LogFAQs > #882375668

Muffinz0rz posted...

Me trying to figure all this out:

Oh honey, this is the simple stuff.

So in DnD, you have a whole bunch of different dice, all with different amount of sides on them, you have anywhere from 4 sided to 6 to 8 to 10 to 12 to 20 and weird dice between them.
How DnD uses these is you roll one of those dice, and add (or subtract) numbers from them to beat some floating number determined from various things.

The way people write about it when talking about it though is XdY+Z. Where X is the amount of dice rolled, Y is die itself, and Z is the added (or subtracted) number.
So 1d20+5 means you roll one twenty sided die, and add five to that number.
2d6+3 is rolling two six sided dice, and adding three.

Once again, there are more complicated versions of rolling dice that other games use.

The attack roll is using the d20, and you roll against someone's AC (meaning Armor Class). The idea is that the DnD character is sitting there attacking a whole bunch during the turn, and you have a chance for one of those attacks to actually do damage to the person and not bounce off their armor or shield.

AC is determined from a whole bunch of stuff and I'm not going into right now though, mostly because this is more of an abstract thing.

So to attack someone, you roll 1d20+stuff, against their AC. The "stuff" in question is called Attack Bonus, because the bonus number is being added to your attack
.
For example, to beat a 15 AC with an attack bonus of +7, you would need to roll an 8 or higher, because 8+7=15 (I think ties go to the attacker in PF, I can honestly never remember). But that also means if you roll a 10, you would have a 17 to hit (10+7), which beats their 15 AC (17>15).
20's always at least hit, and 1's always miss on attack rolls.

Then if you hit, you roll damage. Damage is determined from some dice plus stuff, the amount and specific dice is determined from the weapon itself, and the stuff is from the character sheet.
So it can be 2d6+3, or 1d8+4, or 1d4-1 there's a whole bunch of different damage dice for anything you would want.

Now it's the question of rolling a critical (i.e. a "natural" 20). So the first attack roll goes, and then you roll a 20. You then have to make another attack roll to "confirm" the crit, if you beat their AC, you get some sort of bonus to damage (normally a x2 modifier).
Some weapons have an increased critical range, meaning you can roll a 19 and activate the critical hit, and get a x3 modifier for damage. These builds are weird and I honestly haven't seen them that much.