2026-01-10
Recently our good friend M. dropped by for a visit and mentioned that her partner G. would be interested in getting into D&D. My first impulse was to find one of those introductory books for them, but then I remembered that the copy of Swords & Wizardry Continual Light I once had, was given away a long time ago. When M. bid us goodbye I promised to give them some hints. I really didn’t plan to make this a blog post, but you know how it is …
First off, be informed friends, there is a wide spectrum of different ways to play D&D. From the harsh, gritty and competitive to shared storytelling of furry fairy tales. While all of that can be fun, every player will develop their preferences. Also, there’s a bewildering number of editions concurrently in use.
Modern editions of the game seem to somewhat tend towards the story telling kind of play style, and the marketing of current editions embraces D&D fandom, popcorn cinema and lifestyle. It’s true, there can hardly be a doubt that 2014’s 5th edition has been the most successful edition of D&D so far.
But now let’s see what you’ll need in any case apart from the obvious pencils and paper: a set of rules and dice!
I recommend to learn and adopt a classic edition. For starters setting up a game is much quicker with the old editions. Creating a single player character takes about 10 minutes in classic D&D, whereas you’ll need about an hour in 5th edition. With classic D&D the whole party will be ready and off adventuring in a short time, whereas you’ll spend just about all of your first gaming session to create your first characters with 5th edition.
Then there’s the price tag. The basic three core books of the current 2024 version of 5th edition D&D cost something like 120 €. Granted, they are fancy books.
What I will recommend in general though is an edition of D&D that’s become known as “B/X”, short for “basic” and “expert” from 1981. Think of B/X as the lingua franca of classic D&D. It’s got a broad fan base, has spawned many derivatives and has good support from third party publishers as you’ll see in a second. While it’s basic assumption is that of the harsh and gritty, it’s simple to tweak and make it more lenient for example if you want to try the story telling mode of play. I guess this malleability is part of the popularity of B/X.
B/X is so old that it’s been reformulated and republished many times. Today’s most important “clone” and also most true to the original game version is Old School Essentials. The basic set of books costs around 75 €. If you’re prepared to spend that kind of money, go for it, it’s good.
The cheapest option by far however will be Basic Fantasy RPG. It differs from B/X here and there, but it’s still very close and you’ll be able to use all secondary material with just a tiny bit of tweaking. I recommend to check out the perfect bound 4th edition of the Core Rules plus an adventure book called Morgansfort, the western lands campaign. On Lulu.com you can get both books for for just about 15 € plus shipping, and this will give you material for months if not years of gaming.
If you’d rather like to get the real thing there are options too: A scanned PDF version of 1981’s Basic D&D is available at DriveThroughRPG for about 5 €. Unfortunately collectors prices for original printed copies of the game on eBay have become quite prohibitive, but you might make a lucky grab.
Let me start with dice colors. There’s an amazing variety of elaborately crafted, multicolored, rainbow marble textured, hand carved and gold plated dice to be had, all with UV-lighting and sound effects. So let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge that dice crafting and collecting can be an amazing hobby as well … good.
Now, for actual gaming you want opaque colored, easily distinguishable dice with strongly contrasting numbers. You will be playing under sub optimal lighting conditions. Yes, you will! And you will want to take advantage of color coding too. Ogre on the left: yellow dice, ogre on the right: blue dice. You get the drift.
Now to the actual dice needed. Standard gaming dice sets have seven dice: one with four sides (called a “d4”), one with six sides (“d6”), one with eight sides (d8), one with twelve sides (d12), one with twenty sides (d20) and two ten sided dice. One of them is numbered 0 to 9 and is called a d10 and the other is numbered 00 to 90. As a pair these ten sided dice are called percentile dice (d%) and can generate numbers 1 to 100.
Most of the time you’ll be rolling six sided and twenty sided dice. Especially the twelve sided dice will be used only very occasionally. I really wonder if every single person in a gaming group needs to get their own set of dice, but that’s what folks do anyway.
As a player you really could get by with just a d6, a d8 and a d20. Pick nice matching colors! As I said, you’ll mostly use the d6 and the d20 anyway, and you can simulate all of the other dice with those three basic dice, should the need arise.
As a game master you’ll need more dice, but not really more complete sets of dice. Here’s my suggestion:
It makes sense to match the extra d6, d8 and d20 for colors to get multiple triads of the same color. Wait, maybe that sounds a bit confusing. What I mean is for example: one orange set of d6, d8 and d20, one green set of d6, d8 and d20 and so on. There you go. You can hand out these triads to new players for instance, see above. And they will be your “monster dice”. Rolling a bunch of monster attacks with a fist full of dice makes a lovely clatter and speeds things up. And the color coding makes it easy to see what’s what.
If you ever feel the urge to buy more dice, get more of these d6/d8/d20 triads. Don’t buy anymore d4s, d12s or d%s, they’ll only weigh down your dice bag.
In terms of word count this has gone overboard a long time ago, so let me just add a few more thoughts about the paper to write on:
As a player get yourself a nice A5 notebook with dot grid paper. That’s where you’ll keep your character information and maps and notes about the games you play. Most rules sets come with fancy character sheets, but don’t worry about those, just open a two page spread for each character in your notebook. Stats go on the left, equipment, valuables and various notes go on the right. You will have more than one character pretty soon anyway. Probably even your private entourage of characters. Hopefully they’ll see many places and will move around a lot of stuff. That’s why a notebook is most useful. Save a couple of pages in the front for a table of contents.
If you want to run games, prepare a ring binder with sheet protectors. They’re for your maps, map keys and to keep permanent notes. Have a stack of lined and square gridded paper ready to begin with. As the game progresses, you’ll probably get some hex grid paper as well. Just in case you’ll be running more than one game, have one ring binder for each campaign. This is the way!
I’ll be happy to run a game for you, next time you’re around.
Safe travels! And Hugs!
Please send any comments or questions to wandererbill@betola.de or @wandererbill@tabletop.social
Copyright: ~lkh • Sa 10. Jan 10:37:26 CET 2026 • License: CC BY-NC 4.0 • Hosted by: SDF-EU Public Access UNIX System - https://sdf-eu.org