Dorian's Start Guide
Most of D&D seems much easier when you’re playing. I reckon there are only a couple of things that need attention before the first session.
Read the intro to the Player’s handbook
Before you go around getting all confused by Reddit threads and whatnot, read the introduction section of The (old) Player’s Handbook (PHB). I reckon it’s all you need to really get started thinking about things.
Note: There are now two versions of the Players Handbook. The old 2014 version and a 2024 version. The differences are only really mechanical, the overall game is basically unchanged. However, the old introduction is better for getting a sense of the basics than the new one, I reckon. The newer one isn’t really useful and defers everything to a super detailed “Playing the Game” chapter that I find a bit overwhelming.
Character creation (the easy way)
Your character essentially determines your game, so this is the most important thing you’ll do. It will take a while, and a bit of brain power, but it doesn’t need to be overwhelming!
It’s useful at this stage to ask whether your game master plays by 2014 or 2024 rules. It’s not a huge deal to migrate if you use the wrong rules, but it’ll be annoying for you.
You can do some version-agnostic stuff first though that will make the whole process easier! D&D is one part dice-based game, and one part collaborative story-telling. If you focus on the story part a bit, the game part becomes both more fun and a bit easier.
As such, I reckon its best to think a little bit about what kind of character you want to play first. This is best done by reading about character classes in Chapter 3 of the PHB (2014; 2024: descriptively near identical, only the mechanics are different really). Do you like to play characters that run around hitting things? You probably want to be a Barbarian or a Fighter. Sneak around and play tricks? Rogue perhaps, or Bard, or Cleric of Trickery. Intellectual spell caster? Wizard probably, or maybe Druid. Read about the classes and see what sparks your imagination. Hold a couple in your mind that seem fun, and don’t concentrate too much on the mechanics yet.
Then I reckon read about Races (2014), or Species as they’re now known in 2024. These things do give you various mechanical advantages, but largely they’re about flavour.
If you do this, everything else will sort of come together. Let’s say you wanted to hit things, so you picked Barbarian. And you were fond of the Hobbit as a kid, so you picked Halfling as a Race. A tiny, violent halfling girl with a massive greataxe is already 90% of a gloriously role-playable character, and most of the rest of your choices are going to pick themselves. Or you maybe wanted to play a religious healing-type character, so you went for Cleric or Paladin, but then you saw that you can be a Tiefling (half-demon)—all of a sudden you have a character that’s fighting for the light against the darkness, and the darkness is her parent. Or whatever. You get it. It writes itself.
Relatedly, once you have an image in your head of the kind of character you’re into, then you want to start thinking about a backstory. Backstory is mostly for your role-playing delight, so it can be as simple or as detailed as you like. But, you probably want at least enough to motivate your character. You’ll often find that the most fun comes from figuring out what your character would do in a situation, rather than what you would do. Maybe our violent halfing girl is amnesic because of a bar fight, and she’s trying to work out who and where she is. That’d be plenty to get you started playing, and you can work out the rest later. You already know you want to go from bar to bar, asking questions, and maybe getting up to drunken antics as you go.
Otherwise, with no backstory and motivation, you’re really just waiting for the game master to throw you into the next action, or absently looking at your character sheet to work out if your character is useful while the other players are getting up to hijinks. That said, you can always develop or change your backstory as you play, if nothing special is coming to you. You might find that the perfect idea occurs to you as you watch others playing their own characters.
At this point you’re going to find it much easier to choose the mechanical stuff for your character. Picking ‘feats’ and ‘origins’ and ‘spells’ and ‘equipment’ becomes ‘what makes sense for my character’ instead of ‘what the hell is going on’.
The harder stuff
Now you have a character in mind, you need to actually create it on paper. This is harder now. The mechanics of D&D aren’t exactly straightforward. You probably want to know whether you’re doing this by 2014 or 2024 rules by now, or many of the technical points might end up changing.
You could read more of the PHB at this point, but I wouldn’t get too wrapped around the axles—most of learning how to play comes from actually playing. Basically, though, you will need to choose your character stats (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma), which determine how good your character is at stuff. You want to steal a wallet? You will roll a dice, and add or subtract your Dexterity stat to the roll. The game master will take the number and determine whether you got caught or not. Want to persuade someone to let you into the castle? Roll a dice and add or subtract your Charisma stat. And so on. You’ll also need to pick various spells and skills and “feats” and such. These will determine what special abilities your character has. Can you cast fireballs at people? Or make things disappear? Or forge documents perfectly?
Of course, this means that you need to know what kinds of things matter in the game, and under what conditions. One place that’s quite nice to check out at this stage is the RPGBOT Character Optimisations. There, you can see a bit of logic behind character planning, to give you a feel for how the mechanics of characters might look in play. What stats matter, and what spells work best in practice.
Though of course, many people prefer to roll dice to determine their characters randomly as described in the PHB, because role-playing your character is more fun for some than optimising for mechanical efficiency.
I suspect most people do a mix of the two: optimising but fitting roleplay around the margins.
Another place that’s nice to check out is the D&D Beyond character builder, which can be helpful as a click-through step-by-step builder. This makes things very easy, because it calculates all the harder stuff for you. There are two trade-offs though. Firstly, you’re limited to free options. This is a smaller set of options than the PHB describes. You can get more, but you have to buy them off the website. The second trade-off is that, because it calculates all the harder stuff, you won’t understand your character as well. For example, your ‘Initiative’ is what determines what order you can take actions when you’re fighting enemies. A higher initiative and you might go first, a lower initiative and they might go first. This is something that comes from your Dexterity score, and if you relied on the character builder, you would have never learned that.
You can also go and watch people play online. I recommend Critical Role’s Campaign 2. A bunch of famous voice-actors that got substantially more famous streaming their D&D games. You can do youtube, or podcast. This is essentially how I learned to play.
This will take some time, and its worth talking to your game master or a knowledgable friend about this. Much easier to go through together, I think.
Talk to your game master
Relatedly, you should talk to your game master often. They determine an enormous proportion of the game. For example, they might ignore certain rules entirely. Or base the game in a world that isn’t listed in the PHB. Or allow you to do stuff that isn’t listed in the rules. And so on.
There are three things in particular worth talking to your game master.
Firstly, they might want you to consider your party, when you’re choosing a class. You generally want a healing-type character (Cleric, Druid, or Paladin and Bard at a stretch) so no one dies (which can happen, and is pretty irreversible at early levels). You probably want a tanky-type character (Barbarian, Paladin, Fighter, and Ranger at a stretch) to hold the attention of the scarier baddies. You might want a damage-dealer (Rogue, Sorcerer, Warlock) to help end encounters quickly. You also have support-types that help buff and improve and protect everyone (Clerics, Bards, Druids), crowd-controllers that impede or manipulate enemies (Wizards, Druids), and skill-monkeys that do lots of useful stuff (Rogues, Bards). Having a balance usually makes things easier and more fun, though a confident game master might feel happy to balance stuff for an unbalanced party.
Second, on your backstory. It’s often fun if there are some hooks or blank spaces in there that the game master can use to integrate your story into the game. Amnesic halfling girl? Maybe the game master will make your amnesia something more sinister than a simple bar fight, kicking off the next adventure for your party. Missing sibling? Let the game master decide who was responsible and where they might end up—you might see them again on your adventures. A quest for redemption? Leave it open what redemption might look like, so the game master can weave the right circumstances into things. You get the idea. Talk to your game master, so they can start thinking about how to build a world around your character!
Lastly, ask them to look over your character when you’re done. They’ll be able to tell you if what you’ve done looks good, or if you should change stuff. Also, they might need to correct bits and pieces for you, here and there. Better to get that sorted before the first session. Lastly, it’s particularly good to check your backstory with the game master. As mentioned, they’ll want to know what it is so they can try and build it into the story. More importantly, though, they might help you adjust it so it sets up more sensibly for the start of the campaign (e.g. it’s no good your character living somewhere the campaign isn’t happening, or being a member of a faction that was destroyed in some imaginary war the game master has planned). Sometimes, the game master will build this opportunity in with a ‘Session Zero’, but if they don’t just reach out.
Outro
Mostly, though, I want to emphasise, don’t worry about getting it all right. Put something together, and then if the first session makes you realise you need to sharpen things up, talk to the game master and change things. Most of the concepts are going to be a bit alien regardless of how much reading you do beforehand (if you’re a dummy like me). Get to playing and they’ll make much more sense. In the meantime, I’ll leave any particularly useful resources I find here, and there’s plenty more online.