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The Complete Guide to Dungeons and Dragons
What it really costs, what you really need, and how to run your first session this week — with zero jargon and zero pressure.
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: What Is Dungeons and Dragons and Why People Love It
Imagine you are sitting around a dining room table with four or five friends. There is no board, no grid of spaces, no electronic screen glowing in front of you. There are, however, a few things that might look strange: a set of oddly shaped dice, a printed page covered in numbers and small text, and maybe a hand-drawn map of a castle on a piece of grid paper. In the middle of the table sits a bowl of pretzels and someone's half-empty soda. Everyone is laughing at something that just happened - something that, if you had walked in five minutes earlier, you would have had no context for. Then the person at the head of the table, the one everyone calls the Dungeon Master, looks at you and says, "The door creaks open. You see a long, dark hallway. The smell of damp stone and something metallic drifts toward you. What do you do?"
And there it is. That question - "What do you do?" - is the entire engine of Dungeons and Dragons. It is not a video game where you press buttons to make a hero swing a sword. It is not a board game where you roll a die and move a token along a track. It is a shared storytelling game, played almost entirely in conversation, where a group of people cooperatively tells a story about a band of adventurers exploring a