DND 101: Rolling the Dice

This Episode is #1 in our DND 101 Series. This series is designed to help players who are new to Dungeons and Dragons understand the basic rules and vocabulary of the game.  In this episode Wylie Explains the different types of dice and how they are typically used. 

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Wylie 0:00

Hey Blender Squad, this is Wylie Sloane, your host and DM. We're working hard on season one right now for you, but in the meantime, we wanted to release our first DD 101 episode, Rolling the Dice. This series is designed to explain some of the basic aspects of the D&D game for those of you who are not as familiar and hopefully make some of the nerdy jargon in our podcast a little bit more understandable. Now we get that this episode might not be as enjoyable for those of you who are already avid D&D players. But before you go, we did want to let you know that we have some gift options available for this holiday season. Right now, you can purchase a Patreon membership as a gift, starting at just $5. This will get your friend or family member a one-month membership. But we also have annual memberships available for $60 or any monthly denomination in between that fits your budget. If you access our Patreon for just one month, during that time you'll have complete access to our entire one-shot campaign ad-free, including our behind-the-scenes episodes, all of our character art and maps that accompany it as well. Plus any other episodes and member benefits that we release in that time. If that interests you, then you can check out our Patreon link in this episode's description to either gift a membership or sign up for yourself. We hope you join the squad and become a part of the family. Now, today we're going to be talking about all the different types of dice that are used in D &D. If you want a little bit of a visual, you can go to our Instagram @ Blunderpod, Blunder P-O-D, and we'll be sharing some images and videos of dice to help get you familiar with them if it's a little bit hard to picture what I'm describing. Also, I wanted to touch on some D&D vocabulary for you. I've been saying that I'm DM, and a lot of you might not know what that stands for. DM means dungeon master, and the dungeon master is typically the one who runs the game, whether you're playing an already written adventure or whether you have crafted a homebrew story that you're sharing with your players yourself. We're the ones who tell the story for our players to interact with, and we provide the voices of the NPCs or the background characters, and we provide guidance on following and enforcing the rules. And then of course we have our player characters or players. They're the ones who work their way through the campaign and they have different character sheets determining their stats so that they know what they can add to their different rolls. Now, obviously, we've got a lot of dice that we use and we do a lot of rolling. So just remember, usually higher rolls are closer to success, and the lower rolls are closer to failure. It all depends on the difficulty of what they're facing, but that's how we find out how successful our players are. Now to get started, let's talk about the D20. That is the dice that we use the most, and D means dice, and 20 means the number of sides. So we might be saying D20, D4, D6, and that's just referring to dice 20, dice 4, dice 6, things like that. So our D20 looks pretty round. It's kind of like a more geometric ball, and it obviously has 20 sides. So if you're rolling it around, look for that 20 and you'll know you have the right one. And this is used for all of our main checks, initiative and attacks. So as a player is working their way through the world, the DM will ask them to make different checks based on what they want to do. A player might decide that they want to arm wrestle an orc in the tavern. And so the DM might ask them to make an athletics check. The player would roll their d20, like I'm gonna roll right now, and I got a 10. Depending on what my character sheet says, I might get to add a plus two to that if I have strong athletics. So making that athletics check, I rolled a 12. And depending on what the difficulty is, or perhaps what the orc rolls, it might determine if I'm going to be successful or if I'm going to lose this arm wrestling match. Now another thing we use the D20 for is initiative. When the DM says let's roll for initiative, that means that we're going into turn-based combat. Typically, when you're playing D&D, it's open world, very sandboxy. Players can choose their own adventure and decide who they're going to talk to when. And we don't typically sit in turn order unless everyone's starting to want to do something at once, and we might shift to initiative at that point. But typically, when a DM says roll for initiative, that means that we're rolling to get into combat. And initiative means the turn order. So if you roll a higher initiative, you're going to get to go first. And if you roll a later initiative or a lower number, you're going to go later on the list, and your turn will be further down the list. So the DM will roll for all the baddies or opponents that they've brought out, and the players will roll for themselves to determine who's going when. So depending on how high they roll and what the armor class is of that opponent, will determine if they're actually able to hit them. Once they hit that opponent, then will determine how much damage they do. But first they have to roll to hit. Now you will hear players get really excited when they roll what's called a natural 20. That's when you roll a 20 on the dice. Sometimes in D&D you can get an unnatural 20 or a dirty 20, as we like to call it, by rolling a lower number on the dice and then having an additional bonus in your stat block that results in a final total of a dirty 20. So perhaps you roll an 18 on the dice and you have a plus two on your stat block, and that will allow you to have a dirty 20. It's still good, but a natural 20 typically indicates an automatic success or a critical success. Even if you happen to have a negative stat, like a minus two, that will mean that you will still succeed if you rolled that natural 20. It kind of overrides even if you don't quite make the passing, passing check. Usually if it's an attack roll, a DM will allow you some extra bonuses on your damage die. So they might allow you to roll double your damage dice, or they might just allow your damage dice to be maxed out, which means that if you were allowed to roll a D12, they'd say, okay, you just automatically get a 12 for that. But exactly what bonuses are allowed are usually house rules that vary depending on the DM's preferences and what they've decided together with you as the players. Now conversely, you can also roll a natural one. And a natural one is when you roll a one on that D20 dice. And it usually means automatic failure. Even if you have stats to increase the roll, it's considered a critical failure and will sometimes have potentially exceptionally bad consequences. So instead of just missing your target, you might accidentally injure yourself or hurt a teammate as well. Now, one of the last things that I'm gonna touch on for the D20 today is death saving throws. So death saving throws occur when a player has had their hit points brought all the way down to zero. Hit points or health points might be an easier way to understand it, is the amount of health that you have. And every time you take damage, you're gonna be losing those health points. So if a player is brought down to zero health points, they fall unconscious. And every round of combat on their turn, every time their name comes up in initiative order, they have to roll a d20. And this d20 does not get anything added to it, it's just a straight roll. If they roll a 10 or higher, that's considered a successful death saving throw. If they roll a 9 or lower, it's considered a failure. The goal is to roll three tens or higher, three successes, before you roll three nines or lower or three failures. And once you get to three successes, then you are stabilized and you will remain unconscious. Or if you roll three failures, then you are permanently dead. And your teammates will ha can't just heal you, they'll have to use a bigger spell to revive you, such as a resurrection spell or something like that. When you're rolling those death save throws, a natural one constitutes as two failures. So that can be pretty serious, especially if it's taking your teammates a long time to come close to you and potentially heal you. But the good thing is if you roll a NAT 20, typically that means that you regain consciousness with a single hit point on your health saving throws. So that can be really good and bring you back up into battle or at least give you the opportunity to get out of danger. So that was a lot about the D20. Like I said, it's the dice that we use the most. So now we're gonna talk about our D12. The D12 dice is the one that kind of looks like a more geometric soccer ball, and it obviously has 12 sides. It's usually used as damage dice. So for the most powerful weapons, like perhaps a great axe or a lance, you're gonna be able to roll that D12 dice when you hit an opponent. And depending on what you roll on that d12, will be the damage that you do. Additionally, some spells use the D12 for their damage, like the poison poison spray cantrip or the witchbolt spell. Those both use D12s to calculate the amount of damage that they do. Next up is the D10. This one I think kind of looks like an alien spaceship. It's a little bit like two pyramids that have been stuck together bottom to bottom, but it's round around the edges. And one tricky thing about the D10 is that in the 10s place, it just says zero, which can be a little bit confusing when you're getting used to your dice. It might look like a D8 to you because the eight's right next to it, usually, but the zero means 10 on the D10. And so this is usually used for damage for also some pretty strong weapons, like a heavy crossbow. It's also used for some of the versatile weapons like a long sword or a battle axe. You can do a 1D10 damage with those weapons when you wield them with both hands. Similarly, the firebolt cantrip uses it and the moonbeam spell. So those are just some examples of spells that calculate their damage with the D10. Next up is the D8. This one definitely looks like two pyramids that were stuck bottom to bottom. And this is also typically used for damage, like we talked about for weapons like the rapier, but it's also used in healing spells. So if you cast a healing spell like Cure Wounds, that actually allows you to roll two D8 to determine how much you heal your character or player that you're healing. Next up is the D6. This dice looks the most like a typical dice. It is very similar to the typical cubed dice that you would see, except they usually use dots to indicate the numbers, and the DD dice usually just have the numbers printed on the various sides. So it's a nice cube square-shaped dice with six sides. And DMs like to use this one because it's used again for weapons and healing, but it's also used to calculate fall damage. The formula for calculating fall damage is one d6 bludgeoning damage for every 10 feet that a character falls. So, for example, if a character call climbs up on a one-story building and falls off, the DM will roll one d6 to figure out how much fall damage they take for falling. The maximum amount a player can take is up to 20 d6. So if your character is up in the sky on an airship and manages to fall off, the DM's going to be picking up a lot of d6 to get ready and roll and see how much damage that character takes. Alright, the next dice is our tiniest one. This is the D4. It is usually used for low damage weapons. It looks like a little tiny pyramid, and this is definitely the dice I would least like to step on. I have a metal set of dice here right now, and my D4 is quite sharp. I think it would be worse than stepping on a Lego. So keep those safe. And so it looks similar to the D8. If you took two D4s and stuck them together, they'd look a lot like the D8, but it's just a little tiny pyramid here. So it can be used for weapons like daggers and also magic missile. Now, finally, we're getting into the D100. This one gets a little complicated, even for people who've been playing DD for quite a long time. The D100 is shaped exactly like the D10, but instead of having regular numbers, single-digit numbers on it, such as four and seven, the D100 has 70 and 40. These are also sometimes called percentile dice. And so the way that you use them is if you're trying to roll the D100, obviously it doesn't have a hundred sides, so you roll your D100 to determine the tens place of your number. So I just rolled my D100 and I rolled an 80 on it, and then you roll your D10 to determine the ones place. So my D10 rolled a 5. So I rolled the number 80 on my D100 and 5 on my 5 on my D10 for a total of 85. So that's how you use those dice. D100 are most often used for encounter tables. So encounter tables are used when you have a situation and there's multiple different outcomes that could happen. For example, in our one shot, we used it for arcanium sickness. So I had my players roll. First they rolled a constitution saving throw, and then they also rolled a D100 and sent me that number. If they failed their constitution saving throw, I'd look at the chart that I had created and identify: okay, you rolled a 68, okay, this is the condition that your arcanium sickness is gonna impose on you. And so that's how we ended up with Gordon eating a lot of jelly, uh, representing the skillets, and um even farting and blaming it on the other players. Um, those were all conditions of his arcanium sickness that came from my arcanium sickness table. And that was the result of his D100 rolls. Okay, was that enough math for you guys today? I know it can be a little bit hard to follow along in your mind. I'm not one for mental math, so D&D has definitely been challenging to me. But if you want more about the rules and the ways to play the game, I would recommend checking out DnD Beyond.com. It's a great website for beginners and experienced players as well. You can also pick up a player's handbook at your local bookstore or game store. The Dungeon Master's Guide is also great, or the Monster Manual, but the Player's Handbook is definitely the place to start, or checking out some DD websites, particularly like DnD Beyond, which is the officially licensed site of the game, so that you have more information about how to play by all the rules. Well, thanks for sticking around, and hopefully, this is helpful for those of you who are not as familiar with DnD. Hopefully, it makes it a little bit more clear now. And hopefully, we'll have another episode out for you soon. Thanks for sticking around. Bye.