Dungeons & Dragons - Starter guide

What is Dungeons & Dragons?

Dungeons & Dragons needs little introduction. It is the game that put tabletop roleplaying on the map in 1974 and still shapes the hobby half a century later. One person takes the role of Dungeon Master and describes a world; everyone else plays a character living in it. Dice settle the moments where the outcome is genuinely in doubt. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson built the first version at a kitchen-table scale, and it grew into the thing everyone else is measured against. How that happened is a story we tell in From army to hero.

The version on the shelf today is the 2024 revision of fifth edition, published by Wizards of the Coast. For years it had no settled name - One D&D, D&D 2024, or simply 5e - until Wizards gave in to the shorthand the community had been using all along and started calling it 5.5e in early 2026. The name fits: this is not a new edition but a careful rebuild of the 2014 rules, with ten years of player feedback behind it. Books from the older version still work at the table with minor adjustments.

The setting is yours to choose. D&D is a system, not a world. You can adventure in the Forgotten Realms, which got two dedicated books of its own in late 2025, take your table to Eberron or Ravenloft, or build your own continent from scratch. The tone stretches from bright heroic fantasy to genuine horror, depending entirely on the people at your table.

How does the system work?

D&D runs on a d20. When your character tries something uncertain - swinging at an ogre, picking a lock, talking a guard out of a bad decision - you roll a twenty-sided die, add an ability modifier and often a proficiency bonus, and compare the total to a difficulty class set by the Dungeon Master. Roll high enough and you succeed. That one die has become the symbol of the whole hobby, and it has an odd history of its own: see From classroom to dungeon.

Characters rest on six ability scores: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. Combat runs in initiative order with a tidy action economy of one action, one bonus action and one reaction per turn, and hit points as your buffer against a bad day.

Three changes stand out from the 2014 rules. Ability score increases now come from your background rather than your species, so nothing stops you from playing the halfling barbarian you had in mind. Every weapon carries a mastery property, and martial classes gain Weapon Mastery, which finally gives fighters something to think about in round three of a fight. And every class picks its subclass at level three, which makes the first sessions of a campaign noticeably simpler to teach.

The 2024 Player's Handbook holds 12 classes with 48 subclasses between them, 10 species, 75 feats, 16 backgrounds and just under 400 spells. It is a big book, but it is organised better than its predecessor.

What do you need to start?

As a player you need the 2024 Player's Handbook, a set of polyhedral dice, and a character sheet. That is the whole list.

The Dungeon Master needs the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, which is a far more practical book than the 2014 version and actually teaches you how to run a table. The Monster Manual followed in February 2025 and completes the core three, though you can happily run your first few sessions without it. Whoever runs the game is stepping into a role with a history of its own, told in From referee to game master.

You can also try before you buy. The free rules on D&D Beyond cover all 12 classes and more than 300 spells, enough to run a real campaign at no cost. Worth knowing what you give up: one subclass per class instead of four, four species instead of ten, and a fraction of the monsters and magic items. It is a fair sample rather than the full game.

For a group with nobody experienced in it, the Heroes of the Borderlands starter set is the softest landing. One box, built for the 2024 rules, with a play guide, three adventure booklets, pre-made characters on boards, maps, tokens and dice. It runs characters from level 1 to 3, which is a fistful of evenings.

Who is this game for?

D&D 5.5e is one of the most approachable versions of the game ever printed. The 2024 Player's Handbook explains how to play before it explains how to build a character, a small reorganisation that makes a real difference if you have never done this before. If you are curious about tabletop roleplaying and have no strong opinions yet, this is still the most sensible place to start, and the largest pool of people to find a group in.

Players coming from the 2014 edition will feel at home within one session. The core is unchanged: class fantasy, shared storytelling, flexible encounters. It is simply tighter, more consistent and kinder to martial characters.

It is a poor fit if you want radically light rules or a system that gets out of the way of the story. D&D asks for bookkeeping: spell slots, hit points, character sheets with a lot on them. It also leans hard into fantasy adventuring, and bending it toward other genres takes work that other games do for you out of the box. If that describes you, our guide on how to choose your first tabletop RPG is a better starting point than the Player's Handbook.

How does it compare to other systems?

Compared to Shadowdark, D&D is the richer and slower game. Shadowdark keeps the familiar d20 core but strips it back to fast, deadly dungeon crawling with a real-time torch timer. Character creation takes ten minutes there and an evening here.

Compared to Dragonbane, D&D is more heroic. Dragonbane is lighter, quicker to teach, and its characters are considerably easier to kill, which changes how a table behaves.

If it is the world rather than the system you are after, The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying runs on the same 5e rules in Middle-earth, so everything you learn here carries straight over.

Against older editions and the OSR games that descend from them, 5.5e is forgiving. Characters are resilient, death is rarely a surprise, and the system supports cinematic play rather than careful resource management. Why a whole movement went back to that older style is the subject of From progress to the past. And Pathfinder 2e, the other big d20 game, trades D&D's accessibility for far more granular character building.

The newest fantasy game to be measured against this one gets a piece of its own: Daggerheart vs Dungeons & Dragons 5e.

Where do you start?

Start with the Player's Handbook and read the opening chapter on how the game is played before you touch character creation. Then build one character from scratch, even if you never play it. Nothing teaches the rules like seeing the pieces connect.

For a first session, keep the scope small: one clear goal, one location, three or four scenes. If nobody at the table has run a game before, let Heroes of the Borderlands do the work; the adventure structure and the monsters are already there.

Playing in Dutch is entirely possible too. Our Dutch-language adventures are written for 5e and drop straight into a campaign, which helps enormously if your table includes younger players or people who would rather not read rules in English.

Not sure yet whether you have everything? What you actually need to start playing is the short, reassuring answer.

Recommended products at Netherbook

The 2024 Player's Handbook is the natural starting point and the one book every player wants. The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide and the Monster Manual complete the core set for whoever runs the table. For a group starting from nothing, Heroes of the Borderlands puts a full first campaign in one box.

Beyond the core books, our Dungeons & Dragons collection holds the things that make a table yours: class dice sets in collector's tins for the player who wants their own set, and Morrovion's Guide to Gambling, our own 5e sourcebook with 40 playable dice and tavern games, new backgrounds and rules for building a casino your players will lose money in.

If you want a familiar system in an unfamiliar world, the 5e-compatible settings Neverland, OZ and Wonderland take the rules you already know somewhere darker. And when you are ready for something with a different heartbeat entirely, the starter guides are there for the rest of the shelf.