How to play Dungeons and Dragons?

Dungeons and Dragons is a table top RPG. It’s almost cliché to start out by describing what an RPG is, but everyone has to learn sometime. In an RPG, you and your friends take on the part of characters in a fictional tale. You describe what they do, you say what they say. It is, in essence, a form of collaborative storytelling. There are literally hundreds of RPGs, but we’re going to talk about Dungeons and Dragons today as it is the most famous, most played, and most commercially successful.

The first thing you're going to want to find is some people. Friends are ideal, accosting people on buses is less recommended. There are solo RPGs out there, but D&D requires at least two people, although you'll probably want four or more. Six is about the maximum I would recommend for new groups, more than this and it becomes tricky for the Dungeon Master.

Yeah, the Dungeon Master. One of you is going to be this person. This is nominally the hardest job, but in truth it merely takes a different skill set. In one sense, the DM needs to know how the game works, and remember more about the setting – you’re an author AND an actor AND a referee. On the other hand, the DM can simply make things up in service to a good story. The other players are… the players.

You'll also want somewhere to play, like a house or a gaming friendly cafe. If you really want to play while say, walking up a hill, there are RPGs for that (Sherpa is noteworthy for using a digital watch to generate percentage results). Set a start time, and an end time, also make sure there are snacks (no joke, this is actually important).

There’s no single-volume dungeons and dragons rulebook. Instead, new players are advised to get hold of the Starter Set, which contains the basic rules, five pre-made characters, dice, and an adventure. If people want their own dice (and eventually they will), the seven different dice for DnD are sold in sets in basically all nerd shops, and there’s loads of dice rolling apps. Even google has a built in dice roller these days.

Assuming you want to continue your D&D adventures, your next priorities will be the Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual and Dungeon Master’s Guide. Sometimes these are sold together, but often they aren’t. These can be expensive though, so let’s break down what each one actually does.

The highest priority is the Players Handbook, as this expands the list of races players can choose from to nine, and (more importantly) the number of classes to twelve. It will also guide the players through the task of Character Creation (more on that later). The PHB is the main book not just because it contains the player options, but it contains the spells, equipment the combat rules, and even a few monsters.

There are more books with player options: the most notable Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything which contains a lot of new player options, including a whole other class (the Artificer), but this is not really needed for early forays into D&D. Something I will recommend is the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion, simply because it contains four official races and is free.

Second priority is the Monster Manual. A mainstay of the game, the Monster manual contains a wide variety of enemies, maps of monster lairs, and detailed background for various groups. It also contains a lot of dragons. Armed with a Monster Manual, a DM can expand the scope of adventures greatly, taking the core gameplay loop of ‘description-decision-outcome’ to stranger and more dangerous places

Third is the Dungeon Master’s Guide. But Matthew, you're asking, have you actually read the DMG? The answer is no, no - one has. Not even Brennan Lee Mulligan. Not even Matthew Mercer. OK maybe we shouldn't go that far, but the truth is that the DMG is in a weird place, it contains a lot of interesting and useful stuff, but very little of it is needed to play.

The DMG is the answer to “how do I pay this thing that doesn’t always come up” – extreme weather, mass combat, urban chases. This is why so few have actually read it – you don’t need to know the rules for hiking through a blizzard until you actually go through one. The DMG also has a lot of Magic Items, but in all honesty this isn’t the draw you might think. Most items are different in terms of flavour, and the most useful things t players (simple gold, spell scrolls, and consumable potions) are all included in the PHB.

Some games might require a setting specific book, such as Ravnica, Wildermount, or Eberron. There are also smaller free pdfs for a few places, such as Ixalan. These sorts of setting books are needed for those settings specifically, but they aren’t needed for the core D&D experience.

All in all, out of the 60 cards you can find in The Grand Creators, more than half of them are brand new debuts to the game. There are a total of 10 Ultra Rares, 15 Super Rares, and 35 Rares. To make things even better, every Ultra Rare and a handful of rares in The Grand Creators also comes with an alternate Collector's Rare version, which has a unique rainbow foiling in numerous spots on the card to make it look extra special.

These Collector's Rares are much, much rarer than a normal Ultra Rare, and make up the biggest pulls in the entire set. All of The Grand Creators' biggest money cards are Collector's Rares, like Water Enchantress of the Temple, and Rites of Aramesir. So if you were hoping to bling out your Inzektor or Noble Arms deck, or maybe want to hit the table with a new, glamorous P.U.N.K. deck, finding those Collector's Rares would be the way to go.

So, the players are each going to need a character. They’re going to create a character that will represent all that they do within the game world. The formal steps of this involve a sequence of mechanical choices. The less formal parts are thematic, but they are just as important: what the character looks like, where they are from, how they act

The steps of character creation are as follows:

1. Choose a Race

2. Choose a Class

3. Determine Ability Scores

4. Describe Your Character

5. Choose Equipment

6. Come Together as a group

This can be a lot, but if you walk through the step in order, things work out. Luckily the Starter Set comes with pre-made characters, and the PHB goes into more detail with examples. Newbie CharGen is actually really fraught in 5E – players have to make irrevocable decisions right at the start, without knowing how those decisions will impact what they can or can’t do further down the line. This also needs to be done with the DMs input, as not every game will necessarily contain every race or type of magic.

For absolute beginners, I’d recommend one of two things:

A shorter game where their first characters won’t be long term, maybe two to four sessions. This means players can use what they’ve learned when making a new character, or they can keep (and with the DMs permission retroactively tweak) their existing character.

Use the ‘quick builds’ suggested for each class in the PHB. These won’t be super exciting, but they will avoid pitfalls and janky builds.

One of D&D’s good features (that is, good if you know about it) is that levels 1 to 3 tend to be about learning how a Class works step-by-step, thus avoiding overwhelming a new player. Most classes don’t actually get their Thing until they level a bit: Wizards pick their School at 2, Beastmasters get their beast at 3. This IS a good feature, but make sure players are aware that the ‘core experience’ they want from a class might not be open to them straight away. For experienced players, I’d honestly recommend skipping right to level 3 (and sometimes higher) because they need the learning curve less.

There’s more to character creation than just the stats though. This is step six - it’s a good idea to work out how the characters know each other, and build in some shared history. Personalities aren’t mechanical – how you all play your characters is a social interaction. One thing I’d recommend regardless is a “Session 0” – devote time to CharGen so that everyone understands what is going on. This is also the point where players should do the important task of setting boundaries – talking about what they do and a don’t want the game to cover in terms of content. The Dungeon Master won’t have a Character to gen, but they will have other prep – they need to know how and where the first basic story begins.

So how do you… play, exactly? Well to summarise it totally: the DM describes a situation, the players then describe what their characters do, and the DM describes what the outcome is. When the outcome is uncertain, dangerous or otherwise unclear, you roll dice to determine what happens.

Many groups play D&D entirely within the ‘theatre of the mind’, eschewing the use of maps, minis and grids entirely. The advantage of this theatre of the mind is that it’s much easier to describe wild and extravagant things (even impossible things) than it is to represent them physically. Games like this tend to be more expansive and free-form, with more inter-personal roleplay. It’s also cheaper, cos you need less stuff.

This is a totally valid way to play, but it is not for everyone, especially in a system with frequent combat, exact spells ranges, and frequent labyrinthine dungeons. Many groups prefer a more tactical, careful form of game, where the events are partially represented by maps and figures. These games often focus on challenging combat, though they will still contain some interpersonal roleplay. If you are in this second group, you’ll want to look into two things in particular: a game surface, and some figures.

The way to do this that requires the least planning and effort is to grab one of the Dungeons and Dragons board games: Temple of Elemental Evil, Tomb of Annihilation, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Ghosts of Saltmarsh. These come with tiles and a bunch of miniatures, but they have a fair few disadvantages: they limit you to exactly the theme and tone of the specific adventures, and the tiles aren’t dry erase.

Additionally, while you do get a decent range of dungeons and dragons figures, these boxes are significantly more expensive than going with generic fare from other sources (for the price of the 40ish minis in Dungeon of the Mad Mage you can get 100 Halflings from Wargames Atlantic, although one must admit that Hobbits are less impressive than Beholders).

When it comes to other options for miniatures, there are official Dungeons and Dragons figures, as well as several ranges that offer more generic fare:

Gale Force Nine’s official D&D series.

WhizKids’ Nolzur’s Marvellous Minatures and Icons of the Realms

CMON’s A Song of Ice and Fire Minatures Game

Games Workshops’ Warcry and Underworlds ranges.

This is an area where some of the D&D intended stuff tends to come out cheaper: Nolzur’s giants and dragons are much cheaper than GW’s versions, by virtue of being less detailed and intricate. Generally, the more specific you want your minis to be, the more it is going to cost you. Personally I’d favour starting with a box that gives you a variety: Bells Hells, a Warcry Warband or an ASOIAF Heroes Box. Once you get more into the game, you can invest in minis for more specific monsters and player characters. As I’ve said elsewhere, a Chess set also makes a good resource to provide a useful set of generic monsters.

When it comes to a surface, you can frankly spend as much or as little as you want to. The closest thing to a vanilla “dungeons and dragons gameboard” is the Adventure Grid, which gives you a simple dry erase grid in both stone tiles and green grass. Many D&D books were released alongside dry erase map packs, but while these maps are an excellent resource, they aren’t large enough to place minis directly onto, unless you happen to have a lot of 6mm scale wargames figures.

Don’t be afraid to use surfaces borrowed from other games, such as Blood Bowl pitches (which include all sorts of surfaces in various changeable conditions).

When adding to a basic gameboard, several ranges of tiles and terrain I can recommend. From cheapest to most expensive:

• Piazo’s Pathfinder Flip-Tiles
• Mantic’s TerrainCrates
• Wizards of the Coasts’ Dungeon Tiles
• Roll 4 Initiative’s Dry Erase Dungeon Tiles
• Games Workshop’s Age of Sigmar terrain
• Wizkids’ WarLock Dungeon Tiles

Some of these are just tiles, some are just terrain, some act as both.

There’s no end of content for D&D, from campaign books and settings published by WotC, to third party and independently published materials. Many books from different publishers also come with pre-generated characters, which also makes it easier to dip into and out of different settings, even at high level.

Of course, the thing that most DM’s love is homebrew. That the unique thing about TTRPGs – you get to make up your own places, stories, spells. It’s both that easy and that hard. So while I hope this article has been a useful primer to you, the truth is that the things you need to play dungeons and dragons are inside your skull, waiting in your brain.