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.…
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…
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…
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…
