Dice Tailor

Find out how many of what kinds of dice best suit your word list.

Installation

Using Rust and cargo (suggested method)

1. Install Rust if you haven't already
2. Run: cargo install --git https://github.com/sts10/dice-tailor --branch main

Once installed, the executable will be dicetailor. You should then be able to run dicetailor --help.

Usage

Usage: dicetailor <COMMAND>

Commands:
  measure  Given list length, recommend a "fit"
  draw     Draw charts
  help     Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -h, --help     Print help
  -V, --version  Print version

Examples

Drawing

Dice Tailor can draw a number of line charts related to how dice and word list fit together. These charts show how word list lengths (X-axis) fit to word list cuts necessary to fit to a dice configuration.

If Dice Tailor isn't given a number of sides to draw, it will draw a few common charts. All charts are hard-coded to print to a ./images/ directory. If no such directory exists, Dice Tailor will create one before printing any charts.

Example charts

Common die fits (6,8,12)

All dice 2 to 36 sides

To create these charts in an ./images/ directory, run dicetailor draw

If you want to investigate a specific die, say one with 11 sides, you can run dicetailor draw -s 11.

Measuring

Let's say you have a word list of 7,900 words, and you want to print a corresponding dice roll for each word.

Running dicetailor measure 7900 prints:

Recommend cutting list length to 7776. Can use 5 6-sided dice.

But Dice Tailor won't always recommend using 6-sided dice. Let's say your word list is 8,003 words. Running dicetailor measure 8003 prints

Recommend cutting list length to 8000. Can then use 3 20-sided dice.

If you don't expect your users to have 20-sided dice available, you can "force" Dice Tailor to give you a recommendation using 6-sided dice by running dicetailor measure -s 6 8003. Dice Tailor will then print:

Recommend cutting list length to 7776. Can then use 5 6-sided dice.

Actually printing the corresponding dice roll values

Dice Tailor only gives you an efficient recommendation of how to map out your dice rolls. You'll need to use a different tool to actually print the dice rolls to your list file.

To do this, you can use a tool like Tidy to actually print the numbers to a new list. If you want to make the necessary cuts randomly, that might look something like this:

tidy --print-rand 7776 --dice 6 -o dice_list.txt my_input_list.txt