With the explosive growth in popularity of Dungeons and Dragons, you may be wondering what 5th Edition means.
Dungeons and Dragons is a roleplaying game where a group of friends join in collaborative fantasy storytelling within a rule system. 5th Edition is the latest version, released in July 2014. 5th Edition modernizes elements of game play for a 50-year old game. It has also brought forward gameplay for earlier editions.
Roleplaying games, like Dungeons and Dragons, have its players spend a few hours telling stories of heroic fantasy. One of the players is the Dungeon Master whose role is to plan and lead the story, by acting out the various monsters, villains, and townsfolk who are the antagonists and side-characters of the story. The other players, typically three to five, assume the roles of a specific, heroic character. These are the protagonists of the story.
But unlike novels, screenplays, or movies, no one at the table know for sure how the story is going to evolve. While the Dungeon Master has a plan for the evening, the players may simply make choices that must be reacted too. Also, the game uses dice to randomize uncertain outcomes and conflict. Even if the Dungeon Master and the players are not throwing curveballs, the dice may have a completely different idea.
Pillars of Play: Exploration, Social Interaction and Combat
The three pillars of the 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons experience are Exploration, Social Interaction, and Combat. While this edition fully supports all three pillars, each group will find its own balance. For most groups, the tension is between social interaction, also called roleplaying, and combat. If you are looking for groups online, you’ll also see them listed as 50-50 roleplay and combat or some other combination of the two.
Exploration is the dungeon of Dungeons and Dragons. Your heroes are walking into an unexplored ruin of an ancient, lost civilization. After wandering the old streets with barely-there buildings, they come across a building that appears to have been rebuilt. No one is around, but there are stairs going down into the ground. What do you do?
Of course, not all exploration scenes are in dungeons. Your party may be going through an ancient forest to speak with a wise woman whose cottage is on the side of the hill rising from its middle. The player in front accidentally steps into a circle of mushrooms and is transported to the realm of faerie. Not wanting to leave their companion alone, the rest of the party steps in after the other!
Social interaction, or roleplaying, emphasizes conversation. This pillar appeals to the amateur actors and gregarious players of the group. Sometimes the interactions are between the party members themselves. Each player is encouraged to develop a backstory for their character. Part of that should be, in collaboration with the Dungeon Master, creating individual goals or quests.
Sometimes those individual goals may conflict, whether directly or in priority. The players may roleplay between themselves to set up, explore, and resolve those conflicts.
More often, the roleplay scenes are between the players and the Dungeon Master. Remember, the Dungeon Master is playing everyone else in the story: monsters, villains, high priests, emperors, innkeeps, and wise women. In Fifth Edition these are called the non-player characters (NPCs). These scenes allow the characters to obtain missions, gather information, or just have fun with the NPCs. Think of Bilbo talking to Smaug as an example of this pillar.
Combat is almost self-descriptive. The players have gone someplace they shouldn’t have or said the wrong thing to that flock of faeries. Suddenly, the other creatures in the room want them dead!
Combat is the most rules-intensive portion of playing Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons. From its origins, Dungeons and Dragons was created out of historical and fantasy war gaming. Rather than having opposing armies, each player would just have one character. These rules govern the turn order and actions of all of the participants, with the Dungeon Master being the final arbiter of what can or cannot happen.
What Makes it the 5th Edition?
Explaining 50 years and five(ish) different editions of Dungeons and Dragons goes beyond the scope of this article. Fifth Edition is distinctive from prior edition because it started with a massive, public playtest. This allowed the games designers and developers to craft the game that appeals to a wide set of players.
Where the edition has found its success is integrating the best parts of each edition, without creating a Frankenstein flesh golem. The playtest allowed the game to make its integration elegant and unified. For example, prior editions can have a lot of fiddly bonuses or penalties to dice rolls that the player has to keep track of. This resulted in some cranks calling it Dungeons and Accountants.
Fifth Edition did away most of those fiddly bits and instead uses the Advantage-Disadvantage system. Whenever the outcome of a character’s action is uncertain, the Dungeon Master will ask them to roll a d20 (a 20-sided die) and add a single modifier from the character sheet, depending on the type of action being taken.
If the character did something to make success more likely, then they can roll with Advantage: roll two d20s and keep the higher number. If, instead, the character did something to make success less likely, then they have Disadvantage: roll two d20s and keep the lower number.
One of the other things that makes Fifth Edition, well, itself is an element of backwards compatibility. The Third and Fourth Editions of the game made a break with the prior editions by using a different underlying mathematical model. This made it difficult to incorporate published materials from the prior editions into games using the Third or Fourth Edition rulesets.
But Fifth Edition adopted a simplified mathematical model that made it more compatible with the First and Second Editions. While not identical, it is possible to play published adventures from those editions with minimal modifications to the creature statistics and rules. This compatibility is used primarily in combat.
How Do I Start Playing Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons?
The hardest part is finding three to five other people to play with you. The easiest way of doing that is agreeing to be the Dungeon Master. One of the eternal truths of Dungeons and Dragons is there are always plenty of players, but never enough Dungeon Masters.
If you have never played before or haven’t played in many years, there are several different ways to get started. The first is simply downloading and reading the Basic Rules for free!
Your next option is getting one of the three starting boxes, all priced under $25. I recommend the Starter Set if you have a group ready to go. If you’re not sure how many people you can entice, then get the Essentials Kit that has rules for one-on-one play! Both sets have a basic rulebook and an adventure to get yourself going!
If you want the full-experience, then you’ll need to get the three core rulebooks: Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and the Monster Manual.
Speaking of the full-experience, there are many actual play podcasts and videos that you can listen to or watch to see what its like to play Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons. I heartily recommend Critical Role, whose sessions are broadcast on Twitch, then put on Youtube and their podcast feed. I recommend starting with Season 2, Episode 1.
If you want to learn more about how much it will cost to get into this hobby, then you should click here. If you want to know more on how much time it will take to prepare for, as the Dungeon Master, and play your first session, definitely click here. If, instead, you are wondering about the age appropriateness of Dungeons and Dragons, then click here!
