Garish costumes and crudely painted miniature models, dice rolls and hastily scrawled arithmetic, massive rulebooks and the awkward, teenaged boys that argue over them: These are the trappings often described by those who can name, but cannot define, “Dungeons & Dragons.” Even those who know better—those who have played the game or listened to it through podcasts, Twitch, or television—can struggle to define what Dungeons & Dragons really is. And that’s because Dungeons & Dragons (or “D&D”) is as difficult a game to define as it is to learn, in that it can be many things, and many conflicting things, as mercurial as the people who play it.
The socially awkward characters of The Big Bang playing the game infamous for being played by the socially awkward.
You might think of D&D as a board game, which isn’t a bad place to start, except you have to keep in mind that all of the board, the pieces and the rules are optional. The pieces represent you, the player, except it can be a you with any species and any personality that you choose. The board represents the world as imagined by the Game Master (or “GM”), the one among you who creates and controls every monster, every non-player character, and every aspect of the world that you and your party will explore—akin to a god, except also a slave, required to constantly adapt and tailor the story to fit their unpredictable players’ whims. And the game itself is a combat simulator laden with dozens of rules, except it is also an exercise in collaborative storytelling and improv, a game where the goals are made up and the rules don’t matter.
The game is, essentially, whatever you and your friends make of it. A group with a comfortable dynamic can have the best of times, but an unaccomodating GM or a belligerent player can easily incite the worst of times. Similarly, the combat within game can be as easy or as challenging, as strategic or as creative, as the GM and players want it to be. D&D is difficult, to be certain, though in ways that have nothing to do with the “winning” or “losing” of combat encounters. D&D is unenviably difficult for Game Masters, who must both challenge their players to keep them engaged but also help their players stay alive and feeling epic. And the players, who may have had no prior experience in acting or improv, have the daunting task of play-acting a newly imagined character however subtly or wildly different than their actual self. But despite all this, if you keep in mind what you’re there for—to have fun and to share pizza, I presume—you’ll do just fine.
So what does starting a new game of D&D look like? A fresh group might begin like this: The one among you who’s played before goes out and buys a Game Master’s guide to facilitate his world-building efforts, but whose contents will not be read by rest of you, the players. Each player creates a single character to represent them, choosing a class (such as Wizard, Rogue, or Bard), species (such as Human, Dwarf, or more exotic creatures like Dragonborn), and a background (such as sailor, soldier, or outcast)—whichever sounds most appealing. This can take between minutes and hours, depending on how much a player enjoys reading about the many options (there are nine races and twelve classes in the Player’s Handbook, together spanning one hundred and one pages of basic outlines, illustrations, and information that will only become relevant as characters grow stronger with experience). Then the GM describes in his own words—or with words borrowed from their guide—how the characters in your party first meet in some much-fated, little-remembered tavern, and how a dwarf by the name of Gundrin Rockseeker offers you gold in exchange for escorting his wagonful of merchandise to a nearby town, and how bellicose goblins then descend upon your escort in order to teach you the finer rules of combat. As you and your friends meet up every two weeks (or as often as your busy schedules allow), you gradually explore the mysteries of “Wave Echo Cave” and “Cragmaw Castle” and dungeons that have no name and quests that have no end, all the while your character grows in power and perhaps in personality, and you as a gamer perhaps grow in diameter as you share pizza that is as tasty as it is bad for your cholesterol.
I’ve spent hours poring over the different classes in 5e’s Player’s Handbook.
But how does the game actually work? If players decide what their characters do and say, what’s to stop a player from saying, “I stab the big bad villain through the heart” to save the day?
That’s what the dice are for. The dice, and ability score modifiers.
The fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons uses a “D20” system, which simply means that most actions that have a chance of failure require a roll of a twenty-sided die (or “D20”) to resolve. For example, say your party is venturing through a dungeon to rescue a friend from a band of kobolds. At one point you narrowly avoid falling into a trap floor five feet long and filled with spikes. Now faced with the decision of how to continue through the corridor, you decide to simply leap across the five foot gap. You roll a D20, and your GM decides how high a roll you’ll need to make the leap—maybe a ten or higher will succeed, but a nine or lower will leave you to deal with a painfully porcupinous landing.
The friends of Community perilously allow their fates to be determined by the roll of a die. (“Remedial Chaos Theory”)
But now let’s say you’re playing a half-orc barbarian who’s devoted their life to bashing in the skulls of his enemies with their considerable brawn. Surely it should be easier for your character to make such a leap than your other party members, one of whom is a scrawny bookworm of a wizard who’s never even collapsed a frontal lobe with a swing of a warhammer, much less with their fist. The barbarian will most likely have a higher Strength value, which will translate to a bonus to D20 rolls that involve strength, such as long-distance leaps. Maybe you roll an eight, but with your plus three from Strength, you make the leap. Immediately after, a kobold attacks you from around the corner. You decide to grapple the kobold and toss him into the spike trap, which results in a strength contest: Both you and the kobold (or rather, the GM on behalf of the kobold) roll D20’s, with bonuses or penalties applied from the characters’ respective Strength scores, and the higher result wins the grapple.
That’s the game in a nutshell. Want to attack with a weapon? Roll a D20 and add your weapon’s bonus modifier to the roll, and compare it against the monster’s armor value to see if you hit. If you hit, roll another dice to determine the exact amount of damage dealt. Want to cast a fireball spell? This time it’s the monsters that will roll D20’s to see if they can dodge out of the way of the flame, which is harder to do the better your spellcasting modifier is. And so on.
It’s a simple enough setup, and yet powerful enough to resolve any of the infinite possible actions that might need to be resolved in a game where literally anything might happen. On top of that, it allows a sense of progression, letting your characters tangibly improve at various skills as their ability score modifiers increase over time. And the element of random chance can lead to hilarity, especially considering that any roll of twenty is considered an automatic success (regardless of ability score modifiers) and any roll of one is an automatic failure, so even the patently ridiculous becomes possible with the best of luck, and the blatantly easy becomes embarrassing with the worst of luck.
Dungeons & Dragons was only the first of its kind, as many other role-playing games have sprung up over the intervening decades since Gary Gygax’s first excursion into Forgotten Realms. And yet, forty-odd years later, D&D is still a great place to start if you want to pick up an RPG, or if you want a more imaginative way to spend a few hours with friends. I highly recommend it, if you get the chance.
The players of Critical Role pose with far more panache than I could ever muster.
Rambling After 