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…
What Makes a Shape Worth Trusting. Five shapes are perfect. Rather more than five are fair. The difference is the whole story. What Makes a Die Fair The obvious answer is symmetry, and the obvious answer is very nearly right. It matters which symmetry, and the usual assumption asks for far more of it than a die needs. A die…
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.…
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…
We are building a character sheet app. Native: Swift on iPhone and iPad, Kotlin on Android. Not a website in a shell, not a web view with an icon on it. The real thing, so it opens instantly, works with no signal in a basement, and feels like the rest of your phone. Before we build the wrong thing, we…
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…
D&D runs on one idea: roll a d20, add a number, beat a number. Everything else is a footnote to that sentence, and this post is the footnotes, with the odds worked out so you know when to push your luck. Rules here are from the System Reference Document 5.2, the free version of the 2024 rules [1]. The 2014…
