Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2019/07/17/take-a-chance-with-dice-by-pcalc/
Dice by PCalc is an engaging and attractive dice simulator for iPhone and iPad with realistic physics and remarkable attention to detail.
I don’t play any dice games so I don’t need this. But it’s James Thomson so it was an auto-buy. I’m not sure I understand the ADV setting. But I guess it doesn’t matter as I don’t imagine I’ll ever use it. But it’ll be a fun thing to show people.
I had to do some research to figure it out because I haven’t played Dungeons and Dragons since 3.0. It’s a mechanic in the newer versions where you roll two dice and take the higher value. For my purposes, it made it easier to fill the board with dice 
Here’s an example of what is confusing me. I have it set for 2D20. When I selected ADV it created an additional pair of dice in another color. This roll says my total is 32. That’s the higher of the black dice and the lower of the silver dice. I would have expected either 33 (the higher of each color) or 27 (the higher pair).
That looks like a bug to me, and I’ll report it as such.
But dice can be used for other random number generation. For example I had a gate opener that used an inline switch module with 7 switches and 3 (+,0,-) positions per switch. I used a die to decide position to use for each switch. I rolled the die 7 times, once per switch. Rolling a 1 or 4 was position +, a 2 or 5 was position 0, and 3 or 6 was position -.
Just occurred to me to recommend adding Petals Around the Rose to his dice. This would be perfect for it.
If you are not familiar with Petals Around the Rose it involves 5 6-sided dice. You have to figure out the secret on your own. The secret is only passed on by people figuring it out. We assume it has been the source of some divorces.
I don’t think that result is bugged. I played a bit with the advantage rolls in the application, and the thing to note is that usually Advantage in D&D5e applies to a single D20, becoming two, take the highest. So it spawns a black die to go with the white die. In this case there are two white dice, so each has a black die to compare to for advantage, so the pairing that you cannot see is black 20 with white 13 and black 7 with white 12. So it reads 20 + 12 = 32.