Month: November 2015

Magic Item Math

Riley John Gibbs2 Comments

I had an idea for a magic item for D&D not too long ago. It works something like this:

Pick some number of dice to roll, and if none of them are a 1, then you gain hit points equal to the sum of the dice. But if even one die is a 1, then you instead lose hit points equal to the sum of the dice.

So of course, being a fellow with some background in mathematics and a penchant for giving myself problems to solve, I decided to figure out how many dice you should roll in order to maximize your expected value.

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A DM’s Experiments, Part I: Sandboxing

Riley John Gibbs5 Comments

I’ve recently assumed once again the mantle of Dungeon Master for my Sunday morning D&D group. After two sessions with this campaign, it has become clear that this campaign may be too full of experimental elements. It is very uncertain to me that I will be able to call this a successful campaign, at least not for the first several weeks while I figure some things out.

I have so many thoughts on this that I’m going to break this up into multiple posts, the first of which is about the challenges of running this as a sandbox campaign.Read More »