Starter Set Rulebook
Welcome to Dungeons & Dragons
Driven by imagination, dungeons & dragons is a cooperative game in which the characters you roleplay embark on adventures together in fantasy worlds filled with monsters and magic. This set gives you and up to five of your friends everything you need—besides your imagination and a pencil—to journey in one of those worlds.
Getting Started
If this is your first time playing D&D, start by reading the rest of this introduction and chapter 1. They tell you the most important rules for play.
Being a Player
Each player chooses a character, an adventurer who teams up with the other players' adventurers. This set comes with several characters to choose from, each one printed on their own sheet. Take a look at each of the sheets, and choose the character who looks the most fun to play. Whichever character you and the other players choose, the characters are assumed to be allies as they face the dangers of D&D together. The DM presents exciting challenges, new friends, and handsome rewards to your characters. The DM is not your foe but does present dangers that provide opportunities for your adventurers to shine and then thrive.
Being The DM
Instead of choosing a character, one participant takes on the role of the DM, the game's lead storyteller and referee. The DM runs the adventure for the characters, who navigate its hazards and decide which paths to explore. The DM describes the locations and creatures that the adventurers face, and the players decide what they want their characters to do. Then the DM, using imagination and the game's rules, determines the results of the adventurers' actions and narrates what they experience. Because the DM can improvise to react to anything the players attempt, D&D is infinitely flexible.
If you decide to be the DM, make sure to familiarize yourself with this rulebook, and read the adventure booklet. You'll then be ready to gather your friends together to play.
Rhythm of Play
Once the DM is ready to run the adventure and the players have chosen their characters, the group gathers for a session of play. In a typical D&D session, play unfolds in encounters — similar to how a movie comprises scenes— and in each encounter, there are chances for the DM to describe creatures and places and for characters to make choices. Here's an example of the start of an encounter.
Example Encounter
Dungeon Master (DM): A crumbling castle stands among the trees, the ruins of seven towers jutting up from it like broken teeth. An archway littered with rusted metal gapes open at the top of a short flight of steps. Just inside that opening, you spot two skeletal guards with glowing red eyes.
Player 1 (playing Nice, the cleric): Let's send the rogue up ahead to look in and see if there are more than two guards.
Player 2 (playing Diana, the rogue): OK, I'll sneak up until I can peer in through the entrance.
DM: All right, let's see how sneaky you are. Make a Dexterity check.
Player 2: Using my Stealth proficiency, right?
DM: You bet.
Player 2 (rolling a d20): Diana's pretty sneaky—that's a 17.
DM: There's no sign the skeletal guards spot you, and you don't notice any others.
In that example, three main steps are present, and those steps occur in every D&D encounter, whether it's a peaceful encounter or a fight:
- The DM describes the environment. The DM tells the players where their adventurers are and what's around them, presenting the basic scope of options (how many doors lead out of a room, what's on a table, who's in the tavern, and so on).
- The players decide what their characters do. A character's sheet contains various thing that the character can do.