Well, if I'm reading you correctly, it seems the issue you have is with event communication.

The "Event" that is occurring is a dice roll.

Ignoring everything else, the event taking place is a dice roll.

Now, from what you describe, there are a number of dice-roll types that can occur. 2-dice, 3-dice-subtract-lowest, 4-dice, etc.

Those events must be communicated to all interested components. The most generic way to do that is to broadcast the type of dice-roll, and then the dice.

Broadcast(4-DICE-ROLL_ENUM, 6,3,2,6) //where the enum tells what kind of roll, and the 4 numbers tell what the rolls were.

You can package the message up in a million different ways, the important part is entities and/or their components need to hear about it, and react by changing their internal state, and/or sending out their own messages. One of the entities/components may score that roll as a hit, and set it's internal state to dead, while sending out a "Died" broadcast message to all the other entities/components.

So, to directly answer your question, I guess you would say you "put the logic of the ability into the components". Because they have to deal with these events as they see fit.

I think your problem is just reducing the complexity by separating those dice throws from interpreting them. Why not make make some simple classes to do them and then have each component which needs a different algorithm use its own different instance of that? For example like this:

class Dice {
  Rng& rng;
  int sides;
public:
  Dice(Rng& rng_,int sides_);
  int DoThrow() { return rng.GetNumber()%sides+1; }
};

class DiceThrower {
  // some variables to remember how to calc all the throws
public:
  DiceThrower(Dice&);
  SetDiceNumber(int);
  AddExtraDice();
  SetRuleRemoveHighestDice();
// ...
  int DoThrow();
};

class Component {
  virtual ~Component() {}
// ...
};
class MoveComponent:public Component {
  MoveComponent(DiceThrower&);
// ...
};
class ShootingComponent:public Component {
  ShootingComponent(DiceThrower&);
// ...
};

If you can give me any good reason whatsoever to write that code in a "component" style instead of just providing a DiceThrower class and using it simply and sanely, I will buy you a six pack of the beverage of your choice.

LOL

Ok, I can't do that. But was thinking about a similar problem for my hex-based war game. Where like the question above each unit-class can have special rules that exempt them from the "normal" base rules. Now this can be more complicated that just the number of dice. To give two different examples...

ALL units move at 6 hexes per turn. Well except a select number of fast units. They move 7 per turn.

ALL units calculate attack damage with "formula Y". Welll except for "maulers" which use "formula Z".

and so on...

Initially I thought about just making those flags in my unit data table and the code would just check the flags and deciede what to do. With all my recent reading though it seemed like a componet system might be a nice way to handle this.

I think (please correct me dragongame) this is similar to what the orginal question was about s/he just gave the dice throws as an example.

So based on that is going the componet route just overkill?