Dungeons & Dragons

“	This is a game that is fun. It helps you imagine.	”
	— Frank Mentzer, Dungeons And Dragons 1st Edition Basic Set (1981), first sentence

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is the main roleplaying game system played by the Dragon Friends. D&D is credited with creating the roleplaying hobby in 1974 and remains the most popular roleplaying system in the world. Dungeons & Dragons was originally created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, but has been worked on and updated by a many writers and designers over the decades.

The Dragon Friends play the fifth edition of D&D, abbreviated as 5E, launched in 2015 and still current until the revised rulebooks are released some time in 2024. As a long-time D&D player, God/Dave occasionally uses terms from the third or fourth editions, but most of these translate pretty well into the fifth (see below).

Terminology

The following D&D (and general roleplaying) terms are commonly used in the podcast:

• Homebrew: Rules created by players and DMs for their own use, modifying or adding to the officially published rules. Homebrew is common throughout Dragon Friends, from altering some of the basic rules for initiative and adjusting the difficulty of rolls, to custom-made monsters, classes and playable species. The Heroes of Yearth player characters make fairly extensive use of homebrew, e.g. Polly Waddle being a “ducklin” or Dinner Munchabout being a “pity wizard”.
• Roll/Check: Rolling a 20-sided dice (or "d20" for short) to determine if a character succeeds at a task. This is D&D's standard mechanic for introducing uncertainty to the heroes’ actions. There are three kinds of roll: Attack Rolls determine if an attack hits an opponent during combat; Ability Checks check if a character’s attempted action succeeds; and Saving Throws (see below) determine if a character can avoid or resist something bad happening to them.
• Modifier: A number that is added to or subtracted from a roll or check (as above), to account for the differing abilities of characters. For example Philge is stronger than Freezo, so for rolls based on Strength - bashing down a door, pulling on a rope etc - Alex Lee gets to add a higher number to her roll than Michael Hing does.
• DC: The number a player needs to succeed on a roll or check. If the result of a roll (including any appropriate modifiers) is equal to or greater than the DC, the task succeeds; otherwise it fails, only partially succeeds, or succeeds with some kind of complication. Dave often uses slightly lower DCs than the standard ones recommended in the rules, to make sure the show isn't held up by repeated failures. Early on while everyone was learning the rules, Dave usually just gives the appropriate number, but in later seasons he uses the term DC often. DC is an abbreviation for "Difficulty Class".
• Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma: The six standard Ability Scores in D&D which represent a character's basic abilities and talents. Most players call them "stats" (short for statistics).
• Level: a measure of a character's overall ability. A level 7 character has more powerful abilities than a level 6 one, and so on. Classically in D&D, your level was advanced by earning "experience points" (XP) by slaying monsters (and, in the very earliest versions, collecting treasure); however, it is now more common for DMs to award XP or even levels based on momentum in the story of the campaign, so that the PC's power escalates throughout the story. In Dragon Friends the characters usually level up at the beginning of a season, and as of season 8 the original characters are level 9. In the fifth edition the highest level is 20.
• Class: The fantasy archetype a character embodies: Philge is a Barbarian, Freezo is a Warlock, Bobby is a Rogue etc. A player's choice of class determines the kind of abilities they have, and how they develop as they increase in level (see below). Most classes also have "sub-classes" - variations on the main class idea that are chosen by the player early in their career. For example Freezo began as a Warlock whose pact for power was with the Fiend, which gave him specific powers, including the "Dark One's Blessing" which allowed him to gain temporary hit points by killing enemies (or, indeed, Horsey Two-Horse). During season 4, he changes his pact to that of the Hexblade, which swapped many of his powers to completely different ones that he almost never uses.
• Multiclassing: Choosing to take levels in more than one class. This is usually written by listing the classes taken with a slash between them, each followed by the level of each class. Many of the Dragon Friends are now multiclass characters: Baston is a Fighter 4/Monk 4, and in season 6 Bobby becomes a Rogue 7/Bard 1. (Philge is a special case; Wizards rely on a good Intelligence score, which Philge...ah...does not have, so Dave developed the special hybrid Barbarian/Wizard class for her.) Some home games of D&D discourage multiclassing because it increases complexity, requiring a player to learn the rules of two different classes and how they interact. Since a character can’t get higher than level 20, it also means that the player will never reach the highest levels of any one class, which can result in a weaker character.
• Skills: Areas in which a character can be "proficient", which means they have a level of training or expertise in that area. When making a roll or check where the skill is relevant, the character adds an extra "proficiency bonus" to the roll, on top of their Ability modifier. Examples include Deception, Intimidation, Perception, Persuasion and Sleight of Hand. God/Dave - and most Dungeon Masters - will usually call for a check using just the skill name (e.g. "a Perception check" or "Intimidation check") as short-hand. Michael Hing frequently requests Arcana checks.
• Save (or Saving Throw): Another form of roll, made by a player when their character attempts to avoid something bad happening to them, for example the effects of a spell or being caught in a dragon's fiery breath. In fifth edition D&D, saves are based on the six ability scores mentioned above; since Dave is an old-school GM, he sometimes asks for a "Fortitude" (equivalent to Constitution), "Reflex" (Dexterity) or "Will" (Wisdom) save, which are the saves used in the game's third and fourth editions. (Earlier editions used very specific saving throw categories based on various sources of magical effects.)
• Hit Points: A measure of how close to defeat a character is. If someone gets hit with a sword or spell, or is otherwise affected by an attack, they lose hit points. If they run out of hit points, they're either dead (this is assumed the case for monsters and NPCs) or incapacitated (player characters don’t immediately die; see Death Saves below). Note that since a character (or monster etc) suffers no ill effects until they reach zero hit points, many groups choose not to describe losing them as physical injuries, but rather as the character’s luck and stamina running out. Dragon Friends often does describe them as injuries, even out of combat, and after all the rules themselves describe losing hit points as “taking damage” (see below). In fifth edition, characters don't go into negative hit points, though there are rules for dying instantly from taking massive damage in one go.
• Damage: A measure of how many hit points a character loses when something dangerous happens to them. This is usually determined by rolling dice of varying sizes. The bigger and more numerous the dice, the more dangerous the source of the damage: a longsword uses an eight-sided dice (a d8), while a Witch Bolt spell uses a twelve-sided one (a d12). Physical attacks generally add the attacker's Strength or Dexterity bonus to the damage, while spells do not.
• Death Save: A special kind of Saving Throw made by a character who has zero hit points. Each round, the character rolls a d20 without adding any modifiers; if they roll 10 or above they succeed, otherwise they fail. If they fail three times, they die; if they succeed three times, they become stable, and don't make any more death saves. Normally a miraculous recovery is only possible when rolling a natural 20, but Dave is pretty merciful and has often allowed this to happen with less impressive rolls.
• Spell Slot: Most magic users in D&D, such as Freezo, have a limit on how many times they can use magic. A spell slot represents one opportunity to cast a spell of a given power level, and once used usually don’t refresh until the following day (after a “Long Rest”, i.e. a good night’s sleep). Most spell casters (including Bobby, Bassbass Wihouveberry and potentially Philge) have spell slots of various levels. In many cases, casting a lower level spell using a higher level spell slot makes that spell more powerful. As a warlock, Freezo's spell slots are all the same level, and he has very few of them; to balance this, they are refreshed after a “Short Rest” (by the rules an hour or so of tending to wounds, eating, drinking water etc).
• Feat: Special training that a character can choose instead of improving their basic Ability Scores when levelling up. These are an optional part of the game. During the Downtime Episode, Philge earned the Arcane Initiate feat, which allowed her to learn a small number of additional spells without taking another level of Barbarian/Wizard.
• Campaign: an ongoing adventure featuring the same characters over many sessions of play. Campaigns can run for anywhere from a few games to many years, like Dragon Friends.
• One-shot: a short adventure that’s expected to be completed in a single session, or at least no more than a few. Many of the special episodes of Dragon Friends are one-shots, though they are still usually split into two separate episodes.

I wanna play too!

Great! Dragon Friends has been responsible for a number of players getting into D&D or roleplaying games more generally.

What You’ll Need

You'll need at least a couple of friends to play, one person to be the Dungeon Master, and a set of dice (which can be ordered online or bought from any gaming store; starter sets also include some dice).

To get started, you can grab the Basic Rules for the fifth edition. These contain all the general rules for the game, as well as basic character options (i.e. a subset of stuff from the Player's Handbook; see below), plus a bit of info for the Dungeon Master. The Basic Rules are freely available as a PDF from the Wizards of the Coast website, or as a hyperlinked online document via D&D Beyond. The D&D Beyond version incorporates extra stuff found in the PDF “System Reference Document” (SRD), a less player-friendly but more comprehensive rules document designed for folks who are making their own games and content compatible with D&D.

You can also buy one of the various starter sets, which include a printed version of the Basic Rules plus some dice, character sheets, and a ready-to-run adventure. The Dragon Friends played through the adventure from the 2022 starter set in Dragon Friends of Stormwreck Isle.

Once you’ve got into it, you’ll probably want the full D&D rules, which come in three books:

• The Player’s Handbook contains all the general rules, as well as rules for making characters, combat and magic spells. Every player will need to read this one, or at least bits of it.
• The Dungeon Master’s Guide contains rules and guides for the “Dungeon Master”, like traps, magic items and how to construct scenarios.
• The Monster Manual is a bestiary of creatures and adversaries for the players’ characters to fight.

Note that updated editions with significant (but backwards compatible) changes are coming in late 2024, so you might want to wait for those to come out before you buy the books. You also don’t need to buy physical books; all the official D&D books, and a few from other publishers, are available in digital format from D&D Beyond. It’s also a useful resource for new players, since it can guide you through character creation and automates and tracks many of the rules for you. (There are similar sites for other games; Demiplane is the biggest.)

If the rules used in Dragon Friends seem complex, there are also simpler games, usually based on earlier editions, for example The Black Hack. Or, if you’re more interested in the less traditional fantasy adventures, check out the list of games other than Dungeons & Dragons below.

Tips For Your First Game

• For your first game you might want to purchase or download an existing adventure, rather than improvising the adventure as God/Dave does, which requires experience. (Murphy's law of RPGs states that the players will always do something that nobody was expecting and you'll end up improvising anyway, but at least an existing adventure gives you something to use as a basis.)
  • You can always grab The Gribbits Detective Agency as a starting point; or, if you want to play an adventure that the Dragon Friends also played, Tomb of Annihilation (although the Friends only played a small section of it, and the full version offers a challenge for even experienced players). Season two is based on Castle Ravenloft, a popular horror adventure from an earlier edition which was more or less adapted for fifth edition as Curse of Strahd.
  • Other seasons aren’t direct adaptations of published adventures, but seasons six and seven draw on ideas found in Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, and because of D&D sponsorship, Beef Babes features a lot of stuff from the adventure Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus (a semi-prequel to the videogame Baldur’s Gate 3) and sourcebook Mythic Odysseys of Theros (a tie-in with Magic: The Gathering).
• Remember that Dragon Friends is primarily a comedy show, not an actual play podcast. The play of some characters, most notably Freezo, would be considered disruptive at an actual table - especially with a beginning DM. Dave's rant at Hing in “A Fistful of Shrimp” would indicate a genuine issue in a real group. But you already know that Freezo's not an example to follow, right? ...Right?
• By the same logic, don't compare your game to Dragon Friends or any other podcast - the motivations and goals for a home game, where you are playing for yourselves rather than an audience, are quite different. This does not mean it's any less fun, it just mean you get to play and listen.
• Don't worry about the detail of the rules. (The Dragon Friends certainly don't...)

Other Games

The Dragon Friends haven’t only played D&D, and even some of their D&D adventures have drawn on other games as major influences. If you're interested in those other games, you can look into these:

• Hogwarts Adventures is a free, unofficial Harry Potter RPG used for the Harry Potter themed one-shot episodes. It's a short, single-page game, and not all groups and GMs like this type of short game. It also expects a fair amount of experience can be harder to run as a beginner because more improvisation is needed.
• The Star Wars Special used the Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars RPG, commonly known as Edge of the Empire, although there are actually three versions for different parts of the Star Wars setting. The specific adventure that the Dragon Friends played is available in the Edge of the Empire Beginner's Game boxed set, although this is now out of print. Be aware that this game uses custom dice with special symbols, though there is an app which rolls digital versions, and the rules do include a guide for using regular dice instead.
• The End of the World one-shot used the End of the World system, also from Fantasy Flight Games. It also has multiple different versions, each one focussed on a different kind of end of the world scenario (e.g. zombies, alien invasion etc).
• Season 3 draws from the setting of Shadowrun, a 1990s game which fused cyberpunk with D&D-style high fantasy, but it uses standard D&D rules rather than the Shadowrun system. Shadowrun rules are much more complicated than D&D, with a lot of emphasis on specifics in combat (e.g. different kinds of guns and ammo etc), so they're probably not great for groups new to roleplaying. If you’re keen, you may be able to find and join an existing group who can introduce you to the rules gently.
• Season 5 is inspired by Call of Cthulhu, an RPG almost as well-known within the hobby as Dungeons & Dragons itself, though again the Dragon Friends continued to use D&D rules. This game is much less complex than Shadowrun and has the advantage of having many published adventures available, but is specifically based in the genres of cosmic horror and investigation, and the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft.
• OK Computer uses Paranoia, a retro-futuristic dystopian dark comedy game first published in the 1980s. It’s been updated several times, most recently in 2017 and 2023; the edition played by the Dragon Friends is that newest one, known as the “Perfect Edition” or “Shiny Edition”, published by Mongoose Games. It’s no more complicated than D&D, but it has very different goals as a parody game. It also expects conflict between player characters, and between the players and the Game Master, which won’t suit every group.