Dungeons and Dragons Bingo

You know how some D&D players struggle to use their attributes? Like medicine, stealth, insight, etc. They don't really get the full range of role play and character potential.

I can't tell you how many times my friends & I, cause I'm totally guilty of this as well, will use basically only perception when playing. Sometimes a little bit of intimidation or charisma, but that's about it. We haven't fully grasped the range of possibilities open to us.

I know it's mostly on the DM to decide what attributes are used, but as players we don't really give him the opportunity to do more than those few.

So here is an interesting solution. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Bingo. No, like literally Bingo, the game.

I found an online bingo card generator. This one worked really well. myfreebingocards.com
And did a custom card where I put it all the attributes that are available to us. I even included the main ones as well as a slot for item use. Because why not encourage item use too while we're at it.

See this beauty right here. You get this lovely looking bingo card, the site lets you pick a style, obviously we went with Historical for that parchment paper look. Now that's a sexy looking bingo card if I ever saw one.

Oh, I missed an important part. The incentive here, aside from the joy of using these attributes, is that when you get a line, aka Bingo, you get an in-game prize of some kind. It's up to the DM, but it can be a common item, or roll advantage for an hour or if you really want them to give it a go, you can bust out uncommon items, permanent d4 rolls for HP, go crazy.

How does this all work? Well aside from the logistics of making and dealing out bingo cards, which I will get to in a second, the idea is as such. Whenever a player does something that causes the DM to ask them to do a check of some kind, say stealth, ALL players can mark off stealth on their bingo cards. It's a cooperative game after all. The beauty is that players can't see each others cards, so there is no way to know if your checks help out other players in getting bingo. The best you can do as a player is focus on your own bingo card and try to take actions in the game that will cause the DM to ask you to make a specific type of check. And of course once someone gets a line, they can yell BINGO, temporarily interrupting the game but also giving everyone a nice little break to celebrate. Y'all can settle the prizes on the spot or later on, up to you.

Ok, logistics. This part is really easy thanks to this website. myfreebingocards.com
Go to Bingo Card Generator at the top. Enter your title, your list of attributes or whatever you want to try out, pick a theme, hit next step. From here, you can either play virtually or print out cards for in person play. The site generates a .pdf file to print. If you are playing virtually like me, you can share the virtual link with the players and they each get their bingo card that they can mark off in their browser. Once they get bingo, they can just send the group a screenshot on discord or whatever platform you are using to chat.

And finally, let's check and see if my crazy idea actually works in practice.