Your kid is asking you about getting started with Dungeons & Dragons. Maybe they’ve heard some folks talking about it, their friends are starting to play D&D or they saw some folks playing in a gaming store. Whatever the reason, they’re interested in giving it a try. Great! Except for the fact that you don’t know anything about it.
How do you get started with Dungeons & Dragons? Don’t you have to buy books? Don’t you have to buy dice?
Actually, no!
There are a bunch of free official resources to get your kid started with Dungeons & Dragons without having to drop $50 on the Player’s Handbook and another $10 or so for a set of dice before they’ve even decided whether or not they like the game.
You Don’t Need to Buy Books
There are a lot of Dungeons and Dragons books out there, but the only one you really need to play is the Player’s Handbook – or do you? MSRP for The Player’s Handbook is $49.95. That’s a lot of money for something your kid might use only a few times before chucking into the back of the closet. But you actually don’t need it to get started.
You can use the SRD – system reference document – to get started with Dungeons and Dragons basically for free. “System Reference Document” is just a fancy term for the free rules for Dungeons and Dragons. It’s enough to create a character and learn how the game works without spending a dime. It even has monsters to use for combat encounters. It’s not everything you’ll find in the actual books, but it’s enough to get started.
It’s available here in a 400+-page PDF, but you also can check out other sites such as 5e SRD, which have taken the content and optimized its organization for the web.
You Don’t Need to Buy Dice
A basic set of dice at your Friendly Local Gaming Store will probably run you about $10 or so. That’s not too bad, but each set is seven polyhedral dice that can and will get lost if their owner isn’t careful.
Push your kids toward digital dice for now and they can get some physical ones once they’ve decided they’re into Dungeons & Dragons (or any tabletop gaming, really).
Dungeons and Dragons has a couple of official options for dice rollers. The first (and most basic) is this relic from the early 2000s. It allows you to set the number of each type of die you want to roll and displays the most recent results in a window to the right.
A snazzier-but-still-official option is the built-in dice rolling functions on DnDBeyond.com. This site makes it easy to create characters for the game and, when you’re actually playing, it rolls the dice for you with a mouse click. You could argue that DnDBeyond’s dice roller does all the math for you and, consequently, makes it harder for a newcomer to learn the mechanics of the game. But you focus on a fun experience above all else, it will translate into a desire to learn the guts of the system (which are pretty simple anyway).
You Don’t Need to Buy Battlemaps
Battle maps are handy tools for kitchen-table adventurers. They let the players and the game master keep track of where the players and enemies are in combat situations or during dungeon delving. There are probably a lot fewer kitchen-table sessions going on because of social distancing, but shared online whiteboards are a good solution for your kid’s first Zoom-based Dungeons and Dragons game.
A site like Twiddla allows users to create and share an online whiteboard without having to sign up for an account or even log in. Sessions are time-limited if you don’t have an account, but they’re long enough to sketch out a map to show everyone where they are or track a quick battle. The game master and players can use this as a collaborative space to illustrate the environment or encounters with unfortunate monsters.
The big elephant in the room is “Why didn’t they mention Roll20? It’s free!” It’s definitely the 800-pound gorilla of online tabletop gaming, but it also can be a little intimidating for a first timer to the hobby, and if your kid is trying to get into Dungeons and Dragons it’s probably best to start with options with the lowest barrier for entry.
So there are three free tools your kid can use to figure out if Dungeons and Dragons is something they’ll truly enjoy. If they still like it after playing a few times with these resources, then maybe it’s time to take them over to your Friendly Local Gaming Store to get them some books and dice!
