Dragon Dungeons

   
    (Okay, be prepared for a rant. This will be fun.) 

    Just in case you don’t know much about Dungeons and Dragons, D&D is almost 50 years old. It was developed in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. It is a game that involves dice rolling to determine anything that relies on skill or luck, such as attacks or whether you accidentally make yourself blue (It’s a Wild Magic thing) and extensive roleplaying. The game has evolved over 6 editions with a few adaptations such as Pathfinder, which is an adaptation of D&D 3.5e. In my opinion, one of the best things about D&D is that you can be as creative or uncreative as you want. If you forgot about making a character for a session, you can make a bare-minimum evil dark elf rogue (background criminal). You could also prepare extensively and make yourself a fallen aasimar which is a part divine person who has fallen to evil. You could also make it an oathbreaker paladin (detailed later) with a background of noble. Additionally, it could have a full personality, custom voice you use when your character speaks, and a backstory as long as this rant. There are literally hundreds of thousands of character possibilities, and if you use Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and/or Volo’s Guide to Monsters or maybe other homebrew from the internet (Dungeon Master approval required), that brings the number into the millions!

    If you are ever bored at home with your family during this quarantine, consider buying the Starter Set online, and maybe the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Monster Manual. Before you pick up the dice, I have a few warnings: First: Dungeons and Dragons has a playtime of 30 minutes to a total of several days. When my brother and I were first learning the game, it took around five days from the time we first got the starter set to when we finished the pre-written adventure. Even then, we played every day and didn’t know all the rules, such as your hit points increasing as you level up. Second tip: Take it easy. One of my first homemade characters was a multiclass druid/rogue. At that point, I didn’t really understand how multiclassing really worked-or all the parts of taking a turn, for that matter. Start simple. Make a human fighter, barbarian, or rogue. Then, try using other races with more complicated features, such as darkvision. Once you have the hang of that, try going into higher-level characters and spellcasters (the simplest is sorcerer). Third: Check with the person your group decided to be your Dungeon Master, or DM for short, about all multiclassing, homebrew, feats, and other questionable stuff that might unbalance your character. One example of that is min-maxing. Min-maxing is the art of taking certain classes, subclasses, backgrounds, races, and multiclasses to make your character incredibly amazing at one thing and nothing else. One of my favorite examples is multiclassing from a level two druid into one level of cleric. With that multiclass combo and making your cleric domain life, you can cast the first level druid spell Goodberry, and heal 40 total hit points divided among your party and sustain each of them for several days. For perspective, the 6th level spell Heal only heals 70 hit points to one creature. If you cast Goodberry at 6th level, it would heal 90 hit points, and you could heal Bordak the barbarian’s fatal wounds AND  Sylanis the sorcerer’s also fatal wounds and still have extra healing to go around. Oh yeah. You can also turn into a wolf. 

Let’s talk about character options. First, you have your race. There are the three basic

fantasy races, dwarves, elves, and humans. There are also some races that appear in most but not all fantasy settings, such as gnome, dragonborn, half-elf, and halfling. There are even more uncommon races, like tieflings, half-orcs, tabaxi, lizardfolk, aasimar, aarakocra, firbolgs, tritons, goliaths, and kenku. Tieflings and aasimar are polar opposites, being devil and god people. Half-orcs are, well, half orc, half human, and goliaths are big scary mountain people. Tabaxi, lizardfolk, aarakocra and kenku are humanoid cats, lizards, eagles, and ravens without wings. Firbolgs are nature goliaths while tritons are underwater people. Then, there are subraces. Subraces represent different kinds of a certain race, for example, you are either a mountain or hill dwarf. There are different kinds of elves, aasimar, halflings, dragonborn, and gnomes. With Mordenkanen’s Tome of Foes, there are even more elves, half-elves, devil people and more! 

Second, you have your background. Your background is what you did before you became an adventurer. There are guild artisans, acolytes, criminals, sages, nobles, and much more. Your background gives you some starting equipment and some example personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws. 

Finally, and most importantly, your class. Your class defines what you do. Are you a barbarian who rages into battle and scares the living heck out of your opponents, or a subtle wizard who casts Fireball to kill ALL THE GOBLINS? 

Each class has its advantages and disadvantages. For the spellcasters, the downs are most commonly being squishy (having very few hit points), but the ups are casting the aforementioned Fireball and turning into animals. The martial classes, such as monk, barbarian, and fighter, have higher hit points, but they can’t do magic (most of the time). Each martial class has its own special feature. Fighters get to make many attacks in one turn and do special maneuvers. Barbarians can go into a mighty rage. Rogues can make a sneak attack to insta-kill anything that gets in their way. Monks can use the power of Ki to make powerful martial arts moves such as doing a backflip, landing behind an orc, and punching its calves so hard they implode and the orc dies of crippling leg cramps. There are also classes that land in the middle of that spectrum, such as paladins and rangers. Paladins swear a holy oath and get to use healing magic and the power of divine smite, which is basically the rogue’s sneak attack feature (but it uses up magic and does radiant damage, which I will get to later.) Rangers are the sherpas of D&D. They use nature magic and the power of archery and dual wielding to be the most USELESS class in D&D. They get to pick a favored terrain and enemy so you can track your favored enemy, things in your favored terrain, or or your favored enemy in your favored terrain with ease. Nothing else. No bonuses unless it is your favored enemy or terrain. However, if you know what campaign you are playing in, such as Tomb of Annihilation, you could doctor your ranger so they are the most useful jungle zombie tracker in the party.

    Making things easy for you is no easy task. D&D is a complicated game, so I am making a chart to help you better understand the classes. There are more classes, such as blood hunter and artificer, but we won’t talk about those. There are also some subclasses that give you magic, such as eldritch knight and arcane archer (but they only use magic arrows, no spells) from fighter, way of the four elements from monk, and arcane trickster from rogue. I will also include the abilities that are most important to that class. 

I probably should have explained the abilities first. Oh well! There are six ability scores: Strength is your physical brawn, dexterity is your agility and fine-motor-control, and constitution is your toughness and hardiness. Intelligence is your book smarts, wisdom is your street smarts, and charisma is your people skills. Furthermore, each ability (except constitution, that determines your hit points) has its own skills to come with it. Strength has athletics, dexterity has stealth, intelligence has investigation, wisdom has medicine, and charisma has persuasion. Of course, this isn’t all the skills, but enough to give the idea of each one. There are also saving throws, or saves, one for each skill, including constitution. You don’t choose to make a save. Instead, you are forced to. A save represents an attempt to avoid or resist something, whether it is a blast from a fireball, or simple poison. Strength saves could be trying to keep the closing doors from crushing you. Constitution is for resisting effects like poison or exhaustion. Dexterity is all about dodging. Intelligence isn’t really used that much, so don’t worry about it. Wisdom and charisma are used to resist mental effects like psychic damage. To make a save, skill check, or attack roll, you roll a twenty-sided die, and your respective modifier, which is your (skill-10)/2, rounded down, and compare that with the difficulty class/DC or armor class/AC. If your roll is higher, success! If not, failure.

Ooh, proficiency! At first level, your proficiency bonus is +2. You can add that to any twenty-sided dice roll that uses a skill, tool, or weapon that you are proficient with. You choose a set of skills to be proficient with and are gifted some skill proficiencies from your background. You are also given saving throw, weapon, tool, and armor proficiencies from your class. The set of skills that you can choose from that varies class to class.

Time to talk about damage. There are thirteen types of damage. Acid, cold, fire, lightning, piercing, poison, and slashing are self explanatory. Then there are force, necrotic, psychic, radiant, and thunder damage. Force is pure damage that doesn’t leave any marks. Necrotic withers the soul. Psychic targets the mind and confuses you. Radiant overloads the soul with power. Thunder is caused by loud noises and sound. If you take enough damage to reduce your hit points to zero, you are knocked unconscious and are unstable, but if you take enough damage to make your hit points less than your negative hit point maximum, you die. While you are unconscious and at zero or less hit points, you must make death saves. First, roll a twenty-sided die on your turn. If it is greater or equal to ten, that is one success. If it is less than ten, it is a failure. First to three determines whether you succeed at stabilizing or not. Stabilization means that you are at one hit point and will wake up in one to four hours (determined by a four-sided die).

I should probably talk about dice. There are six types of dice: The d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20. The d signifies that it is a die roll, and the number following it is the number of sides. For example, the damage dice for a greatsword is 2d6. If you hit an attack with one you would roll two six-sided dice and add them together. The d4 is only used for randomizing starter gold and small amounts of damage. The ds 6-12 are used for determining a character’s hit point maximum (the die depends on what class you choose) and damage, while the d20 is used for determining success, whether it is an attack or skill check. There is no way that I am explaining all the spells, but I will tell you how magic works. First, determine your spellcasting ability modifier. That determines the nature of your magic. Do you study endlessly, devote yourself to a cause, such as a god or nature, or do you project your will and soul into the world? Wizards use intelligence for their spellcasting ability, druids, rangers, and clerics use wisdom, and sorcerers, bards, paladins, and warlocks use charisma. You have a spell save DC, which determines how hard your area of effect (AOE) spells are to dodge, and a spell attack modifier, which determines how good you are with hitting one thing at a time. Your save DC is 8 + your proficiency bonus + your spellcasting ability modifier. Your attack modifier is your proficiency bonus plus your spellcasting ability modifier.

Armor time! There are three sections of armor: Light, medium, and heavy. If you are wearing no armor, your armor class is 10, the base + your dexterity modifier. With light armor the base increases. With medium, the base increases more, but your dexterity modifier is capped at +2. Heavy armor doesn’t let you add your dexterity modifier, but the base is even bigger (up to 18). Wearing a sheild increases your AC by 2. Some armors, like padded (light), scale mail (medium) and plate (heavy) give you disadvantage on stealth checks, which just means you roll twice and take the lower one. Some armors also have strength requirements, like chain mail (13), splint (15), and plate (15), which are all heavy. If your strength is less than the requirement, you cannot wear the armor. You do NOT add your proficiency bonus to your armor class. If you are not proficient with the armor that you wear, you cannot cast spells.

I think that’ll do for an introduction to D&D.