Building a Character

The best part of Dungeons and Dragons is you get to become an entirely different person. You get to make all decisions and live through your character. Here is the step-by-step guide to start making your character.

1) Race

First step is choosing a race. Double check with your DM if any races are not allowed in their campaign. The race can help give you advantages in your travels.

Races to choose from:

• Dwarf- medium size. Advantages include darkvision, dwarven resilience and Constitution ability score is increased by 2.
• Elf- medium size. Advantages include darkvision,  fey ancestry, keen senses and your dexterity score increases by 2.

Glossary

Here’s a list of common terms used throughout the campaign and this guide, and what they mean.

DM:  Dungeon Master. The person who runs the campaign. Don’t make them mad because they hold the fate of your character in their hands.

Modified Roll: A dice roll with either a bonus or penalty added to the original number. This can change the outcome of an action. For example, say Bob is tricking the palace guards into letting him into the castle to raid the armory. He needs to roll a minimum of a 12 to fool the guard. Bob rolls an 10, BUT since it is a Charisma roll, he adds his charisma modifier of +3, he now has a modified 13 and successfully tricks the guard.

PC- Player character. You.

D&D 101: Materials Needed

So you decide that you want to get into playing D&D and came here to find out everything you could need to start a character.

*Note this post is about what you physically need as a PC, or player character. Building a character will be in a separate post (Coming soon!)

Dice

D&D use a basic set of game dice for a campaign. Most game shops will sell these dice as a set. When talking about dice, most are notated as d(#), meaning the number of sides the die has. For example a d6 is the standard six sided die.

d4– Pyramid shaped die, numbered 1-4, the number on top is the value of the roll.

d6– Cube shaped die, standard, numbered 1-6

d8– Diamond shaped, numbered 1-8

d10– numbered 1-10

d20– numbered 1-20, MOST USED!

Percentile– variation of a d10, numbered 00-90 in 10’s

Player’s Handbook

Vital to playing a campaign, the Player’s Handbook (PHB) has detailed lists, statistics, ideas and just about all the information needed to playing a character. There are PDF versions online that can be used, but just make sure you bring it with you every time!

Character sheet

A character sheet is the place where you put down anything and everything about the character you want to create. There are hundreds of character sheets online and the official one in the back of the PHB. My favorite one comes from Mr. Ronny at Dungeon Master Assistance which can be found here. You can type in your info instead of handwriting it, and Ronny goes line by line to explain everything here.

Alternatively, there are some great character sheet apps for your smartphone that come in handy. I’ve been using Fight Club 5 and it is phenomenal.

The character sheets linked above are for the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons

Writing Utensils

Pencils. All the pencils. Just like you do in real life your character grows, and things change so pencils are crucial. Also invest in a good eraser too.

D&D Game 1: Torrieth the Elf Druid and the adventure through Waterdeep

So in my first game ever, I decided to play a druid. Now druid’s are magic folk who use the power of nature for magic. Due to this druids have some cool features, such as Wild Shape where they can transform into animals and a secret language of Druidic.

Torrieth the elf grew up mostly alone, due to the death of her parents. She befriended a tiefling Carreid who would be as close to a family as she could get. Together they look after one another, never fully trusting anyone but each other.

Our campaign started as a band of friends going on a quest to help a guy from our town get a magic item stolen from him. We started to head towards the castle and get attacked by zombies. Yeah Zombies. Every one except for our human fighter made it out unscathed, and that’s because he rolled a modified 3 on his attack roll (He rolled a nat one)

More to come…