this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Dungeons and Dragons

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ELI5: The rules of D&D (latte.isnot.coffee)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/dnd
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

It is a role playing game, and in all role playing games you create a character that resides in a made up world, and use information about that character (these are your character statistics, or your "stats") to attempt to do stuff. The game decides whether those succeed or fail based on your stats and something else. Usually, you play with a referee, or with a computer acting as a referee that has the final say on what happens in the game. The goal is to try to do things

To try to explain the more DND specific (and famous) rules:

In DnD you have 6 base stats: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Each character in the game get's a number from 1-20 in each, higher being better. There are other stats your character gets, but these are the core that you use to determine whether you can do stuff in the game.

When you want to perform an action in DnD, you usually have to roll dice to see if it succeeds or fails. Many actions require you to roll a 20 sided die, especially when you want to attack an enemy (a large part of DnD is about simulating medieval/high fantasy combat). Determining whether something suceeds or fails is dependent on your situation and the stats of the characters involved. But rolling a 20 is considered a critical roll, and should always succeed no matter what. Meanwhile, a 1 is a critical failure, and should always fail no matter what.

Another thing that DnD is well known for is the alignment system. Alignment is supposed to represent a characters intentions. A character's alignment depends on two axis: whether they believe in following order (Lawful to Chaotic) and whether they believe in altruism (Good to Evil). You can also be neutral in both, one or neither. Your backstory for why a character has chosen to be this way, or what they believe they are can be made up, but the alignment system generally ties into some of the lore of various DnD settings and affects how other mechanics work, such as certain spells.

Anyway, you can probably tell that there are way more rules than the ones I talked about, but I think those three make up a good chunk of what are the "signature" DnD rules, and what it is well known for.