Back in 2020, I sat together with my best friend and she mentioned that she wanted to try out D&D and tasked me to find out what we need to do to play it. Months later, I was sitting there, with my nose deep in the core rulebook set, trying to figure out what to do. I also got the Essentials Kit and the Starter Pack, until I sort of had an idea where to start. In parallel I started to watch dozens of explainer videos. And then, eventually I started a three year long campaign and several other one-shots for my friends and their friends. But thinking back, I probably would have started a little different.
Where are you coming from?
Today, in 2025, Dungeons & Dragons has seen a surge in popularity throughout the last decade, since the release of the now Fifth Edition, or also known as 5E. Released originally 2014, Fifth Edition rebooted the main lore and introduced a stream-lined version of their rule sets. After being part of storylines of The Big Bang Theory or Stranger Things and the rising popularity of actual play YouTube channels like Critical Role, Dungeons & Dragons was as successful as never before in its now 51-year old history. Therefore, you might be interested to get into D&D if you’ve seen any of those properties, or the criminally underrated 2023 movie „Honor among thieves“. So… what *is* D&D and *isn’t* D&D?
Is it a board game?
So let’s start with what it’s not. It’s not a simple board game that can be opened up and played without preparation. D&D or TTRPGs in general rely on an asymmetric setup: One game master who serves as a storyteller, a quest-giver, a guidance, a referee and overall scholar of the world they are presenting. They have a rough estimate about what kind of story they want to let the players experience and give some guardrails. On the other hand, you have players who create characters who live in this world together with NPC, i.e. non-player characters that the game master (or GM) has either prepared or has to invent on the fly. It’s a medium for collaborative story-telling to bring everyone on the table together, to have fun, solve some mysteries, speak with a variety of people and beat up the occasional monster that appears.
What are campaign settings?
At that point, let’s take a step back at what D&D distinguishes from other systems. Dungeons & Dragons started off as an extension to wargaming games that were popular in the 60s and 70s. Instead of presenting and controlling large armies, Gary Gygax wanted to introduce mechanics that focused on single, controllable hero characters that would do special tasks during a battle or would walk through the lands on their own. This became the basic foundation of D&D up until today. Characters could interact with objects, other characters and fight monsters, while controlling the health status of the characters with health points, mechanics you’d see in any video game today. Initially wanting to play around in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, the first published versions were playing in a rather generic Fantasy world named Greyhawk. Over the years, many other campaign worlds were introduced. Ravenloft is a world full of dread and gothic horrors. Dragonlance is a world of giant battles between good and evil. Spelljammer is a science-fiction-fantasy world with space pirates. Planescape is a multiversal campaign setting that fits most campaign worlds together. But the most famous one is probably the Forgotten Realms setting. If you’re talking about D&D adventures in recent years, those would be set in this world. The above-mentioned Honor among Thieves movie was playing around the Swordcoast area of the Forgotten Worlds. Baldur’s Gate 3, also takes place in this setting. Depending on which campaign setting you’d like to choose your adventure, you’d end up in one of those campaign settings. If you want horror, you’d go to Ravenloft. If you want a whimsical adventure, Feywild. If you find a post-apocalyptic steampunk world, you’d go for Eberron. If you want a Star Trek-like adventure, Spelljammer. And so on. Depending on what kind of playstyle and theme, you’d take one of these settings and go for it.
How the D20-Roll-high system works and other TTRPG systems
As mentioned above, in the past D&D had some issues with licensing certain settings like The Lord of the Rings and this has opened up in recent years and there are lots of expansions and homebrew settings that you can use for your play, but let’s just say, let’s have a first feeling for basic TTRPG’s first, before getting more complicated stuff. But, at that point, I should also mention other TTRPG systems. D&D is known to be as a D20-Roll-High role playing game. The D20, or a twenty-sided die, is the main decision point for checks, attack rolls and other challenges. When ever you want to convince someone of a lie, you’d do a check, in this case a deception or persuasion check. The character that you are creating in a D&D game has a set of abilities (that can also be trained and enhanced throughout the campaign) which results in a modifier. So, let’s assume your character John wants to convince that he’s just walking around a villa, getting his daily workout and NOT staking out the villa for the rest of the party to steal a powerful item at the same time. It’s a high-stakes scenario and you don’t want to screw it up. The GM tells the player to roll a D20 for a check and you’d add your modifier value to the result of the roll. The person John wants to convice, a guard perhaps, is highly suspicious, so it should be more difficult for him to succeed with his lie, so the GM would require a roll higher than 15 to convince the guard of the lie. Fortunately though, Frank is quite charming and has also a proficiency in deception (in this example the modifier would be a +8), so he rolls a D20 with a 11 as a result. Adding 8 on top gives the final result 19, which is larger than 15, therefore he succeeds in convincing the guard. Other systems have other methods of determining results of those kinds of checks. TTRPGs made by the company modiphius have a 2D20-Roll-Low system, the newly released Daggerheart TTRPG has a 2D12-Roll-High system. And at that point, there has been a large influence of new systems of TTRPGs that would fit for a variety of playstyles. The before-mentioned Daggerheart is more focused on narrative-long-term-storytelling. Mausritter is a whimsical TTRPG for younger players with a reduced rule set. Cyberpunk Red is the newest iteration of the Cyberpunk franchise that also is known for the Cyberpunk 2077 game. Star Trek Adventures is a 2D20-Roll-Low system if you want to fly around in a starfleet ship trying to explore strange new worlds. Candela Obscura is another horror-based scenario based on an alternate late 19th Century-early 20th Century. Mothership is a system for Sci-Fi-horror scenarios in outer space on derelict ships that have been taken over by alien entities. And if you really want to go deeper, there are systems for Blade Runner or Alien if you really want to play in that worlds. Each of them unite one thing: A bunch of friends sit together, have adventures together and have lots of fun.
What it really isn’t
Before, we had seen that TTRPGs are not simple board games per se and that at least one person in the group, i.e. the game master, needs to do some research and advanced work first. So, let’s get back to D&D and have a closer look at what it isn’t exactly.
It’s not a satanic game, as some would have suggested decades ago. Yes, there might be devilish creatures and you might create a Tiefling character (someone with horns on their heads), but you wouldn’t sit afterwards on an inverted Pentagram or something. Others are frightened by violence and combat. Actually D&D has a three-pillar system based around exploration, social encounters and combat. Depending on the preferred play style, the campaign could be designed such that combat only happens occasionally. But sometimes, adversaries can be stopped with other ways. Maybe they could be lured into a trap or knocked out in a different way. It’s open for your player’s imagination. It’s also not just for Math nerds. The example above is just one of many easy examples of how the result of a check scenario is calculated. In higher levels, some players might be stacking up effect combos that might lead to some calculations, but overall it stays pretty simple. In general, rules are pretty straigh-forward and seem frightening at first, but after playing a few sessions, my GM anxiety was away. Actually, before my very first session as a GM, I probably watched a dozen videos on how combat works and eventually the first combat session became a high-stakes battle against a Manticore, lots of tactical withdrawals and jumps from a windmill. You’ll create memories together with your best friends and those moments will stick with you forever. That’s what the power of TTRPGs is.
Where to start?
Well, when I started, I stepped into the classic trap that I usually step into: Over-preparing. I got all the core rulebooks, the rules expansions, campaign settings that I wouldn’t even play, adventures that were way too large and multiple starter campaigns. Heck, I even merged the starter adventures „Lost Mine of Phandelver“ together with „Dragon of Icespire Peak“ as a first-time-GM. But it took some effort to merge the different threads into a coherent narrative. And when I was done, I also took elements of Tyranny of Dragons, Descend into Avernus and other adventure modules and that was our three-year-long campaign.
But that’s not what I’m trying to suggest to you. If you want to start with 5E, there are several starter campaigns available.
- Lost Mine of Phandelver (early Starter Set (2014) (no longer available), now expanded into Phandelver and below – The shattered obelisk)
- Dragon of Icespire Peak (Essentials Kit)
- Dragons of Stormwreck Isle (Starter Kit 2022)
These are the original starter adventures. In 2024, there has been a general re-design of the core rules and you might see a distinction between 2014 and 2024 rules. In Autumn 2025, there will be a new starter set for the 2024 rule set named „Heroes of the Borderlands“. But if you just want to get into playing D&D, either stick with one of these sets or play a simplified system like Mausritter where you play mice that are going on an adventure. Or you might try out other role-playing systems such as Brindlewood Bay, where you basically play a group of Golden Girls and Miss Marples trying so solve a mysterious crime. You could also try out Fiasco, a simple cinematic game about escalation. There are tons of YouTube videos available that not only show a simple playthrough but also how to play them. Furthermore, most of them also contain necessary ingredients like simplified rule books, pre-defined characters, item cards, dice sets and GM screens that can be placed in front of the GM to hide all their secret, hidden, spoilery notes. If you don’t want to use any of those, you might also consider so-called One-Shots, simple adventures that are specifically designed to fill a game-session of around 3-4 hours, whereas the starter sets are considered to fill around 5-10 sessions (or even longer)
My simple tips are: Don’t try to lose yourself in over-preparations. You don’t need to have every rule memorised. Don’t be intimidated by the amount of content. Just try to focus on those elements that are for your role in the game. A GM only needs a general overview about what a player can and can’t do, what their backstories are and what their builds are capable of. That’s for the players to find out. Once you’ve understood the main premise of the adventure, make some preparation notes, grab some dice and just roll with it. It may be clunky at first, but over time you’ll figure every detail out. And that’s also the fun of every TTRPG. Sitting together with your friends, having lots of fun.
And this will be also the start of a small blog series for this month. In the next blog entry, we’ll dive deeper into the logistics of D&D: Finding a group and schedule sessions… And trust me, there’s no bigger boss battle than finding a schedule for the next session that fits all…
