pm_me_your_happiness

Or even easier: right click

Good luck! Good way to go down if the dice send it that way, though.

But then how do you chuck d20s at your players when they misbehave

Well my wife is one of my players

https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules

There’s a link to the basic rules. At the most basic example, let’s say you swing your sword at a goblin. The goblin has an Armor Class, or AC, of 15, thanks to his leather armor and shield. So in order for your swing to hit, you have to get higher than 15. So you roll a d20, and it lands on 13. However, since you’re good at swinging swords and very strong, you can add those bonuses to your roll. Let’s say +3. So your roll ends up being a 16, which beats 15. So then you roll a couple dice to see how much damage you do based on the type of weapon and how good you swing swords again. For a long sword you would roll a d8 and add any relevant modifiers to your roll. Then you subtract that number from the enemy’s go. When it’s the goblin’s turn, the DM rolls against your AC to do damage to you.

Those are the basics to all of the rolling. Someone rolls a d20 and adds modifiers to determine if they are successful at something against a target number, and the other dice are mostly for damage, healing, or to choose something random on a table.

It sounds complicated as a comment but when you play you have your character sheet which shows what all the numbers are supposed to be.

Edit: for your given example, there isn’t an ice shield spell, but there is a spell called Armor of Agathys that covers your character in frost. It gives you 5 temporary hp, and if a creature hits you in melee range (they roll higher than your AC) they take 5 damage.

Each spell has a specific description of its effects. You can cast spells at different levels depending on how strong they are, and it costs spell slots (resource points) to cast them.

When I ran Thundertree, I had a backup plan where if my party all died I’d have them wake up jailed somewhere else in the tower with none of their gear or magic items. Venomfang would be sleeping and they’d have to escape from their cells somehow and sneak out of the tower. Maybe Venomfang would wake up while they were escaping and there’d be a tense escape sequence.

Instead, my party managed to somehow kill the young green dragon at level 3 before he could escape. They rolled multiple crits in a row and the only casualty was a weak npc. They rode that high for a while.

Then I introduced them to Strahd.

Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum. It’s a Korean horror that has some really good scares.

As Above, So Below is also a really good one.

I heard Christian on NPR this morning, as well as a mod from ELI5. Seemed like a pretty fair shake.

The mods have a man on the inside

I put Discord in its place, my muscle memory has been opening it all morning.