AICN Tabletop: New to D&D? Want to be? Massawyrm checks out the D&D Essentials Series

Hola all. Massawyrm here.

If there is one e-mail I get more than every other – even more than the “this is what *I* think INCEPTION was about” letter that choked my inbox this summer – it is from people who have read my gaming column and want to know how they can get started playing DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. The penning of my very first column on the topic (my early review of 4^th Edition) brought people out of the woodwork. Friends and acquaintances came forward to admit that for years they’d secretly harbored a nerdy desire to play D&D, but just didn’t know how to go about it. The image of a table full of overweight virgins speaking in lisps about their Paladin’s latest adventure scared the shit out of them and, wanting no part of social pariah-dom, long kept that fucking secret to themselves. But things have changed. MMORPGs have introduced the idea of fantasy gaming to millions who never before had considered it and now the idea of sitting around a table of your friends delving into a dungeon doesn’t seem so alien.

This summer, Harry’s infamous nephew Giovanni turned 10, so I did for him what I did when my own nephew turned 10. I bought him a box of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS books. He had no idea what I’d given him. Weeks before he’d heard the words in a conversation and asked me what they meant, and when I described it his eyes lit up and when he said “COOL,” I knew he was ready. His mother told me later that he spent a week falling asleep with the Monster Manual across his chest. Hell. Yes.

The easiest way to get involved has always been to simply drop the $100 on the giftset, sit down with the books and plow through them until you have a basic understanding – that is if you don’t know a Dungeon Master already. But for some, the idea of dropping $100 to do a few weeks of reading to try out a game you may or may not enjoy is just as much of a deterrent as the image from paragraph 1. And for years, Wizards of the Coast have strived to find easier inroads than that – while also trying to make a product that is equally useful to the seasoned veteran. This year, they finally found the magic formula and created the single easiest way into the game yet: the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS STARTER SET and the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS ESSENTIALS SERIES.

The STARTER SET is one of their easiest gateway products yet. Dressed up as the classic red box that I first cut my teeth on back in the 80’s (complete with the original artwork from that starter set), this $20 box set (which is available at Wal-Mart and Target as well as all the usual venues) has everything you and your friends need to play your first adventure. It is designed for the newest of the new player – even those who have never before played an MMORPG – to be able to wrap their minds around what a role playing game is and how D&D is played.

The genius of the red box is the Players Book. Unlike books before it, it is not a list of characters and an explanation of the rules. In fact, there isn’t a character to be found anywhere near this box. The Players Book is a 32 page choose-your-own-adventure book that wlaks you step by step through the character generation process while simultaneously teaching you the rules by running you through an encounter against an attacking mob of goblins. When your wagon is attacked on the first page, the book asks you how you imagine responding: drawing a weapon and attacking; casting a spell; tending to the wounded; or sneaking around to pick off the goblins. Your decision chooses your class and the book begins to tell you how to fill in your character sheet as you fight through the ranks of attacking goblins. By the end of the encounter, you have a full character sheet and a basic understanding of how your character works. Now you’re ready to sit down with the group.

The second book is the Dungeon Master’s Book, which is much more straightforward. There are 18 pages of basic rule explanation and the follow-up adventure to the Goblin attack in the Player’s Book. This 7 encounter adventure is everything you need to play 2 or 3 sessions (although, I imagine if your group gets a good grip on everything, they could do it in a single sitting) taking your characters up into 2nd^rd level. The second half of the book has rules for leveling up the characters to second level, explanation on how to set up your own dungeons and a small bestiary so you can run your players through a second level adventure of your own choosing. Filling all this out is a map for the adventure, tokens for all the monsters contained in the box and ability cards for the various powers each class has available.

If you’ve gotten through the red box and discovered that D&D is something you really dig, what next?

The D&D Essentials books. This is where the product line merges with products for long established players. These products are a line of paperback editions of stripped down versions of the main rulebooks. Designed to be cheaper and more readily portable than the standard editions, these aren’t so much a replacement of the books as it is a compartmentalization of them. Each book is a $20 trade paperback with a very specific purpose. The Rules Compendium – easily the most useful of bunch – is everything a standard player will need for a game if they’ve already got their character printed out beside them – just the rules. There are two books that have all the necessary character rules for different classes – split into one for the four classes available in the red box and one for the other 4 basic classes not previously presented. And available in $30 box sets of their own are the Dungeon Master’s Book and the Monster Vault.

Basically, the idea here is that new players can move along at their own pace. Did you enjoy running a D&D game, but aren’t ready to pick up the Dungeon Master’s Guide and start making your own games? Well, that’s where the Dungeon Master’s Kit comes in. At $30, this comes with a book that covers all the basics, a Dungeon Master’s Screen, another map, more tokens two books with further adventures picking up where the red box left off. Once the players get to level three, they can buy a Players Handbook – or they can pick up the $20 HEROES OF THE FALLEN LANDS, which is just the class information and rules for the four classes contained in the red box. If the players want to stray a little further from that path, there is HEROES OF THE FORGOTTEN KINGDOMS – the four classes omitted from the red box.

At this point, now a group of new players have a number of options to take this further. Without buying another book, you can take your adventures further by playing through the available modules released over the past few years. You can buy the basic rule books and begin collecting the various tomes already in existence. Or you can continue with the series, creating your own adventures with the rest of the essentials.

Next up in the series is the Monster Vault, a stripped down version of the Monster Manual that comes with 10 pages of tokens representing the monster in the book (meaning you’ll always have a representation of the monster you need for your game) another map and finally another adventure – this time for 4^th level characters, following up the adventures in the Dungeon Master set. The Monster Vault, combined with the Dungeon Masters Book, the Red Box, the Rules Compendium and the Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms, provides you with absolutely everything you’ll ever need to run D&D adventures. There’s no need to purchase the additional rule books – though you might want to if you really begin to get into D&D – and there was zero need to buy them all at once.

What it comes down to is the Essentials line a step by step introduction to the game without overwhelming players with cost and hundreds of pages of intimidating rules to swim through in order to get your feet wet. Meanwhile, the books are still useful for long time players and dungeon masters as they present readily portable versions of the books they already use. At the end of the day, a group will have dropped more cash on the essentials line than they would the standard rule set – but will come away with a pile of maps, tokens and four levels worth of adventuring – all spread out over a period of time they are comfortable with. It’s a great model and I hope it becomes one they carry on with.

DUNGEON AND DRAGONS ESSENTIAL TILE SETS

Easily the best bargain of the entire line, the Dungeon Tiles sets are pretty awesome in their own right. Long time players will be familiar with the product as these are just a repackaged reissue of the Dungeon Tiles sets already in release. However, these are cheaper, more accessible version of the line. For $20 you get what amounts to three of the $10 sets, each combined in themes based upon location. There is a dungeon themed set which comes with enough tiles to make a dungeon of the size below:

There is a city themed set, seen below, that has tiles for playing the sewers beneath the city on the opposite side of a number of the tiles.

And a Wilderness set soon to be released.

The boxes come with a cardboard slip cover that, when removed, reveal that the boxes themselves contain a grid, allowing you to use them as map features with higher elevation. The Dungeon one is just empty dungeon, but the city box is a pathway through a cluster of houses – allowing you to run alley fights or to run chases over rooftops. (At the time of writing, I have not seen the wilderness box – hoping to get that one soon.)

$20 gets you a tables worth of material that can be arranged thousands of different ways. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. These sets are my very favorite gaming product of the year; sturdy, pretty and multifunctional, the best part is they are also dirt cheap. Experienced and new gamers alike will find these immeasurably useful. Highly recommended.

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