Rolling the Dice

Dungeons and Dragons has captured the public, with all ages having a go at the game. However, the game doesn’t come naturally for many. A lot of people don’t know where to start, getting intimidated by how complex it appears. The main ideas that confuse people who want to play are how the game runs, how the dice work, and all the different options with character creation. These new concepts are confusing enough on their own, and with new players rarely having guidance when starting out, it can act as a deterrent to the game. However if an experienced player or group of players are able to help, then it could make learning all these things much more simple and enjoyable.

The first thing a new player faces is  creating your character. When someone is introduced to the game, they will often be handed a confusing paper with no instruction waiting to be filled. There’s also the fact that the character sheet can be lost, destroyed, or marked with a pen, which can’t be erased and would ruin the character sheet. Many new players have shifted to online websites to create their character since they not only can’t be destroyed, but several also make it much easier to create a fully filled out character sheet that can be easily changed. A common website used for this is called D & D Beyond, which also has a multitude of other helpful resources besides character creation.

Dungeons and Dragons is built on the use of various dice, creating randomness and the main game aspect for players. These dice are even used during character creation. There are seven different dice that are commonly used while playing, these are the D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, and the most important one, the D20. The majority of these dice are used for dealing damage to enemies, the one that will be used for seeing your damage the least though will be the D20. What this 20 sided die will be used for is basically every action you might take. It’s used for seeing how well you do something, whether that be investigations, seeing if you can actually hit an enemy, or even fun things like seeing how well you can do a backflip. 

After learning about those two things, it’s time to learn about the dungeon master. The dungeon master, or DM, is the person in charge of their group of players and the one who runs the campaign that they will play. The dungeon master organizes and hosts the campaign for the players to enjoy, but it’s not an easy role to fill, especially if you’re new to the game and are forced to be the dungeon master for your group. Needing to guide a group of people through some fantasy world may seem difficult and confusing and you might not know where to start, so a good question to ask is what you want your world to be. It could be classic fantasy, or a sci-fi setting, or even some semi-modern setting, it’s entirely up to you what you want to do with your campaign. After you decide that, you should brainstorm some names for towns and cities and what the maps of your world look like. Then, once you’ve done that, it’s best to think about the culture of this world, if society heavily relies on magic, if magic doesn’t exist at all, and how well different countries get along.

There’s also the struggle of not knowing what to do with a world and not having any ideas. One tactic for getting rid of this struggle is thinking about a game, a show, or a book and gradually add new ideas to it until it is something entirely new. Another method is to create an entire idea for a new campaign out of pure creativity. It’s also a good idea to get feedback from people who may be interested in playing the campaign. Don’t tell them everything about it though; instead, tell them the general idea of it and if they seem interested then ask more people until there is a nice group of about 4-6 people. At this point it’s up to the DM to manage the new players and work with them to figure out their characters and how to integrate their backstories into the world to weave this wonderful story that everyone gets to experience.

All of these things are very important to learn if you wish to play D & D; although, if you only wish to remain as a player, you probably won’t know exactly how to play at first. As mentioned before, you will mainly be using the D20 to see how well you do on most things, the higher number you roll the better you do on something. A small number of things you might need to roll for are seeing if you can remember something properly, or if you can steal something, or how well you can throw a rock at someone’s head. It’s hard to understand all the rules involved in playing this awesome game, especially from this limited description. That’s why it’s vital to join a group with established players who are prepared to guide you through all the rules and events as they come. After you figure out all these topics you’ll finally be able to play. This is where all the fun of it actually is since you as the player get the choice of what you want to do. If the main quest you’re doing seems like it’s taking a toll on your character then you could definitely just take a while to go do something fun, like instead of chasing after the main villain you could give your character a day to relax and do whatever they would want to do. Since D & D is a tabletop role playing game, you will likely have to roleplay as your character. This is meant to make the game feel a bit more immersive and fun since you get to understand what your character is feeling which makes it more fun. So get your costume ready!