Welcome To Dungeons & Dragons

/

Let’s Begin

So you read my first blog, and decided that Dungeons & Dragons peaked your interest. Amazing! I’m happy to announce that you’ve come to the right place. In this blog we’ll go through everything you’ll need to know as a beginner in D&D, what to expect, and how gameplay usually runs and tips and tricks to help you in your journey.

Learning D&D always comes in 3 parts:

  1. Seeking interest and wanting to learn to play.

  2. Learning to play, getting overwhelmed, and quitting cause no game should be this complicated to learn.

  3. Coming across this blog, and realizing that I’m here to help you make things easy.

When learning, you might feel overwhelmed. Everyones tells you that you should be learning all types of different information and to read all the books, but that’s not the case. Of course if you were to do that you’d be overwhelmed, you’re forcing yourself to learn so much that isn’t necessary at the moment. D&D, though, is a game where it’s good to learn before you play. It’s a “learn as you go” experience.

Now don’t go reading the Players Handbook from front to back, you’ll quit after 10 pages. Youtube is your friend, it’s what I used for months before I got the books. Youtuber’s like ‘Pointy Hat’, ‘Ginny D’, and ‘The DM Layer’ helped me so much in my journey. If you want a visual feel on how a session is run, I suggest watching Critical Role or Dimension 20.

(Because books are expensive, I’ve got your back. I’ll leave a link to a PDF of the player handbook at the end of the blog)

Now you’ve got an idea about how things are run during a game, you’re ready to move on to the next step. Character creation! A character sheet in D&D might be your most prized possession when playing. It’s more valuable than the magical item you found in session three and completely forgot about.

Character creation can be intimidating at first, especially if you have no idea what anything means. Luckily there is an amazing website called D&D beyond which will help you create your character with step by step instructions and proper description for everything to help. The main focus when creating your characters is choosing your race and class.

List of all races: https://www.dndbeyond.com/races

List of Classes: https://www.dndbeyond.com/classes

Note that some races are harder to play than others, if you’re not creating your characters with your group contact your DM and ask what would suit the campaign better, and if there is any information needed when creating your character.

Something you should keep in mind is your ability scores, the vertical column on the left side of your sheet

Here’s a little idea on what each ability score is used for:

Dexterity: How you can walk under/around/over something

Strength: How much you can throw, carry, pull, push, etc.

Constitution: Now the character’s physique, toughness, health and resistance to diseases and poisons.

Intelligence: Refers to “reasoning and memory” or “logic, education, memory, or deductive reasoning”.

Wisdom: character’s practical intelligence, cleverness, perceptiveness, and how in tune they are with the world around them.

Charisma: Charisma measures a character's force of personality, force of will, persuasiveness, personal magnetism, ability to lead and physical attractiveness.

Finding a group can be hard if you don’t have a group of friends willing to play or you don’t know someone who already plays. That’s okay, with how popular it’s gotten there are so many online communities you can join.

Something a lot of players forget and I always need to remind my own players is that your DM is there for you! Your DM will always be there to answer any questions you have rather than when you’re trying to learn, or even questions that come to gameplay.

“What am I going to expect when I start playing?”

D&d is a collaborative game where you work together as a team to explore worlds created by your DM. It's a great game to build team building and strategy skills especially when you’ve accidentally walked into a race belonging to an owlbear and you need to find a way out.

It’s a game meant to have fun with your friends, messing around trying to convince the guard that you didn’t break the door down when he clearly saw you do it. It’s every theatre kid's dream when role playing gets involved, coming to the sessions dressed up as Dobby from Harry Potter and attempting to do Voldemort's voice when playing your character.

So I’m leaving you with that, I hope you’re journey in learning D&D is fun and you experience some of the best adventures.

Player Handbook PDF: https://orkerhulen.dk/onewebmedia/DnD%205e%20Players%20Handbook%20%28BnW%20OCR%29.pdf

Hey, I’m Valerie Robert! I’m a Dungeons and Dragons DM. I’d get your D20s ready because I’ll be taking you on an adventure into the world of Table top RPG games and why they’re taking over the world by a storm. For the past couple of years I’ve been intrigued with writing fiction, and decided to join the amazing world of Table Top RPG to take my skills to the next level, and have fun with my friends. I love being able to express my love for creating worlds and characters along with anything involving RPG games.

So before we begin our adventure, I’d love for everyone to please roll initiative.