Entering the world of Dungeons and Dragons

I’ve recently been venturing down a road I’ve never been down before … Dungeons and Dragons.

When non-gamers first learn that I play board games, they often ask, “Oh, like Dungeons and Dragons?” And I would respond, “Nope, not exactly.” I wasn’t one of those gamers who grew up playing D&D or role-playing games. I actually didn’t know anyone who played D&D my entire childhood.

My only run-in with an RPG was at Game On Expo, and that was a complete accident. But I had such an exciting first-time experience that I wanted to explore what else RPGs had to offer. I’m also probably spoiled that my first dungeon master (DM) was friendly, helpful and wickedly creative. (I mean, he has to be if he’s a co-host of the RPG podcast Full Metal RPG, right?)

I mentioned to one of the guys in my core gaming group that I had fun playing an RPG. He’s like, let me know if you want to do a campaign.

Well, here we are folks, after a few sessions, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. I’m totally upping my nerd level. Woot woot!

Our DM Mark has an entire office library of D&D modules, guidebooks, miniatures and the whole nine yards to lead us on this journey. We are playing second edition D&D and doing “The Keep on the Borderlands.” (No spoilers, people!)

We’ve only had a few sessions so far. The first session was strictly to generate characters and fill out our character sheets. Man, there are a lot of numbers for that! When I played Dungeon Worlds at Game On, the characters were mostly preset with minimal number filling.

When you start from scratch like we’re doing, we had to decide our characters’ race and class, and, based on that, roll to figure out their ability scores. That took some time because two of us had never played D&D before and we were thumbing through the player’s handbook to get a sense of what each character does. And when those are calculated out, we had to look up the breakdown of each ability based on their scores.

We then had to figure out what equipment each character was carrying and their proficiencies, and a whole host of other things. My two characters are Clara the Cleric, who is human, and Furiosa the Fighter, who is the dwarf. I do love alliteration and use it any chance I get.

One thing I realized when we were generating characters was that I had to acquaint myself with all the many different dice. Most people are accustomed to the typical 6-sided dice, but when our DM tells you to roll a d10, I honestly was spending a few seconds to count sides on my dice before picking it up.

To make things easier, I lined up my dice so that I can keep track of which is which. When I posted this photo last week, I was glad to hear that I’m not the only one who has difficulty differentiating the dice when they first enter the world of RPGs.

Anyway, wish us luck on our adventure! In addition to my weekly game night, we’re scheduling a separate D&D night, too. In the few sessions we’ve had, I’ve already learned that when there’s a fire, you should probably go over and help. That misstep sent our story zagging off into another indirect direction when we first set off.

Lastly, here’s a clip that we’ve been joking about in our group, saying this is how Mark probably feels DM-ing us newbies.

So, tell me about your first forays in D&D, and do you still play it?