A coin has two sides and one job: be fair. It is not quite fair. A person flipping a coin by thumb lands it on the side it started on about 51% of the time [1][2]. That one percent is where this post lives. Chance is the maths of what the dice do. Luck is the story we tell about…
Five shapes are perfectly regular. Every one of them is in your dice bag, and there will never be a sixth. Why Only Five Pick up a d20 and turn it over in your hand. Every face is the same triangle. Every edge meets its neighbour at the same angle. Every point has the same five triangles crowded around it.…
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…
Players and Dungeon Masters roll the same dice for different reasons. A player rolls to find out whether the plan worked. The DM rolls to find out what the world does about it. Below: the rolls each side makes in the first hour of a game, the ten rolls that make a table lean in, and the four rolls of…
Most players know a d20 when they see one and stop there. The Book of Dice keeps going for 107 pages: where the shapes come from, how the table talks about them, every way to roll, and why we keep coming back [1]. Full disclosure: we wrote it. rpgcreator.net is ours, the same people who run this roller. What is…
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…
Advantage and disadvantage are two of the most important dice rules in modern Dungeons & Dragons. They are also two of the easiest to explain badly. The rule, from the System Reference Document 5.2.1 (the free 2024 rules text, "Playing the Game", D20 Tests) [1]: Advantage: roll two d20s and use the higher. Disadvantage: roll two d20s and use the…
Dungeons & Dragons is the default front door to fantasy roleplaying, and for good reason: it's everywhere, and finding players is easy. But "most popular" isn't "best for every group." Groups go looking for something else when they want one of four things: deeper tactical combat, faster and deadlier dungeon crawls, a gentler and more structured start for young or…
In January 1974, a small Wisconsin company shipped three booklets in a woodgrain cardboard box. The whole print run was 1,000 copies, assembled by hand, and it took eleven months to sell out [1]. Since then Dungeons & Dragons has had more makeovers than a polymorphed wizard, and every edition has partisans ready to tell you theirs was the real…
An anthropological study of the bizarre rituals players perform with plastic polyhedrons. Yes, I'm included. Yes, I have a dice jail. When I first started playing D&D, I was a rational person. A man of science and art. I understood dice were random number generators: small plastic objects governed by physics and probability. Then I met my d20. Now I…
