Secrets

I was all set to write this Q&A style post with witty retorts of all of the strange internet arguments that people have about their favourite rulesets. And then I promptly forgot what all but two of them were because my cup of tea tasted really nice.

So instead I’m going to do it this way, and it’s probably for the best.

Almost every single argument I have read about one ruleset being better than the other comes down not to the ruleset but how the DM runs the game. You can literally make the game work any way you like and Wizards of the Coast or Necrotic Gnome or whoever else are very unlikely to send their invisible stalker patrol or flying snakes after you.

The third paragraph of the introduction to the 5.5e Player’s Handbook includes the following sentence:

“Use only the rules that serve your fun, and always follow your group’s bliss.”

It doesn’t matter which rules you’re using, it’s still pretty good advice.

How to Get Started in a D&D-like TTRPG

This is a follow-on from my DM kit post where I mentioned what I thought to be the best and easiest and cheapest way to get into a D&D-like TTRPG (which from here I’m just going to refer to as D&D because typing that out every time is going to get really old really fast).

I’m going to go through each of those things in a bit more detail and provide some links where I’m able.

Dice

You only need one set of 7-die polyhedral dice to play D&D. It doesn’t matter whether you’re solo role playing or have 10 players and you’re the DM, you still only need one set. It’s nice to have more but you don’t need them. Apparently some US dollar stores have them. Or use an online or app based dice roller. Or go classic and write the numbers of scraps of paper and pull them out of a hat. If anyone cares what method you’re using to general a random number from 1 to X then they need a hobby, maybe try to get them to play D&D? Or stuff them in a bag of holding (or devouring).

Rules

Especially if you’re only ready to try things out, get some free rules. I’ll list a few variations in no particular order:

• D&D 5e (2014) Basic Rules - https://media.wizards.com/2014/downloads/dnd/PlayerDnDBasicRules_v0.2.pdf
• D&D 5.5e (2024) SRD - https://www.dndbeyond.com/srd
• D&D Beyond Basic Rules - via D&D Beyond
• Old School Essentials SRD - https://oldschoolessentials.necroticgnome.com/srd/index.php/Main_Page
• Shadowdark Quick Start Set (PDF) - https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/products/shadowdark-rpg-quickstart-set-pdf

There’s TONS of options that are free and TONS of options that are cheap. Pick one, it doesn’t matter which, don’t go reading about them either, unless it’s specifically to find even more rulesets, your opinion will get skewed with all the Internet rubbish before you’ve even given your option a chance. Pick one, play a couple of sessions and….keep going if you like it. Or pick another one and try that out. 

I’ll let you in on something. Come closer. Don’t mind the stench, that’s just my mortal form decomposing but we don’t talk about that. When you first start playing you’re not going to remember most of the rules and chances are you’re going to be bad at it. But that’s not the secret. The secret is that it’s ok to be bad at it. Maybe even really bad at it. Lean into it and just go with it, make stuff up and look up the rule later. Or don’t and that’s now the rule for that thing. Are you having fun? If so you’re doing it right. If not either try a different ruleset or switch roles (DM to player or player to DM) and give that a try. Or maybe you just don’t like TTRPGs after all, and that’s fine too, just don’t rain on anyone’s parade, everyone is entitled to their preferences.

Maybe I will offer a ruleset suggestion. Start with OSE (free), the 2014 Basic Rules (free) or Whitebox Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game (Amazon). All of these are rules light and when you’re starting out less rules is better. An advantage of an old school based game like OSE or Whitebox is that character creation is about five minutes instead of…well longer than five minutes. 

Character Sheets

All of the rulesets will have a corresponding character sheet and they should all be free except for the cost of printing. If you don’t want to do that or can’t afford to do that (I get it) get the cheapest notepad or notebook of decent size and write out your own using the details from the online versions.

Writing and Erasing Implements

A cheap pencil and eraser is all you need. I can’t even think of something clever to say about this because it’s a cheap erasable writing implement and method of erasing. Go to your local dollar store and you’re done.

Adventures

Either do five minutes of online digging for level 1 adventures and go with that. Or pick a creature you like and think of a reason you would need to be fighting them. The princess is in another castle and all that. Find a small dungeon on Dyson Logos site (https://dysonlogos.blog/maps/) and just put creatures in there. And traps if you want to. A puzzle if you’re feeling clever. But it’s your first dungeon, go easy on yourself and stick some goblins and skeletons in there and you’re done. Why are goblins and skeletons living together? Maybe they’re goblins skeletons? Maybe the skeletons are the long lost cousins of the goblins from Mykonos and they want to experience life…un-life….in New Yo….a random dungeon. It doesn’t matter, worry about that stuff later or never.

People

Yeah, there’s an unfortunate side effect in that you need people for this. Willing people I might add. You could solo role play but I haven’t done that yet so can’t comment, it’s on my to do list. I play with two and it’s fine. I’ve played with five and it’s fine. I may be playing with seven soon and that’s fine I guess. You just need willing people.

Imagination

You’re going to play a medieval fantasy role playing game where walking into a circle of mushrooms backwards while whistling can transport you into a fairy land where you might get cursed and need to find the right coloured fairy dragon to bite you to remove the curse or maybe instead carve your name into a tree which then takes on the curse and dies. You will need your imagination and maybe lower your inhibitions if needed. I put on terrible voices for NPCs and practice them in the car on my way to work and swing an imaginary sword through the air while describing fights (not in the car on my way to work) and gory deaths. Find your imagination, you’ve got one I promise, it might be buried underneath the oppression of modern society but it’s there.

And that’s it. This is all you need to play D&D. Even in these harsh economic times the pencil (with eraser) and an a4 notepad is $4 and I’m sure it’s possible to find these for cheaper. Or use whatever you have on hand, none of it needs to be perfect. It’s probably better if it’s not perfect. Just have some fun.

How I Started and Where I am and Why I’m Doing This

 If you have taken the time to read my highly engaging profile, you would know that I’ve been playing D&D since I was 9. I had changed schools and somehow became friends with the group of kids who played D&D.

I don’t recall what version it was because nobody ever used a rule book but given it was the early 90’s it would be anything from BX to AD&D. The only reason I’m ruling out OD&D is because someone brought in one of the little brown books one day as a novelty. We would hand draw our character sheets in cheap exercise books and play during our lunch break while sitting on the pavers in the courtyard underneath a huge tree.

Childhood memory being what it is, I’m not sure where exactly this event occurred but at some point my Nan must have read or heard something about Dungeons & Dragons and suddenly I was forbidden to play. And so began the dark times and it felt like years of my life passed where I wasn’t allowed to play D&D. About six months later somehow managed to convince my Nan to let me start playing again and it was the renaissance period. The group had moved to AD&D 2nd Edition and we even had rule books. I don’t think I ever had my own, we couldn’t afford it but I do remember borrowing the Player’s Handbook several times. We no longer played at school but we would go to someone house on the weekend, there was about five or six of us including the two regular DMs, and had sessions that lasted five or six hours.

The plot was almost nonexistent, the games were always dungeon crawls, character death was not uncommon, critical failure tables were brutal (critical hit tables made up for it, sometimes) but we had so much fun. We also played Cyberpunk 2020 and Magic: The Gathering and had massive amounts of fun with those as well but this post is about neither of those games. Most of the time, when we were finished our D&D games we would play Magic.

When high school happened we continued playing but with a slightly altered friend base. Overall I played for maybe five years before high school social dynamics meant that friend groups fragmented. Sadly I’m not in contact with any of the people I played with but the significance of the group and the games (Cyberpunk and Magic included) we played had a massive impact on the rest of my life.

A few decades later I’m playing D&D with my kids. They have the greatest imaginations, hopefully playing means they’ll keep it for longer than the current world wants them to, and they’re incredibly creative. The three of us really get into it and there’s not a lot of sitting but a lot of reenacting. Afterwards they’ll talk to me, full of excitement, about how they imagined creatures or places or doors, i think doors are significant and I think one of my kids still has the coloured in sketch I did for the very first entry (door) into the very first dungeon we ever played which was loosely based on Skara Brae.

Sadly my ADHD-esque issues mean that we don’t play as often as I’d like to but I’m working on unravelling that ball of twisted yarn that’s in the bag of feral cats. But I still see the impact the games have had, on my son in particular. He runs his own “D&D” games with made up rules and it’s been a lot of fun for us both. There’s maps and NPC’s with their individual personalities, wildly inaccurate travel times, custom character sheets and it’s all so great! Both kids draw fantasy related pictures and write fantasy related stories and I couldn’t be a more proud nerd Dad.

This isn’t the conclusion I thought this would arrive at, but I don’t write any of these with any particular conclusion in mind either and I let them go where they will. Regardless of how long we play D&D for, I’m not naive enough to think that this will last forever, I know I’ve already achieved what I set out to do. When I started playing D&D all I really knew about fantasy was that I liked knights and wizards but I tapped into a vein of creativity that I never knew I had and, being a passive and shy kid, might never have otherwise found. My kids are far more naturally creative (and exuberant) than I ever was or will be and they have used D&D  to tap into their creativity in a big way. It’s storytelling and voice acting and acting and improv and abstract thinking and imagination and more all rolled in to each other in the form of an interactive story that they, as their character, take part in. This, and the stories and memories of it, will be with them for the rest of their lives.

Putting Together a “DM Kit” - A Perpetual Work in Progress? A Snapshot in Time

This all started when I decided to look at what things people were using as DM, and so began an almost year long, stationery-heavy buying spree because this is new ground and I can only properly figure things out by trial-and-error and tasting and feeling for fit.

I think it’s important to define something here. The label “DM Kit”, it’s just the Internet buzz word for the things you or someone else uses to DM their games. There’s nothing special or magical about it, trust me on this, I’m a lich. But people love a label so “DM Kit” it is.

When I first actually started playing D&D with my kids (there were a few false starts) we played using the Old School Essentials (OSE) ruleset which is based on BX and AD&D. If you’re interested in playing a TTRPG for the first time I highly suggest OSE due to it being rules light and forgiving with its “rulings over rules” mindset, this is a fancy way of saying make it up and work it out later as is great preparation for other rulesets. It also doesn’t require much in the way of gear. All you need are the free rules, character sheets…or any reasonable sized sheet of paper, a pencil and eraser, one set of dice. Grab any free level 1 adventure you can find or have a go at making one up. And fire up your imagination. Oh and at least one other person to play with is helpful but not actually needed if you’re planning on solo RPG’ing. There’s your DM kit and it’s all you need for OSE or D&D and likely any other D&D-like TTRPG you could play for as many sessions and players and whatever level your characters get to, that’s all you need and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Here’s my DM kit sans rulebooks:

• DM screen.
• Spare character sheets.
• Mechanical pencil plus spare erasers and leads (2B).
• Tokens.
• Chessex battlemat.
• Wet erase markers (black, blue and red).
• Inspiration tokens.
• Clipboard folder.
• Notepad.
• Dice.

For the longest time I thought this was so much stuff when I packed it into my backpack until I wrote it out as a list (don’t ask). And turns out it’s not much more than my original OSE kit. In fact, the inspiration tokens are probably the only real extra thing. I attribute thinking I have tons of gear to the bulk of the rulebooks and that I also have my kids character things in there as well.

I’ll eventually get around to going through my backpack items one-by-one complete with delicious, delicious pictures. By then the extra bits I’m evaluating should have been tested out a few times and added or discarded. But I stand by what I consider to be the basic/essential kit list, the cost is minimal and it’ll get you pretty far with OSE rules. If you go with the D&D 2014 Basic Rules, D&D 5.5e SRD, or D&D 5.5e Basic Rules from D&D Beyond (free) you won’t come across too many limits and none of them soon.

Where I Attempt to Explain Why All of This Content is Going to be a Chaotic Mess

I won’t attempt to unravel the tangle that is my jumble of brain impulses that manages to form a thought process most of the time. I think it will become apparent while reading the content here that I’m a bit all over the place. Instead I’ll try to present a series of…things….to paint a picture of what to expect and attempt to explain the why of all of this.

I don’t have an ADHD diagnosis, and really couldn’t be bothered getting one because what difference would that make and it sounds like a lot of effort and money that I could spend on other things, but let’s just say that adding “for someone with ADHD” or similar into search terms when I’m trying to figure things out or hyper-research important things like “why are the colours in  the numbers on my dice inconsistent” has really helped my ability to deal with things.

This blog is something that I feel I need to do for some reason. I feel the need to talk into the void about the things that I’m interested in and to try and explain the very likely long and labyrinth-esque mental acrobatics that it’s taken to arrive at that conclusion.

There’s a large element of doing this that is to help others who process in a similar way, things are hard when most reviews and written/video impressions and overviews etc. are geared to and created by people whose mental train goes in a more direct line. I generally feel like I need to probe and analyse the thing, whatever it may be, to get the proper taste and shape and texture of it to see if it fits into the weird shaped hole I need it to but the shape needed changes based on other shifting variables all of which have their own taste and shape and texture requirements.

I also feel the need to bring back aspects of the early Internet into my life. Social media is a doomed thing, it’s ruinous. I don’t toxically need the validation of others, I don’t need to be advertised at and feed targeted and give a false impression of the requirements of life or click-baited and the generations who grow up not knowing that that is not a normal thing and that life goes on regardless of whether you have an Internet connection and friends lists and know what someone had for breakfast in whatever actually-probably-terrible-for-you viral food craze is going around. I’m aware of the irony that this blog is hosted on Blogger which belongs to Google. I also don’t want to pay for even more subscriptions than I currently do, Blogger is free.

And there we have it, I think. I’ve probably forgotten several points that I wanted to make but the heart of it is there.