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Use an Oracle Die

by Mike on 21 April 2025

Ask questions. Roll a die. See what happens.

I first heard the concept of an oracle die from the excellent RPG Ironsworn but I expect it's been around longer than that.

The concept is simple. Ask yourself a question, assign a probability to the potential answers, roll a die, and see what happens.

You can use pretty much any die. A d6, d10, or d20 works well. Choosing odd numbers or even numbers gives you a 50% probability on any die. Odds, this thing happens. Evens, something else happens. Roll and see what happens. Make sure to assign the results before you roll of course – even if it's just in your head.

For more complicated situations, you can keep a table in your head. On a 1 or 2 on 1d6, a random encounter occurs.

An oracle die represents randomness in the world. Sometimes the weather is mild – sometimes it's severe.

The Table-Less Oracle Die

We don't need to have fancy tables for every roll. Instead, the oracle die can tell us the general severity, attitude, distance, or other factors just by how low or high the roll is. The lower your roll, the less severe the result. The higher your roll, the more severe the results. This severity works for weather, attitudes, behaviors, morale, and so on. We can also use it for distance. The lower the roll, the closer they are. The higher the roll, the further away something or someone is.

Other Oracle Examples

We can use our oracle die anytime we want to shift the direction of the game away from our own decisions and pass the decision over to the die. We can do so in the open too:

"On a 1 to 5, the guards check the room you're in. On a 6 to 20, they go over to another room. Melissa, roll for us."

Using an oracle die is a great way for the GM to become a player as well. We don't know what will come up. We don't know how the game will fork one way or another. The die tells us.

Here are ten other ways you might use an oracle die in your game:

Determining how alert some guards might be.
Determining the path a guard takes through a dungeon.
Deciding if a badly injured adversary runs or stays.
Determining if a monster acts wisely or chaotically in battle.
Determining which character a monster might attack.
Determining if a servant is in a room or not.
Determining if a wandering monster is looking one way or another and which direction they are moving.
Determining the type or harshness of weather (the higher the stronger).
Determining the time of day.
Deciding if the object vital to the quest is here or has been recently moved.

The Oracle Isn't Character Focused

Typically the sorts of things we roll for using an oracle die aren't character-based. It's not a replacement for determining a difficulty class. The oracle die helps determine what's happening in the world when chance plays a part. Characters don't affect the oracle. But the oracle can definitely affect a character.

Keep your oracle die handy and use it to shift what's going on in the world.

Ask questions. Roll a die. See what happens.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video.

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers.

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

Last week I also posted a couple of YouTube videos on D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide Tips versus the Top Tips of the Lazy Dungeon Master and Graymist – Dragon Empire Prep Session 20.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

Keep a handle on combat pacing. Don’t just run one hard fight after another.
Have the characters walk in on the tail end of a battle between two other competing foes.
Give characters an opportunity for a long rest or an equivalent magical restoration service like a healing fountain after several hard battles or a long dungeon crawl.
Include multiple possible solutions to hard problems.
Keep a general gauge of hit points to damage in mind. Roughly how many hit points do the characters have? For 5e it’s roughly 7 x level + 3.
Include NPCs to roleplay with even in the darkest dungeons.
Offer multiple paths and secret paths to navigate complex dungeons. Offer enough details so players can make informed choices.

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