So you want to play Dungeons and Dragons…

Dungeons and Dragons is in a bit of a renaissance right now. Whether folks have watched the characters from Stranger Things take on a Demogorgon, or you’ve seen the cast of voice actors on Matt Mercer’s Critical Roll through their live game’s… you may be one of many that are now coming around to consider what it would take to play the game.

Why a Tabletop RPG?

Dungeons and Dragons is one of many tabletop RPGs. We use the term tabletop RPGs to describe, generally, RPGs played around a table with pencil, paper, dice, and friends.

The core component that all tabletop RPG’s have… and the main differentiator that makes them so unique is an aspect of Collaborative story telling. For us at Cloud 9 Tabletop, that is the heart of what makes D&D, and other tabletop RPGs such a satisfying, and worthwhile way to spend your leisure. D&D gives us the opportunity go get together with friends, and get immersed in a story that we get to co-create. There’s something uniquely satisfying about a creative concept that comes out of your mind that joins the creative improv session at the table, and takes on a life of its own… then watching where it goes. All while taking on challenges together, and vanquishing the baddies. Tabletop gaming also brings together a real sense of a real life “us” like no other game. Regular recurring games can become cornerstones in long-standing friendships, and help build new friendships too.

Why Dungeons and Dragons

Of the a myriad of other tabletop RPGs with various systems and genres such as Pathfinder, GURPS, Shadowrun, Vampire Masquerade, Dungeons and Dragons is by far the most well-known, and we’d advocate that it’s the best one for getting started as a beginner. Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition (5e) has been on the market since 2014… with this latest iteration we’ve seen a swing in the style of game that really hits a sweet spot for creating a low barrier of entry for new players with fairly simple rules, and a streamlined character creation. Honestly… it’s the best version yet. We’ll be creating other content that compares other systems to Dungeons and Dragons, but rest assured it’s our favorite system to play currently, and we hope that through this guide maybe it can be yours too.

About this Guide

There are dozens of other guides and videos out there that give good step by step introductions to how you might get started playing D&D. We understand that you know you’ve got many options. Our guide aims to not just explain how you could get started, but really outlining our recommendations on how you should get started to really drive you to the best experience possible with as little “trial and error” as possible.

How do you get started playing Dungeons and Dragons

While Dungeons and Dragons is our favorite hobby, we realize that it’s not “turnkey” to start. You can’t just open a box of components, unpack it around a table, and play like you could a board game or video game. There a kind of knowledge “floor” that you need to get past to get everyone on the same page about how to play. However the investment of getting past this is definitely worth it. Our goal with this article is to make the learning process as easy, and as fun as possible.

Here’s the outline for getting started in this guide:

1. Dipping Your Toes in the Water – Experience the game
2. Customize, and make D&D your own
3. Elevate your game – Cloud 9 Style

 

Step 1. Dipping your toes in the water

The best way to explore the waters is to experience the game. Play it, or at the very least, watch it played. I liken this to a kid learning to play baseball. He could read a baseball manual for three weeks to get the rules memorized… or he could just go out back and get some back yard stick ball going with the other kids down the street. The second method is much more effective… and this same kid is in a better position to grasp the more nuanced rules when learning to play on a formal baseball team with rules and regulations. In the same way we’d recommend reading through this list of ways to just get out there and experience some gaming… then make a game plan for how to get your own game going.

 

Watching the game played

For those of you searching for how to get involved in D&D yourself because you saw a game on a stream or on YouTube, this might be old news. But if you have not already, checking out some live play of D&D games on YouTube is a great way to get the feel of the game. Here’s three to check out…

 

D&Diesel with Vin Diesel

A hilariously over produced (and awesome) D&D session with Vin Diesel honestly just watching the first five minutes of the D&Diesel clip with Vin Diesel will give you a feel for the game.  Keep an eye out for the formula that will setup each interaction, and rinse and repeat over and over again… this is how the game is played.

1. The Dungeon master describes the scene that the players are in, and may act out the actions of the Non-Player Characters or monsters in the scene.
2. The players decide what they want to do, and perhaps add some color, detail and role play to the mix.
3. The dungeon master will decide if a roll of the dice is needed to determine how successful (or unsuccessful) an action is. The players roll, and report their numbers… and the dungeon master describes what the outcome is… and then we rinse and repeat and loop back to the players.

 

The Provokers

This is my personal favorite. It’s run by another dude named Matt who gathered other YouTube D&D content creators to play a game together.  When I discovered this YouTube Series I binge listened anytime I possibly could including all of my commutes.  I love the characterization and storytelling that these guys bring to the table… and I love that the players around the table feel like “real guys” that one of us mere mortals would hang out with.  The players themselves are D&D enthusiasts who each create YouTube content around the hobby.

 

Critical Roll

Perhaps the most well-known D&D stream which is broadcast on Geek & Sundry’s Twitch channel. Critical roll combines the amazing storytelling and Dungeon Mastering of Matt Mercer, with a crew of professional voice actors to play the game on stream.  They started in a basement on a shoestring budget and have become an internet sensation.Watching the awesome voice actors and DM Matt Mercer take on RPG adventures can be both inspiring, and also a bit intimidating.  It’s like watching professional athletes in their element… they are fantastic, but it may have taken years to get to the point where they are… and they have a full production crew behind the scenes making sure that everyone looks great. You don’t have to be at their level to have a great time. Back yard stick ball is still hella fun… even if you’re not ready for the major leagues.

 

 

Jumping in for at least a session or two within an established group of players game.

This is the Cloud 9 primary recommendation for getting your feet. Aside from observing a stream from afar, getting in to the game with folks who are already playing is a fantastic way to get acclimated. Most gaming groups will have folks that are happy to step you through your character creation process, and help you understand how to take actions in-game and be a part of the collaborative experience. We do realize that if you’re reading this article, it’s probably not because you already have a buddy that’s chomping at the bit to sit you down at his table and get you playing D&D. You’re here because you likely don’t have an obvious place to jump in and start playing so you’re doing some research for ways to get involved with a game if you don’t already have access to one.

 

Roll 20 for finding an online group

Up for a remote game? You could go with the online route and use the Roll 20 site www.roll20.net to find some fellow nerds. This site provides a fantastic digital tabletop that can be used for tabletop gaming. It even integrates chat, video conferencing, voice, and a shared tabletop experience that has moderator and player roles. Check out their match making features to link up with beginner friendly games that suit your play schedule.

The time spent with this group of existing players can be long-term, or short… the key experience you’re going for is just jumping in and experiencing how the game is played without feeling like you need to learn the rules, and teach them to others before you even roll the dice.

 

Rally your friends around the D&D Starter Set

When joining an existing group of folks isn’t available, and the online version of the game is less appealing or not a choice you want to make for whatever reason, you may want to just gather your would be fellow newbie D&D players you’d like to play with and try running this starter set game. I can’t say enough good things about this product. The D&D Starter set was created by Wizards of the Coast, the official publishers of Dungeons and Dragons, with the goal of creating a very low barrier of entry to the hobby for new players, and they have done a great job of doing so.

The box contains four pre-generated characters, full color maps, a streamlined “quick play” version of the rules, a premade adventure that runs from levels one to five, and even a set of dice. All for $20. Get your set here on Amazon through our affiliate link, and we’ll get a small commission… about enough for a cup of coffee. While the best way to acclimate is often with a more tenured player guiding your way, this provides a very solid way to get started with your friends.

Just know that the most critical role in the group will be the person who agreed to be the dungeon master. They will need to be familiar with the premade story content, as well as have enough of a grasp on the rules to be able to facilitate the session for the rest of the group.

 

Honorable Mention – Sign up to play at Adventures League Organized Play

Adventures League is officially sanctioned and organized D&D play that happens, typically, at local brick and mortar gaming shops. Adventure League nights are on the calendar, players sign up for the events, and sit in for a session with a tenured DM.

Adventures league sounds great at first blush, but there are some drawbacks that keep me from getting overly enthusiastic about it. First of all, if this might be your only way to go experience the game without creating one from scratch, then it goes way up the coolness meter for something to try. I would just not recommend it for your “home base” for Dungeons and Dragons gaming. Nothing beats a home game. Kitchen tables, or basements (yep – the stereotype has some truth) usually work best. The best parts about tabletop gaming tend to be the creative, evolving story that the characters can influence… the immersive feel around the table… a gaming store can detract from this as being in a public space, passing by onlookers, side conversations around, can detract from this. Also the Adventures league sessions are standardized, so you don’t get that evolving open story like you can in a home game. Lastly, again because they are pick up and play type sessions… they tend to be a bit more combat focused… which isn’t a bad thing entirely, I love combat in D&D… it just has a tendency to fall short on the adventuring, exploring, and role playing parts of the game. I don’t want to completely dog it though… it can be a great way to gain exposure to the game, or even to add a supplemental game to your calendar. Just don’t lose sight of having our own home or online game with regular players. Honestly, I’d love to hear your feedback on this. If you are new to the hobby and try out an adventures league game and would be willing to share your story, give us an update in the comments below.

 

Have Cloud 9 Tabletop help your group launch your campaign

If all of this sounds kinda… hard… Cloud 9 Tabletop is also planning a premium service to help solve this problem. We offer having one of our senior Dungeon Masters run a group of you and your friends through a kickoff adventure. This would include a session zero for planning, a 2-4 hour adventure evening, and an optional chance for the DM to sit in on your game as a player, providing mentoring and coaching for your own game.

 

Step 2. Customizing and Making the Game your Own

At this point, you may find that you’ve been bit by the RPG bug, and you want to take your game to the next level, and you should. The most authentic feeling experience in playing, honestly, is playing a character that you dreamed up, with friends in a home setting. So you have a few options for playing the game further… you could double down on one of the methods you had success with above, such as finding / hosting games with others online through roll 20, or in adventures league, or just keep playing that starter set all the way to level 5 and the completion of the story (would take about ten, two to four-hour sessions to get that far… so there’s a ton of content to play through, OR you can take the leap into playing or facilitating your own home game.

Again, the most critical component for your group is figuring out who the Dungeon Master is going to be. From there, here is a list of essentials:

Recommended Gear & Activities for your first game

Players Handbook(s) – Everyone

This is the main physical component that you need at your table. You really must have either the basic rules, or the players handbook available in order to walk through creating your character, get familiar with how game mechanics, and reference it in-game when needed… for example for looking up the effects of the cool fireball spell that your mage just flung at the pack of crazed goblins behind you. The main difference between using the players handbook vs. the basic rules is your breadth of options. The players handbook has an expanded list of races, classes, subclasses, spells, combat mechanics, and optional feats. The main differentiator this gives you as a new player is the ability to create a less cliché, more interesting character that feels fun and satisfying to play as.

Character Sheets – Everyone

As you design your character, you’ll go through a process to generate their stats and pick out a class that provides some unique capabilities such as better physical combat prowess or the ability to cast spells, and you’ll get starting equipment. These stats and abilities are recorded on your character sheet. Side note – house rule – it’s not a real character sheet until you get food or drink on it! You can’t go rubbing food on it on purpose either… this needs to be a natural byproduct of hanging out around the table. Get some orange Cheetos stain on the corner from scrambling to figure out what your armor class is to see if the ogres giant maul was able to smash your chest plate in or not? Spill some mountain dew on the edge of your sheet before you quickly pick it up? It’s a real character sheet now.

Something to consider – Physical Paper Character Sheets vs. Digital Character Sheets in an app

Generally, I strongly recommend using a character sheet generator that lets you click-through the character creation process, yet also prints out on a physical piece of paper. There’s a lot of little pieces of the process to make sure you’re adding together when creating a character and apps will streamline that process for you. You select the choices and it does the math… and outputs it onto your character sheet.  However, there are limited choices right now for apps that will allow you to do so.  Here are your three main Options:

D&D Beyond Character Generator

This official character generator has brought out some love / hate emotions in me.  I love that it allows new, and experienced users to click-through their character choices in a kind of “wizard” UI… making the process very painless. I love the sleek spell selection and intuitive UI… However, updating your character with content outside of the basic rules are behind a pay wall… you need to purchase digital copies of the additional books within D&D beyond’s framework, even if you already own the physical copy.

Paper or Form Fillable PDF Character Sheets

The analog alternative, is keeping your character on a physical sheet of paper, or a form fillable PDF. (Just google for a D&D fifth edition character sheet.  there are lots… pick one that suits your fancy.)

The drawback to paper is that, of course, none of the calculations are done for you.  When you pick up a new weapon, you need to figure out that the bonus to attacks that the weapon has is the dice value of the weapon + any magical properties that the weapon has + your proficiency modifier + your stat bonus for the character stat you’re using. You only need to do this once… then it doesnt change much but making sure you’ve got it right.

Apple and Android Apps

Know that many apps will give you an electronic character sheet that you can manage. Some are even interactive, allowing you to swap in new equipment, and lower and raise hit points on the fly. However, I’m a really big proponent that part of the real satisfying parts of this game is keeping and scribbling on physical paper, and rolling physical dice. Also these apps have some trademark issues with using Wizards of the Coast’s IP, and often are limited to only including the basic rules in their content… so if your character is using something cool out of one of the expanded rulebooks such as Xanthar’s Guide to Everything, they won’t be able to bring it in to thier character sheet here without some manual work.

Dice – Everyone

If you hadn’t picked them up earlier in your process, each player and the DM will want to have their own set of dice. A set of “polyhedral” dice are sold in sets of 7 different dice in a set. You can pick these up from your local gaming store (support local gaming!) or on amazon. There’s something really fulfilling about picking out your favorite color / design and rolling your own set at your game.

A note on digital dice rollers. Yes. These exist. There are apps, and websites… and they work just fine… they are just not quite as cool as having the physical set to roll with.

Pencils

Yep – you’ll need these.  We like them better than pen because you scribble and erase quite a bit as your HP, Inventory gets updated, etc.

A Session Zero Activity – Everyone

Whether this happens over the phone, Skype, google hangouts, in person, over a meal… its super recommended to get together with the folks that you’ll be playing with and level set about what kind of game is going to be played, what kind of things are allowed in-game and out of game, and what kind of etiquette / expectations to follow. We’ll be writing a comprehensive article on session zeroes in the coming future here on Cloud 9.

An Adventure to run – Just the DM

If you’ll be the one running the game, you’ll need an adventure to run your players through. You have a few options:

D&D Starter Set

If your “getting your toes in the water” experience did not include a play through of the D&D Starter set, it’s still a solid option for your first home game, or even for a game of experienced players for that matter. Our recommendation is that you take the setting of the Mines of Phandelver but expand the source material to allow your players to create a race and class from the full list of available options in the Players handbook, as well as allowing the rest of the content in the players handbook like a wider choice of spells for magic users, and the optional feats. The reason we like this method is that while the basic set started you off with some basic tropes for the characters you can play, its most fun to really explore playing something that has a new twist that doesn’t feel cliché or overdone to you.

DM Guild

https://www.dmsguild.com

This is a great source for free and paid content where gamers can upload their own homebrew games for others to play. I love that there are so many options… and I love that… again… this could get you exploring the type of story that feels fresh and new…

Your own Custom Game

The most time and brainpower intensive (and the most rewarding) approach to creating an adventure is to make your own. This gives the DM the role of creating a world with fascinating places to explore, creatures to vanquish, and journeys and adventures to be had. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is to take an existing setting that you are familiar with and “D&D-ify” it. The sweet spot with this approach, is that your players are challenged to up their game as well… they will be creating characters that have some back story in the world. As the DM you can use the back stories of your characters as fodder for the main, or side plots of your main story. For example… have a character that has magic powers from an unknown primordial magical origin who appeared at their birth? What if that same source of magic was somehow now contorted and twisted, and wrecking the land itself. What if it is sentient and can be reasoned with? What if it considers your part member like a son of theirs… if they can even remember them. Intertwining back stories into the active campaign is perhaps the best way to really spike player engagement and interest, and to really facilitate the collaborative story telling aspect of the game. Much of Cloud 9’s content will be dedicated to providing education, inspiration, and resources to DM’s looking to elevate their games for their players.

Additional Gear

Recommended additional gear purchases for making the game your own

Optional – A grid mat and miniatures for tracking combat.

There are two styles of combat in D&D… the first is called “theater of the mind” where combat is worked out without any physical representation of what’s happening… all of the hack and slash is happening in the theatres… of our minds… the other is to bring a physical component… including a matt and miniatures to represent the characters, and the baddies that they may be fighting on the map.

Players handbooks

We talked about this already. You’re gonna need it.

Monster Manual

This beautifully illustrated hardcover book compliments your game by bringing the stats, and descriptions of hundreds of monsters that you can bring to life in your world

Dungeon Master’s guide

This book is often misunderstood. This is NOT intended to be a good read, cover to cover, by someone who is playing the DM role… it is more so a reference book to help DM’s create worlds, encounters, and includes things like random loot tables to allow that archmage that the party just vanquished to have something cool on his person for the party to loot after they defeat him.

Xanthar’s Guide to Everything

Expanded subclasses and more character options. Good stuff in here to explore.

 

Step 3. Elevating your game – Cloud 9 Style

By now, you’ve experienced the game, and developed your own budding gaming group with unique characters, and a premade or house made adventure to run. From here, it’s really about incorporating inspiration, tips and tricks to take your game from good to great. Some of these pointers can be dramatically impactful to the game session… for example… getting your tabletop group to really embrace descriptive combat scenes makes your combats feel like an awesome action sequence, compared to the kind of dice rolling slog fest that it can sometimes feel like if it is uninspired. Cloud 9 will be providing inspiration, education resources and tips on a weekly basis, so subscribe for the upcoming content.