Alignment, For Players, Greenhorns GuideRichard OstranderSeptember 09, 2021Good, Evil, Neutral

The Greenhorn's Guide to... Playing Dungeons & Dragons

Alignment, For Players, Greenhorns GuideRichard OstranderSeptember 09, 2021Good, Evil, Neutral

So the other day I was asked, how does a campaign work? How does an adventure work? Do players bring characters with them? When do they make them? These are very simple questions. But they are good questions, as for new players with no understanding of the game, they help provide a framework for exactly what “Playing D&D” is. So let’s start answering them.

So first, let’s cover the very basics. Dungeons and Dragons is a collaborative storytelling experience that uses a basic set of rules to govern what can happen during that story. What this means in simpler terms is that the Dungeon Master (DM) will tell you a story which you are a part of. Throughout the story they will ask you what you want to do, and you will tell them, often in simple English.

So for example, the DM might say you are in a room with a table covered with a grand feast. Guards are rushing towards you, coming from around either side of the table. What do you want to do? You might then say, I want to do a cartwheel across the table top, leap onto the other side, and run out the door the guards emerged from. Your DM would then PROBABLY tell you to make an acrobatics check, using a value on your character sheet to determine what roll you will have to make to successfully pull off your cartwheel. In general, the DM will always tell you what to look at on your character sheet and what to roll. For starting players, they mostly just have to say what they want to do.

While this system explains what to do from moment to moment in D&D, it does not really cover the other terms like adventure, campaign, and character creation. So let the discussion continue...

An adventure is typically a single story that players work through from beginning to end. This story can be short enough to play through in a single session, or require many (a session by the way, can be as short as 1-2 hours or as long as 3-8 hours, often with a break for food in the middle). In many ways you can think of these adventures as being a lot like a book. Some books are smaller novellas that you can finish in a sitting, while for some larger books, you might have to continue reading them for days or weeks at a time. Adventures are the same way. For players that are new to D&D, I try to make their first adventure no more than 3-6 hours, but there is no hard rule as to length. Often they last as long as it takes to get to the end of the story.

Continuing our analogy, if an adventure is a book, then a campaign is a series of books that tell a larger story, like the Harry Potter series or the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Typically a campaign contains a series of adventures, each standing on their own, but linked together via a strong narrative thread. Perhaps the same villain is featured in each of the adventures, or there is a grand goal that the players work towards accomplishing by the end of the series. Campaigns can last months or years, depending on the size of the story being told.

Lastly, we have character creation. For new players, character creation typically occurs right before their first adventure, in what is known as “session zero”. This session usually involves the DM setting boundaries based on what the players are comfortable with (which I will discuss in a later article), and helping them build characters of the appropriate level. For new characters, that level is typically 1, but the DM can set the starting level to whatever he would like, with advanced players rarely, if ever, starting at first level. If the DM has a particular story in mind, he might also set additional rules and restrictions on what characters can be created (things like “your character must be level 3 with a criminal background”, or “you cannot make Artificers as the world we are adventuring has very little magic”).

Even with advanced players there is usually some form of a session zero where the DM vets each character and makes sure they are happy with what they’re seeing. For most of my players, who are usually new to D&D, I either run session zero on a day prior to session 1 (typically lasting 1 -2 hours), or I have them submit their characters to me online so I can look them over.

So there you have it, some basic terminology that hopefully makes you comfortable enough to want to join your first game.

As always,

Happy roleplaying, and may the dice be ever in your favor.