The Dungeon Master

The Dungeon Master has the most that they need, and even that isn’t all that much. As the Dungeon Master there are two books that you need, plus a few other things. The two books are Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook and Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual. There are a lot more books, but those are the two books that you need.

The Player’s Handbook is going to have all the options for your players as to how they can build their characters, or at least what they need to know for starting out in a very first game. There are additional books with more options, but those are just options, and you don’t need all of them to start, or really ever. The Monster Manual is going to give you a ton of things for your players to fight against and to build a campaign around. It’s really a great way to figure out what you are going to do in your campaign by just flipping through the book.

The last thing that only the Dungeon Master needs to provide, in my opinion, is character sheets. Now, not filled out ones, but ones for filling out for session 0. This doesn’t meant that they don’t need more, but it’s stuff that everyone will need. The character sheets are important because I’m not going to recommend that players have the Player’s Handbook, for me that is not an essential thing. So as the Dungeon Master, that person will have a copy of the character sheet they can make photocopies of, or you can find it easily online and print them.

What Does Everyone Need

I thought that I was going to split this between the players and the dungeon master, but really, the dungeon master just has more that they need to have before starting a game. So what do you recommend that everyone has?

Firstly, everyone should have their own set of dice. Personally, I probably have enough dice sets for 15 people comfortably, but that’s just me and a lot of other players who have been playing longer. When you start out, a single set of dice (should be 7 dice) is all that you need. It should have a D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, D20, and percentile die in it (D4 = four sided die, D6 = six sided, etc). While you might need to roll some of the dice multiple times for things, you don’t truly need more than one set.

Next I think everyone should have a pencil, which you need for making your character, but also a notebook. The notebook, or paper, is for taking notes. It’ll be handy for character creation, but also for during the campaign remembering everything that is going on. For the players, they should be jotting down what they find interesting, what seems to be important plot points, etc. For the dungeon master, you’d be using it for keeping track of NPC’s, plot points you’re creating, and general recaps of what the players have done.

And really that’s about it that everyone needs to get going on a game of Dungeons and Dragons.

What I skipped

So, I do think it’ll be useful to talk about some of the things that I skipped as well and why I skipped them.

Why not the Player’s Handbook for the players or everyone?

I don’t think that the players really need the players handbook. It is nice to have at least an extra copy around for character creation and leveling up, but it isn’t needed. So if someone wants to spend the money on it they can, but you really just need one copy. Also, for new players, they often get stuck in the rule book looking something up during the game and not paying attention. So for a lot of people it detracts from the game instead of enhances it having their own copy.

And the Dungeon Master’s Guide for the Dungeon Master, why not that?

While the Dungeon Master’s Guide contains a lot of useful information, it can be overwhelming. What magical items are out there is interesting, but is a lot. How to create an NPC or a bad guy also interesting, but also can be done without it. I think personally it’d have been too much for me at the start. The information is really good, but it could lead to delays in starting playing because of trying to get your campaign “right”.

Finally, these are the physical things that are essential for playing Dungeons and Dragons. Things like being willing to try it, having a good attitude, having fun, and everyone else having fun, those are important as well. And I will talk about those coming up because they are important, in fact more important. Without what is above, you can play something close to Dungeons and Dragons, but your experience won’t be as full as if you started with all of those. Thankfully, you can make it a pretty cheap hobby with cheap dice and those few books.

What do you consider to be essential for starting playing Dungeons and Dragons?

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Quests

In Town Activities

Level Events and Monsters

Boss Battles

Building a Character

So, this really should have more of a graphical component to it than it will. I would love to show some art, but I don’t have that, to give a sense of the design, or a layout of how I think the board is going to work, but we are in the super early phases of this design. What’s really going to happen is that I’m going to move this over to a spreadsheet and create a number of different characters based off of that so that everything is formatted the same.

The Real World Character

Male – Age 26 – Office Drone

A recent graduate with high hopes and now nothing more than an office drone. Changing the world was the dream, and now it’s changing numbers in the spread sheet. Friends moved away and not enough energy after working overtime to make that many more. At least the people he works with are nice enough, and the coffee isn’t bad.

“I’ve been waiting for this game for months, I know some old friends have too, it’ll be just like old times.”

Keywords: Gamer, Business

In Game Character

Stats:

Strength: 5

Agility: 5

Vitality: 5

Allure: 5

Guile: 5

Currency: 100 Gold

Oddly enough, that’s about it for a character when you pull them out of the box. The real nuances to a character are going to come with how you allocate your 10 extra points for the stats.

The Other Stuff

I think it’s important to talk about what else you’ll have right away, even though it might not be pure character creation stuff. Such as what sort of weapons will you be able to find, and what sort of skills can you pick up. You will be dropped into the world without any gear, just normal commoners clothes, and no skills, just basic attacks that you can do, so that’s why you get 100 gold to start. You can save it up, because there is better stuff you can get on level 2, but you might not live that long.

For armor, and this could have really been it’s own section, you’re looking at two types of armor.

Leather – No movement penalty, +2 defense

Chainmail – Minus 1 movement, +4 defense

Something along those lines. the advantage with chainmail is that you are going to be taking considerably less damage. When an attack might only get through on leather armor at 2 to 4 damage, that means chain might mean that you take no damage. But it does mean that the enemy is going to be more apt to focus on you, because you are going to be the closest with that slower speed, so it’s a trade off. Numbers are not final at this point obviously, but for an example.

Weapons then, you’re going to have much more of a choice. You will have two handed swords, short swords, daggers, bow and arrow, axe, crossbow, and maul at least all available at the start of the game to buy.

As for skills, we’re looking at pretty simple ones that would be available. Something like sweeping attack, bash, counter attack, rush, disengage.

Plus there will be items as well, health potions probably being the biggest of those items that the players might want to buy.

Now, with getting items, I could be really nice, I could be really mean, or I could do something between that. What do I mean? If I was really nice, you’d have a catalog of items that you could pick from and purchase without it costing a turn. If I was really mean, I could make those places four separate shops and make players almost have to decide to shop at least 3 times in a row before doing anything else. I’m going to be less mean than that, I don’t want to hand out gear, and players can do other things on their first turn, but on the first level, there is just going to be a bazaar that’s the shopping area, so you can go and shop once and be done with it, unless you decide that you need more and then you can come back again. The first level is going to play a bit differently than others, I think, and I will delve into what I’m thinking when I start building a level, though I probably won’t build the first level.

Character creation, pretty simple, basically all a player would need to do is allocate those points and fill in the player name and the character name. The character boards, for the stats, might be more like a character sheet, and then a side board. Or I might go with dials that keep track of stats, that’s too be determined, with a save sheet so if the dials get bumped it isn’t the end of the world. Or with a save sheet, maybe I’d do a dry erase player board, that’d be pretty cool and useful.

What do you think of character creation, it should be extremely simple. Obviously, the keywords I handed out this time were pretty generic, but I want to create more unique real world people than just what I wrote for this one, someone might run a greenhouse so they’d know about plants, or maybe a chef, give people a ton of different backgrounds.

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Dice

Most, if not all RPG players can never have enough dice. It’s just a scientific fact that eventually a die will have a poor session and need to be banished from being played with forever, or slightly longer. So more dice is always a good thing, and there are some really cool dice out there. If you want to keep it simple and cheaper, there are tons of interesting dice sets with more basic plastic, but you can also find stone dice or my favorite metal dice. There are even some companies where the metal dice don’t cost an arm and a leg. If you are going really fancy, the dice to get would be a single D20 (twenty sided die), but set of dice are also really nice which should come with a D20, D12, D10, D10 Percentile, D8, D6, and a D4, that is enough for someone to start playing D&D.

Dice Tray/Dice Tower

Both of these serve the same purpose, they are something to roll your dice into. The dice tray is simpler in that it’s only a tray and you can roll it into that without it thudding against the table and denting it, this is especially important for if someone has stone or metal dice as those are heavy. But it also means that you’re not as apt to roll off the table either. A dice tower does kind of the same thing. You drop the dice that you’re rolling into the tower and it has levels that it hits off of causing it tumble. It rolls down into a tray that’s attached to the bottom. The best part of dice towers is how cool they look. I have one that looks like a tree with some birds in it, definitely a unique/fun thing to roll dice in, and there are so many different possible designs to choose from out there for dice towers.

Custom Mini

Now, a custom miniature sounds expensive, but thanks to the likes of Hero Forge, they really aren’t that bad. Hero Forge is a site that lets you custom design a mini based off of the body parts that they have built into the system that you can then get 3D printed. So if you’re in a game with someone that you’d be giving a gift to, this is a fun option. And if you know of someone who has a 3D printer (or have one yourself) you can just print it off from an STL file which you can buy which makes it even easier. I really like this idea for a serious RPG player because it’s something that feels like it’s very thoughtful and something that a person might not do for themselves, because while the prints are a reasonable price, that doesn’t mean that they are $10, or less, like a generic mini.

Book Bag

Might not be something that is needed right away, or maybe you play digitally, but a book bag is really useful. It gives the player or the DM a way to carry around whatever books they have really easily versus having a stack in their arms. You can probably find good nerdy ones related to D&D, RPG’s or just fantasy in general that would work well. A dedicated bag is nice, from my personal experience, because it means that I don’t have to pull anything out ever if I’m always taking it to one person’s place, or if we rotate whose place it is at, I could easily see leaving stuff in there between sessions.

Notebook

Now, a notebook sounds odd, and depending on who it is for, it might be more or less useful, but there are some notebooks or binders that are made for either the player or DM. And as the DM, if they are like me, they might generally do more of their planning a notebook than say, on a computer. But the ones for players are very cool because you can have your character sheet in there, you can keep track of spell and uses, as well as it gives you a spot to take notes for the session. So it’s a one stop shop for your character. I really like the concept, and I have one that is a binder and leather bound for when I eventually am a player.

Obviously there are other things as well you could consider. There are books that are coming out fairly often for all of the main systems so you could grab them the newest one that has come out, but there is some risk in that as normally I’ll just grab the newest books right away as someone who has all the DM sort of books, minus the adventures. You could also do a new system for a game, but depending on what your group plays that might be more or less useful.

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Back with some D&D streaming, this is because I have a D&D game coming up this weekend, so I’m getting ready to generate some characters.

This time, I’m looking at the rest of the character sheet, the spell and background pages, but also the traits, alignment, weapons, and everything else that comes along with being a character with a class in Dungeons and Dragons.

Today, at 7:30 (November 21st, 2019), I’m going to be streaming that character creation to show how different race as class combos can create an interesting character. You can find that on http://twitch.com/maltsandmeeples. The time is central time for those wondering. If you want to get alerted to when I’m streaming, you can follow me on twitch, or to watch as your own leisure, subscribe to Malts and Meeples over on Youtube.

My drink last night was just one of my favorites, Fresh Squeezed by Deschutes. It’s a good crisp and nice IPA, even though it’s getting cold outside, I don’t mind drinking a good IPA.

Bottoms up!

I’m back with some more Drinking in D&D. Tonight I brought up two Deschutes Fresh Squeezed IPA, but I only drank one of them. It’s one of my favorite beers, a good IPA.

The topic for Drinking in D&D was looking at the Character Sheet and what sections on the character sheet are. There’s a lot to keep track of it and it’s the basis for how you roll your dice and what your character can do, particularly in combat.

There are a number different areas that I looked at on the board, hit points, speed, initiative, proficiency, armor class (AC), ability scores, and skills. I’m going to go back and do the second half of the main sheet and hopefully the other two sheets in my next stream, which might be happening on Friday, tbd.

Thanks for checking out the video. If you are enjoying the content, it does go out live on Twitch at http://twitch.com/maltsandmeeples. The videos are also uploaded to youtube, and a subscription or a like will help people find the videos there.

Bottoms up!