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. (Constitution save against the…
Six numbers decide whether your wizard can hit a door with a fireball and whether your barbarian can spell "door". The method your table uses to make them sets the campaign's power level and fairness before anyone says a word in character. Some methods make lopsided, memorable heroes. Some keep the party level. Some reward nerve. This guide shows the…
. . . If a character sheet, spell or stat block has ever shouted this at you, you were reading dice notation: a shorthand for how many dice to roll, which kind, and what to do with the result. It looks like algebra for about five minutes. This guide gets you through those five minutes, then into drop, reroll and…
Greetings, noble adventurers, rogues, and people who press the refresh button too often! I want to step out from behind the curtain (and the code) to say this: the dice roller you've been using, through crits, fumbles and the occasional emotional breakdown, is no longer a small hobby site. I built it for fun, hoping it might help the D&D…
