>4 will only match pairs of 5's and 6's.
  • These two arguments can be combined as well. 10d6m4<3 will only match 4-of-a-kind rolls of values less than 3.
• Custom Dice Flag Support
  • A lot of flags worked incorrectly or did not work at all for custom dice. We went through our roll syntax with a fine-toothed comb and ensured not only that every flag works with custom dice, but that the behavior was consistent as well.
  • Flags that refer to values now use 1-based indexes for dice flags. Other flags are not affected by this. For example:
    • 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.
    • Any flags that use numbers for things other than roll results or thresholds will continue to work like before on custom dice. So a roll of 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.
  • We also want to specifically call out that exploding was fixed for custom dice. By default a custom die will explode on its last side. You can use this in Prowlers & Paragons, for example:
    • 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)
      • Alternatively, the above die roll could be written with multiple dice pools: 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.
    • We think the Prowlers & Paragons custom die is a great example of how you could look at probabilities on uncommon dice rules to make the perfect roll for your system!

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 20s 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 Listening

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.

That's all for now!

Thanks for reading and for being a dedicated Astralnaut! We look forward to bringing you more updates from the Astral Plane.

- Team Astral