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Dungeons & Dragons Buyer's Guide
Have you watched the movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and want to try the real game? Have you played D&D many years ago and don’t know where to start with the current 5th edition? This buyer's guide is for you.
Starter Sets
If you have never played a pen-and-paper roleplaying game before or if your budget is limited, there are two starter sets to choose from:
- Dungeons & Dragons: Essential Kit (2019)
- Dungeons & Dragons: Starter Set - Dragons of Stormwreck Isle (2022)
Both sets contain dice, simplified rules, an adventure, and everything you need to start playing D&D with one to five other friends. The adventure found inside is different in each box so some game masters end up buying both.
Core Rulebooks
If you are serious about playing D&D, you can skip the starter sets and purchase the three core rulebooks:
- The Dungeon & Dragons: Player’s Handbook contains the rules to create heroes. Choose your race, class, background, equipment, special abilities, and spells. The most important game rules like ability checks, combat, rest, and magic are also covered.
- The Dungeons & Dragons: Dungeon Master’s Guide is intended for the game master only. It is full of advices on how to run a campaign (a series of adventures) and has rules about magic items, non-player characters, diseases, environments and all.
- The Dungeons & Dragons: Monster Manual is the ultimate collection of baddies to challenge the heroes. You will find the statistics of goblins, doppelgangers, beholders, and other strange creatures ordered from A to Z.
These three books are also available as a nice bundle that includes a game master's screen - a tool that displays useful shortcuts and blocks sneaky players from looking inside your adventure book.
Adventures
If you have the core rulebooks, you can use your imagination to create an adventure. That said, writing your own storyline, drawing your own maps, creating treasures, monsters, and traps can be very time consuming. If you don’t have the leisure to do so, buying a ready-made adventure written by professionals is the way to go.
Be careful and remember to check the level required to play an adventure! Some are meant for experienced heroes only. For example, Dungeons & Dragons: Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is designed for adventurers of level 1 to 5 while Dungeons & Dragons: Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage is for heroes of level 5 to 20.
Sourcebooks
Need more monsters? More magic items? More information about the geography and politic of the D&D universe? That’s what sourcebooks are for. They contain a goldmine of information but generally don’t include any story for the heroes to play.
Accessories
Accessories such as tiles for tactical combat and screens with useful tables are not essential, but they make your life easier as a Dungeon Master.
Don’t forget that you will also need a few polyhedral dice sets! D&D uses the traditional six-sided dice, but also dice of various shapes like the twenty-sided dice. Having one set per player is strongly recommended.
Miniatures
Everybody likes a few combat scenes to spice things up and nothing beats miniatures to bring the action to life! Wizkids Games offer three product lines for D&D miniatures:
- Nolzur's Marvelous Miniatures are affordable and ready to paint minis.
- Icons of the Realms are pre-painted miniatures. They often come in boosters with an element of randomness.
- Frameworks are highly detailed miniatures that also come with optional parts but they require assembly and are unpainted.
Have any questions? Feel free to contact us!
Last updated: August 2023.
