i was wondering if someone could explain to me the meaning of 1d4 in games like d&d and the such?

Question

id like to know what thet meand and whats the 1 mean the d and the 4 and is like a 1d6 better and how do you know thanks

Answer 1

1d4 means 1 roll of the 4 sided die.

In D&D (and other games) there are 6 types of dice.

Four sided
Six sided
Eight sided
Ten sided
Twelve sided
Twenty sided

If you were called to roll the eight sided die 4 times and add up the results it would be written as 4d8. It is just notation. There is no better or worse here. In some situations you would want a bigger die to roll (lets say combat damage you inflict) and in other situations you wanted a smaller die to roll (combat damage being assigned to you).

d100 would mean that you would roll two ten sided. One would be the tens digit and the other would be the ones digit. Say you roll a 5 and a 6 (the 5 for tens and the 6 for ones). The results there would be 56. Before you roll you decide which die is the tens and which is the ones. This allowed you to get a result of 1-100. This was used for rolls that determined percent chance. If you had a 20% chance of something happening you would roll d100. If it came out to be 20 or less whatever happened would happen. Anything higher meant it did not happen.

I have played a few games in my life. When I was a kid I played a bit of D&D, a Star Trek role playing game, and a James Bond role playing game.

Answer 2

1D4 means a 4 sided die the "1" is a single die the "D" stands for die and the "4" stands for the number of sides, the numbers on a 1D4 can range from 0-3 or 1-4 they may not even have numbers on but symbols in some games, a 1D6 is the normal looking die that you get with most games, sometimes 2D10 are used to read percentages one reading the 10s and the other reading the units.
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