My friends and I want to start a campaign. We don’t know the ruling for the game. We are waiting for our official book to come in so we can start our first session. Can anyone explain in a simplistic manner the rules for D&D? Classes and Races we will review ourselves. Just want to know the basics.
There’s no avoiding it. You’re going to have to read the books. A good game of D&D is 90% improv, so it’s mostly about crafting a story together. But the rules of the game (as interpreted by the DM) make the world consistent and makes it feel more “real”.
As far as the rules go, there’s a few basic steps that are pretty consistent regardless of whether your fighting, or using a skill, or interacting with the environment.
The DM determines a numerical difficulty for the action. So a DC for a skill check or AC for an attack. 10 is easy in either case. 20 is kinda hard.
Roll a twenty sided die (called a d20) and add a bonus. The bonus is calculated from an attribute (a base property of the character), your proficiency (which increases with experience), and maybe a bonus from some item line a magic weapon or gloves that make you e.g. good at picking pockets.
If your very likely to succeed the DM might give you “advantage” which means roll twice and take the highest number. Likewise disadvantage means roll twice and take the lowest.
Regardless of the outcome of the roll, this is the time where you accuse the dice of cheating. It’s their job to serve you and they just failed so hurl them across the living room. Now take a good 5 to 10 minutes digging through your bucket of dice to find one that works. Also that roll landed crooked so it doesn’t count.
Now it’s important to remember that the DM is cheating too. No matter what you’re doing, your character should absolutely have had advantage on that last roll. You’re going to want to lean heavily into your character’s back story, because the DM has no control over it. Trying to climb a mountain in a thunderstorm? Well your grandmother was actually a gecko lady. Trying to shoplift a priceless artifact under the eyes of a magical security team? Oh yeah, your other grandmother was made permanently invisible by a sorcerer’s curse so now you’re periodically invisible too. If you neglected to write a backstory, this is the perfect time to start.
Your probably noticing at this point that your table mates are enjoying the game. You have to stop that. If they’re having fun then they’re winning and you’re not. This is easily correctable by pressuring then into role-playing scenarios that no reasonable person would be comfortable with. Access the most unpalatable, “delete my browser history when I die” side of your personality and then force everyone to stew in it like a fart in an elevator while you yiff like there’s no tomorrow.
It is very important now to change your schedule radically . Attend regularly at first just to get everyone interested in the story. Then decide you need to be in Latvia every Saturday afternoon so now everyone needs to shift their work schedule to suit you.
If you’ve been following along carefully, you’re ready to blow up at the DM. This step is great because it’s a chance to vent frustration you’ve always felt with your father for having emotionally and professionally neutered you by constantly withholding affection. Every blow-up is going to be unique but some classics that you’ll want to work in are identifying one or more characters as “shameless self inserts”, declaring that the game is too hard, and deciding that the setting you helped choose is now boring.
Storm out never to return.
Seriously though, have fun. I know this was mostly player-focused. I’ll follow up with a summary for DMs when I can.