Gen Con 2026 ran from July 30 to August 2 at the Indiana Convention Center, and it was the biggest one ever. I was not there. I was at my desk in a different hemisphere, refreshing three liveblogs at once and doing the time zone arithmetic that every non-American gamer does in early August. So this is not a "what…

Advantage and disadvantage are two of the most important dice rules in modern Dungeons & Dragons. They are also two of the easiest rules to explain badly. At the table, the rule is simple: If you have advantage, roll two d20s and use the higher result. If you have disadvantage, roll two d20s and use the lower result. If you…

D&D uses a lot of repeat rolls. Attacks, damage, healing, saving throws, ability checks, random encounters, loot tables, spell damage, concentration checks, and character creation all come back again and again. That is why dice presets are useful. A preset is just a roll you do often enough that you do not want to rebuild it every time. It might…

Pathfinder 2e and D&D 5E are close enough to attract the same players, but different enough that a group can strongly prefer one over the other. Both are fantasy tabletop roleplaying games. Both use d20 rolls. Both support heroic adventuring, tactical combat, spellcasting, monsters, treasure, character classes, and long campaigns. But they do not feel the same at the table.…

Dungeons & Dragons is still the default entry point for fantasy tabletop roleplaying, and that makes sense. It is widely available, easy to find players for, and familiar to a huge part of the hobby. But "most popular" is not the same thing as "best for every group." A lot of players start looking for alternatives when one of a…

Ability scores shape almost everything your character does. They affect combat, spellcasting, skill checks, survivability, and often the entire feel of a build. Because of that, the method your group uses to generate those scores matters more than many players realize. Some methods create wild heroes with obvious strengths and weaknesses. Others keep the party balanced and predictable. Some reward…

If you have ever looked at a character sheet, spell description, monster stat block, or house rule and seen something like , , or , you were looking at dice notation. Dice notation is just a compact way to describe how many dice to roll, what type of dice to use, and what extra rules apply to the result. Once…

Half a century ago, a strange little white-box game appeared on a kitchen table in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and quietly changed the world. Since then, Dungeons & Dragons has gone through more makeovers than a polymorphed wizard. Each edition has its loyalists, its critics, and its die-hard "this was the best one" partisans. Rather than crown a single champion, let's…

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 that dice were simply random number generators, small plastic objects governed by physics and probability theory. That was before I…