What D&D Looks Like to a Newbie
I was prompted by a friend who asked what a gaming session looked like. I thought I’d write it out, if only to look upon it with nostalgia later. ;)
Before I go into what a session looks like, there are a few factors to consider. One, not every gaming session will look like what I describe. There are many different editions to the “base” Dungeons & Dragons game, v1, v2, v3, v3.5, v4, and a few others that I am not familiar with. In addition, there are supplimental books to any and all of the gaming editions, modules that tweak the game a certain way, introduces new classes, other races, more skills, spells, monsters, and all the rest of the stuff that makes up a Dungeons & Dragons game.
Two, depending on the GM (GameMaster), you may or may not play with a game board, miniature figures, custom content that the GM has taken the time to write up and use. The GM I game with currently uses dice and the printed books of v3, with a custom world map and her own restrictions on races depending on which continent/area she decides your character is to originate in. Each of us has their own set of dice, and we use a character sheet containing every bit of information about our character: name, age, physical description, history, what they’re wearing, using, carrying, and six stats upon which all skills and abilities are based upon, strength, constitution, intelligence, and a couple others.
Three, game sessions can occur daily, weekly, bi-monthly, or at irregular intervals, depending on the group’s needs. For two people with schedules that change weekly, our group tries to meet weekly, coordinating schedules as soon as each gets their schedule for the next week.
Four, there can be as few as two people (one GM and one player, though obviously that doesn’t bode well for social interaction), and as many as the GM can handle. Our group has six, not counting the GM. Imagine us all crowded around a folding card table with our character sheets, dice, drinks, snacks, and everything else cluttering it, talking and joking loudly, vacating chairs and tripping over others trying to get outside for smoke breaks, bathroom breaks, and so on. It’s a bit mad but fun.
Okay, enough babbling. Now, there are two parts to any new, freshly started gaming campaign–the session where you create your character, and the rest of the sessions where you drag your character through whatever the GM’s whim takes him/her/them. I greatly enjoyed the two times I made a new character. GM mileage may vary, but mine allowed all of us to choose whatever race and class we wanted. That was the first thing I chose.
The next step involved rolling our stats. Our GM allowed us two different ways of rolling: using 4d6 (4 six-sided dice) and discarding the lowest die, adding the three remaining dice together and choosing which stat we wanted to put the single or double digit number, repeating this six times; or using 5d6, discarding the lowest two dice, adding the three remaining dice together, and requiring us to place each single or double digit number in each sequential stat, which might mean that you’d have to choose your class after seeing where the highest stats landed. The 4d6 method would allow you to put the best/highest number in the stat(s) your chosen class needs most, the 5d6 method ensured higher stats across the board but limited your class choice. I chose the 4d6 method, as I really wanted to play a certain class.
Once that was done, we were instructed to choose a race (human, elf, dwarf, etc), a class (ranger, fighter, druid, etc), and give our character its physical features. Our GM told each of us that our character originated in an area that she arbitrarily chose, and then gave us a list of applicable races to choose from. We were allowed our own class choice. There are resources online that describe basic and exotic race and class choices. Our GM also allowed us to choose to play a “gestalt” character, a character of any race who has TWO classes, such as a sorcerer/druid or whathaveyou. The caveat to that was that your character would hold all the benefits AND penalties of each class. Fighters might have a penalty to INT, for example.
With all the really basic stuff done, we’d move onto skills. The GM would tell us how many skill points we had, based on our stats and a dice roll for a random total. From there, we’d choose the few skills in a long list of possible skills we could have, and how many skill points we’d have in that particular skill.
And then, it was time to go shopping! ^^ We had to choose armor, weapons, and crap we’d want to lug around with us. We were given a budget and a total weight burden and told to go to town.
Since there were five of us at the time all creating our characters, this took an entire five hour session to complete. The following week, we had our first gaming session, wherein we had separate adventures, the GM leading us from the recent past, to the “present”, where we happened to conveniently gather in the same town, and the same inn, wherein we began interacting and roleplaying with each other. I’d chosen a boring, generic character and by the end of this session, just wasn’t feeling her. The GM made a special trip the following week to get me set up with a second character, along with someone else we’d invited to game with us.
Tomorrow night, I get to play my second character, for the first time. I’ve spent the time between its creation and tomorrow night reading up on the exotic race I chose and got the GM’s permission to play, and all about the class I chose, the ranger. I’ve found a few photos that exemplify what my character looks like in her human form, her cat form, and her hybrid cat-woman (lol) form. I’m excited. It promises to be a fun time. I’m modeling my character after the character Neytiri from the movie Avatar as far as being a hunter, but a little more aloof, very helpful as a chaotic good archer but very self-motivated and independent. She’s not a girly girl by any means, though she would clean up nice if she ever bothered. She’ll be in her human form and go off by herself to hunt, change, and hide her not-humanness from the others in her party until necessary to reveal, or caught off-guard.
This’ll be fun. :)
