New to the hobby? Every game has its own language, and nobody expects you to arrive fluent. Across this site, any term with a dotted gold underline shows its meaning when you hover or tap it. This page is the whole phrasebook in one place.
House promise: at my table, "what does that mean?" is always a great
question. Rules get taught as we play; this page just gives you a head start.
The People at the Table
- ✦Dungeon Master (DM), a.k.a. Game Master (GM)
- The person running the game: narrator, referee, monster-voicer, and your biggest fan. At this table, that's me!
- ✦Player Character (PC)
- The hero you create and play. Yours, entirely.
- ✦NPC (Non-Player Character)
- Everyone else in the world — shopkeeps, villains, suspicious badgers — played by the DM.
- ✦The Party
- The group of player characters adventuring together. Stronger together, especially in front of dragons.
Rolling the Dice
- ✦d20, d6, and friends
- Dice are named by their number of sides: d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and the star of the show, the d20. "2d6" means "roll two six-sided dice and add them together." You'll be fluent in one session.
- ✦Ability Check (or Skill Check)
- A d20 roll to see whether your character pulls something off: climbing a wall, persuading a guard, sneaking past a sleeping owlbear, recalling old lore.
- ✦Attack Roll
- A d20 roll to see if your swing, shot, or spell connects. Meet or beat the target's Armor Class and it hits.
- ✦Saving Throw
- A d20 roll to resist something happening to you: leaping away from a fireball, shaking off a charm spell, keeping your footing on cracking ice.
- ✦Initiative
- A d20 roll at the start of combat that sets the turn order. High roll acts first. (There's a practice button on the home page, no dice required.)
- ✦Advantage / Disadvantage
- Advantage: roll two d20s, keep the higher — circumstances favor you. Disadvantage: roll two, keep the lower — the universe is asking "are you sure?"
- ✦Natural 20
- The d20 lands on 20 before any bonuses are added. On an attack it always hits, and crits. Cause for table-wide celebration.
- ✦Natural 1
- The d20 lands on 1. On an attack, it always misses. The bard writes it down for the wrong reasons.
- ✦Critical Hit (Crit)
- A natural 20 on an attack roll: you roll double the damage dice, and you're owed a glorious description of the blow.
- ✦Proficiency Bonus
- A bonus added to rolls your character is trained in. It grows automatically as you level up.
- ✦Inspiration
- A reward for great roleplay. Spend it to give yourself advantage on a roll you really care about.
Building Your Character
- ✦Ability Scores
- The six numbers — Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma — that describe what your character is naturally good at.
- ✦Point Buy
- You "buy" your six ability scores from a fixed budget of points, so every character starts on an even footing. This is how stats work at my tables.
- ✦Background
- Who your character was before adventuring — soldier, sage, urchin, noble — granting skills and story hooks.
- ✦Backstory
- Your character's history in your own words: where they came from, who they love, why they left. Mine start at 250 words, and the Backstory Builder will walk you through it.
- ✦Subclass
- The specialization your class chooses in the early levels — a wizard's school of magic, a rogue's particular brand of trouble.
- ✦Alignment
- A rough compass for your character's morals, from Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil. My tables skip the Evil end of the map.
- ✦Milestone Leveling
- Characters level up at meaningful story moments, instead of counting experience points from every defeated goblin. Less bookkeeping, more story.
Magic & Combat
- ✦Hit Points (HP)
- Your character's staying power. Zero is bad news — but very rarely the end of the story.
- ✦Armor Class (AC)
- The number an attack roll must meet or beat to hit you. Plate mail: high. Wizard pajamas: low.
- ✦Encounter
- One scene of the adventure: a battle, a negotiation, a puzzle, a deeply suspicious door.
- ✦Short Rest / Long Rest
- A breather of an hour (short) or a full night's sleep (long) that lets characters patch up and recover their abilities. Adventuring is tiring.
- ✦Cantrip
- A simple spell a caster can use without limit. The magical equivalent of a jab.
- ✦Spell Slot
- The "fuel" spellcasters spend to cast their bigger spells. Slots come back after rest.
- ✦TPK (Total Party Kill)
- The whole party goes down at once. Rare, memorable, and always statistically someone's fault.
- ✦Theater of the Mind
- Playing a scene through narration alone, no map required. Your imagination renders in better resolution anyway.
- ✦Battle Map & Tokens
- A gridded map with little character portraits (tokens), used for tactical scenes so everyone can see exactly where the chaos is.
The Table & the Tools
- ✦Campaign
- An ongoing story told across many weekly sessions with the same party — think "TV series" to a one-shot's "movie."
- ✦One-Shot
- A complete adventure told in a single session. No long-term commitment; a perfect first taste of the game.
- ✦Session Zero
- A relaxed pre-campaign meeting where the party sets expectations and boundaries, finishes characters, and gets comfortable. Free at my tables, always.
- ✦Lines & Veils
- A safety tool. Lines are topics that never appear in the game at all; veils happen off-screen, "camera pans away." Collected privately, respected without question.
- ✦Stars & Wishes
- End-of-session feedback: a Star is something you loved, a Wish is something you'd like more of next time. Examples here.
- ✦Virtual Tabletop (VTT)
- The software "table" we play on: shared maps, dice, tokens, and character sheets in one window. You never need to buy it for my games.
- ✦Fantasy Grounds Unity (FGU)
- A desktop virtual tabletop with deep D&D 5E automation. The free Demo version is all you need; my license covers the whole table.
- ✦Foundry VTT
- A virtual tabletop that runs right in your browser. I send a link before the session; you click it, and you're at the table.
- ✦D&D Beyond
- Wizards of the Coast's official online toolset for building characters and reading the rules.
- ✦StartPlaying
- The platform where you find my games, book your seat, and handle payment securely.
- ✦Homebrew
- House-made game content — classes, spells, monsters — that doesn't come from the official books.
Places You'll Hear About
- ✦Waterdeep
- The City of Splendors: the great, scheming metropolis of the Sword Coast and the backdrop for many a tale (and one crossword).
- ✦Undermountain
- The vast dungeon beneath Waterdeep, entered — famously — through the well in the Yawning Portal inn.
- ✦The Yawning Portal
- A famous Waterdeep tavern built around a great well that drops straight into Undermountain. Patrons wager on which adventurers come back up; you can too, in the Ledger.
- ✦The Feywild
- The plane of untamed magic, eternal twilight, and dangerous whimsy that mirrors the mortal world. Do not eat the food. Do not tell them your name. Do bet on the snail races.
- ✦Phandalin
- A sleepy frontier town with an above-average number of secrets beneath it. Current site of my Monday campaign.