A friend who has never played asked whether a D&D turn is like blackjack: learnable rules, so you never freeze when the table looks at you. It is. Both games compress to one law each. Blackjack: "the dealer has no choices, so play off what their up-card threatens." D&D: "actions are the currency, so spend yours to take away theirs."…
You have seen it on a spell scroll, in a monster's stat block, scratched in the margin of somebody's house rule: . Four symbols and a promise. Everyone else at the table reads it without pausing, the way you read a road sign. This is how they do it. Dice notation says how many dice to roll, what kind, and…
Nine Solids and What They Are For Every die in the set, one at a time. What it is, what it looks like, and the moment at the table it was made for. Dice are written in dX notation, where d means die and X is the number of sides. Nine shapes cover nearly everything D&D asks you to roll.…
Psychologists have a name for the story you tell about yourself: narrative identity, "a person's internalized and evolving life story, integrating the reconstructed past and imagined future to provide life with some degree of unity and purpose" [1]. D&D lets you write a draft of that story with training wheels on. You can try out who you might become and…
Dungeons & Dragons is a game where you say what your character does, the Dungeon Master (DM) says what happens, and a twenty-sided die settles every argument in between. That is the whole engine. Everything else is detail, and this guide gives you only the detail you need for your first night at the table. The rules here come from…
In March 2019, a group of voice actors who play D&D on camera every week asked their viewers for $750,000 to make an animated special. 88,887 people pledged $11,385,449 in 45 days [1]. That is Critical Role, and it is the ceiling. Your stream starts at the floor: three friends, one webcam, and a DM who talks too close to…
Every character starts on a sheet. Most people print the official one, lose it, print it again, and end up with three versions of the same fighter in three different bags. Here are the free sheets we make, what each is good at, and when to use which. The one that fills in the browser The character sheet at rpgcreator.net/sheet…
The DM says "Dex save, with disadvantage, DC 15," and the new player at the end of the table picks up a d6. This glossary fixes that. Nine terms, each with what you roll, what you compare it to, and the odds. Rules follow the 2024 rules as published in the free System Reference Document 5.2.1 (SRD 5.2) [1]. Where…
Rolling Dice, Telling Stories, Creating Legends Some rolls are bookkeeping. Others make the whole table stand up. This guide is about the second kind: five rolls players live for, five rolls DMs can use to surprise themselves, and the real odds behind each one, so you know exactly how unlikely your legend was. Rules come from the 2024 rules in…
Gen Con 2026 ran from July 30 to August 2 at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis, and it was the biggest Gen Con yet. I was not there. I was at my desk in a different hemisphere, refreshing three liveblogs at once and doing the time zone arithmetic every non-American gamer does in early August. So this is not…
