Rolling two sixes is easy enough to think through, right? Well… not so fast. How do you account for that possibility? It’s got to be two sixes, nothing else… No three, no four. (If it was any number greater than one then we’d just say “two or more.”) That’s important since most of us conflate … Read more

At least initially, it seems counterintuitive to drop highest dice in a pool: after all, most table top mechanics is built around rewarding higher rolls! They’re symbolic of power and success. What you have here is an exercise in reversing that idea and asking yourself what a number represent in the fiction of your game. … Read more

You’ve rolled five dice. Maybe the stakes are only that high in your head. Yet now you require a six. One. And the tension isn’t in watching for whether any particular die will produce it. It’s in watching them all fail to do it together, here is the trap that our intuition betrays us most … Read more

There’s no tool for this that you don’t need because “rolling a 20 on the first try doesn’t feel so bad…until the dungeon master tells me I’ll roll again and it instantly triggers a death trap.” A set of dice are more than just a randomizer; it’s a probability engine with its own curve, and … Read more

When reaching for a die, most table-top gamers rely on their gut instinct, but details of keep and reroll modes, and the various rules surrounding them, aren’t realy about gut instincts. An added bonus to your roll seems like simple math, until you add a rule that requires dropping lowest result, then another rule that … Read more

What’s it worth? This dice roll calculator for tabletop gaming will tell you the chances of any die roll. In many games, you get advantages such as rolling twice and taking best result. A lot of people just go with their guts in these situations, but your instinct is often wrong when confronted with a … Read more

When you roll those dice onto the table they go quiet. That is a solid pool. But wait… you notice one is a ten, one’s a natural six and both could possibly explode into more chaos. Now it isn’t just about whether or not you hit a static number. It’s about guessing at how far … Read more