A Guide To Dice

You might have noticed that there are lots of different shaped dice used in Dungeons & Dragons, and it can be a bit confusing for new players. So we're going to give you a handy overview!

Lots of D&D players would describe themselves as ‘dice goblins’ and will turn up to games with a veritable sack full of different dice. You can find all sorts of wonderful colours and designs of dice online. You can even get ones with liquid cores which move around inside the dice when you roll them! Of course you don’t actually need more than one set of dice to play D&D but… well… they’re so pretty...

If you don’t have a set of dice, or if you’re playing online like we do then there are loads of online dice rollers. In fact you can even get Google to roll dice for you, just type in what you want to roll (for example “roll a d20”) and away you go!

We use Roll20 as a virtual tabletop for playing D&D and you can roll dice directly in there as well by typing in the chat /roll followed by what you want to roll, so for example /roll 2d6 will roll 2 six-sided dice. You can even set it so that when you roll dice in Roll20 you see animated dice rolling on your screen! Which is fun, but can slow down some older computers.

In roleplaying games like D&D we name the dice based on the number of sides it has. So for example if you see "D20" written somewhere, that means it's a 20 sided dice.

The most common dice used in D&D are as follows:

D2 - A two sided dice, so essentially flipping a coin. You probably won’t have to do this very often in D&D.

D4 - A four sided dice. This is the one that looks a bit like a pyramid. When you roll it, it's the number that is pointing upwards which is the one you have rolled.

D6 - A six sided dice. This is the traditional square dice that you might be used to using in board games.

D8 - An eight sided dice. This is the one that is diamond shaped.

D10 - A ten sided dice. This one looks a little bit like a spinning top, with five sides on the top and five on the bottom

D12 - A twelve sided dice. This one's shape is hard to describe, it looks a bit like a football I suppose.

D20 - A twenty sided dice. This is the one we use the most often in D&D and is the one you'll probably recognise the most if you've seen any D&D related artwork or tattoos which feature dice. Any time we want to use one of our skills or make an attack we will roll a D20 and add our modifier to the result to find out whether we succeed or fail at what we’re trying to do.

D100 - Sometimes also called a percentile dice. Usually this dice doesn't actually have 100 sides, although you can get those and they're basically just round balls! Instead you usually have two D10s, one with 1-10 on it, and the other with multiples of 10 on it (10, 20, 30 etc) - the percentile dice. So then you roll both and combine them to get a number out of 100. For example if you rolled 30 on the percentile dice and 4 on the normal D10, then your total is 34.

So there you have it! You are now a dice expert! Go forth and impress all your friends with your new knowledge!