Ditto!

I'm waiting for @darkliquid to chime in on this one...

In the meantime, I'm no expert by any means, but D&D is founded in printed gamebooks and is the basis for pen 'n' paper roleplaying. The gamebooks lay down character classes, how to determine stats, and the adventures in general. Dice are used to calculate "rolls" for special skills, attacks, and things of that sort.

Basically, imagine any computer-based RPG (roleplaying game) without the computer to do the work for you. The gamebook describes the story, setting, characters and situation, as well as the rules of how things should play out, and the dice and human interaction complete the game.

Wikipedia has a good write-up here, until someone with more experience than my meager bit of play with a friend when I was 12 adds their assessment/thoughts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons

Cheers,
-nick

Nick's link to the wikipedia entry is good for all the basic information you'll need. Personally, I like to think of roleplaying games such as DnD as cooperative storytelling. Everybody in the group has their character, one person known as the DM (or GM) sets the situation and story, and the group decides how to work their way through it. RPG.net is a website devoted to roleplaying games, so you might have a look around there if you're curious about the hobby in general.

I'll also add this - don't think DnD is the only roleplaying system out there. It's got the advantage of being well known, but there are so many others... HARP, Burning Wheel, FATE, Dark Heresy, GURPS, World of Darkness... the list goes on. If you don't like one system, there's always another to try. :)

If you have any specific questions or need clarification, feel free to ask, I'm sure there are any number of roleplayers around here who can answer those questions.

Right, let me begin.

Dungeons & Dragons is a table-top roleplaying game. Tabletop roleplaying games are typically games played collaboratively where the participants work together to play out a story involving characters the participants have created.

Tabletop roleplaying games are massively varied in their target audiences, their scope, their theme and their mechanical and philosophical design. While they all contain elements of roleplaying, naturally, some games leave the management and support of roleplaying mostly in the players hands and instead provide support rules for resolving other kinds of player-interaction. Dungeons and Dragons is one of these kinds of roleplaying games.

Dungeons and Dragons, especially the latest 4th edition, is mechanically a tactical combat simulator. Virtually everything in the system, is designed to help with modelling and resolving turn-by-turn combat, choosing how you want to perform that combat, and dealing with various situations of environment that effect combat. Character advancement is also tied very closely to combat. This isn't to say roleplaying isn't supported by Dungeons and Dragons but rather the system gets out of your way and lets the people resolve those things themselves and instead mostly relegates itself to handling the complex matters of tactical combat. Dungeons and Dragons also has strong thematic roots in fantasy settings and so it is geared very strongly to fantasy settings, though like most roleplaying games, you can 'roll your own' way of doing things and cherry pick the parts of the system you like.

As a newcomer to D&D, you'll most likely enjoy it if:

* you want to play out the role of a character in a fantasy world
* like the idea of a rich, complex but easy to use system for modelling combat
* like to play act social and other non-combat situations without the game telling you want you can and can't achieve
* you enjoy working as a team
* you enjoy collaborative story telling

Now, D&D is a tabletop roleplay game because primarily you would play it with a group of people around a table. When I say "play act" or "roleplay" a scenario, I'm not talking about getting up and actually acting but rather speaking in your characters voice (actually changing your voice is optional), speaking for your character, describing what they say, think and how they react to things.

Obviously telling a story together can be done without a system at all, after all we all write collaborative fiction on protagonize and some of us participate in protagonize roleplays where we write out the actions and reactions of a specific character. D&D as a game takes this collaborative roleplaying aspect and adds in a rich set of mechanical rules for allowing characters to arbitrate various scenarios rather than just 'making it so'. While without a system, you could just say 'I punch this person in the face and they fall to the ground; and, if nobody disagreed, that would be that, D&D adds a layer of rules to determine several things, such as:

* who can react quicker (would the person being punched spot be able to react to it before your fist connected)
* surprising targets (the target can't react to your punch, since they didn't know it was coming)
* hitting targets (you may throw a punch, but it might not connect as your aim may fail)
* damaging targets (how much damage your punch makes)
* coping with damage (would the damage from a single punch be enough to knock out someone this strong/tough/etc?)
* lucky hits (did you manage to hit them in such a way you did extra damage, like in the eye or nose)
* absorbing damage (maybe this person is particularly tough or wearing a helmet, helping to either deflect the blow or reduce the force of it's impact)
* the effect of environmental factors (are you moving whilst doing this, are you stood on an unstable surface and how does this effect your accuracy. Is the target behind cover and partially obscured?)
* movement, combat participants are placed on a grid and can move and attack a certain number of grid squares as determined by their statistics

Dungeons and Dragons does this by having the players do a number of things:

* create character sheets that assign numerical values to various attributes (i.e. Strength might be 18, making you far stronger than the human average value of 10). Rules are provided for helping with this.
* rolling dice to introduce an element of chance into any actions players attempt. For example, because a monster you are trying to hit with your sword is quite tough you need a score greater than 20 to be able to even hit it at all. When attempting to hit it, you would roll a twenty-sided die and add the value to the appropriate value for what you were doing and if the total exceeded the target (20) the you would succeed.
* assigns statistics and attribute scores to all monsters and creatures.
* assigns statistics and attributes to all kinds of armour and weaponry
* assigns statistics and attributes to all magical effects

By now, you must be thinking there is an awful lot of mathematics involved, what with all these statistics and comparisons.

You would be right. However, for the most part, the player is shielded from doing and heavy maths beyond simple addition and subtraction. D&D also comes with a number of lookup tables to speed up reference to different calculations.

Another important concept D&D uses is the idea of a GM or Game Master. The Game Master takes on the role of the entire world and everything in it except for the characters of the other players. The GM gets to arbitrate and overrule any rule in the game and guides the players down plots or in more sandbox games, merely provides the reactions to the characters actions. GMing might seem like a boring or hard task, but it really isn't. While yes, you have more responsibility (essentially being the referee for the game and the main driving force of any plots) you also get more control and the reward of presenting challenges to the other players for them to overcome. As GM you are the God of the game.

Now, it would be impossible to accurately convey how the system works mechanically without basically writing out the whole rulebook, so instead I'll give a short scenario of how a game might be played. I can't really demonstrate combat with a grid without doing a whole bunch of pictures which will take forever.


Robert is the GM.
Susan is Ellandra, a male half-elf barbarian and lives to kill monsters and take their stuff. She is interested primarily in combat.
Jason is Tali Worth, a male halfling wizard. He enjoys the roleplaying aspect of things far more and has an elaborate backstory and personality profile written up for the character he is playing
Rachelle is Kayla Stoneblood, a female dwarven druid. She has an interest in both combat and roleplaying.
Simon is Rhianna Black, a female human cleric. He has primarily an interest in combat, but also enjoys the roleplaying aspects.

Scenario - The party are looking for a criminal in a tavern, in search of some information about a supposed plot to overthrow the king

Robert: As you step into the tavern, the noise and stench hits you like a brick wall. The Fallen Foe Inn is not the most upmarket of establishments in the city and you can tell, from the grimy look of the patrons to the raucous behaviour of the bar flies, this is a rough pub. The place is packed and while nobody seems interested in your entrance, you do spot the eager glances of cutpurses and thieves eyeing your adventuring equipment greedily from amongst the crowd. None of you can see Nobby, the goblin thief from the entrance.

Susan: I stride right in and grab the first cutpurse I see eyeing us up.

Jason: "Ellandra, my good colleague, perhaps we might take a more diplomatic approach?"

Simon: "Maybe I can use my feminine charms to get some info."

Jason: "In a den of rapists and murderers my dear, I would not recommend it. And really Rhianna, have you no sense of decorum? That's your solution to everything."

Simon: "Shove it up your robe, Tali. You've got your books, I've got my looks." Rhianna tosses her hair back, "because you're worth it"-style.

Rachelle: "Bah. Whatever gets us away from this place sooner the better. There is barely a single tree in this city."

Robert: Too late! Susan, roll initiative.

Susan rolls a 20-sided dice, or "d20" and gets a 12. Her initiative stat is 4.

Susan: I got 16.

Robert makes up a stat for the goblin cutpurse she's spotted on the fly of 2 and rolls a dice, getting an 8.

Robert: Okay, you're going first. What do you do?

Susan: I grab him.

Robert: Okay, so we'll call that a grapple. You need to beat his strength.

The rules for grappling state an opposed strength check, so Susan rolls a d20 + her strength modifier (with her strength of 18, the modifier is 4) and Robert rolls a d20 + 1 for the goblin. He gets a total of 10.

Susan: Sweet! Natural 20!

Robert: Okay, you got him. "Lemme go you pointy eared ass!" The goblin yelps.

Susan: "Where's Nobby?"

Robert: "I dunno no stinking Nobby!"

Jason: "Ellandra my good fellow, perhaps a change of tact is required." I cast Charm Person.

Robert rolls to see if the goblin resists the spell, but rolls below 10.

Robert:The goblin's face suddenly changes from a picture of angry struggle to a congenial smile. "Oh, that Nobby. Sure, friend, I know where he his. He's in the basement. That's the secret thieves hideout!". At least a few other patrons hear this exclamation and the bar goes quiet as everyone turns to look at you.

Simon: Aww, crap.

Susan: It's clobberin' time!

Rachelle: I'm casting barkskin on myself. I see a fight coming.

Jason: You don't need to be a scryer to see that coming!

There's usually more people in the area playing than you might think, but most groups in smaller places are isolated and don't talk about it too much with anyone else, in my experience.

You're probably best off asking specific questions if you want more info as it's hard to give a general overview without actually playing a game - I could even run an online-only game if you fancy, a sort of one-shot taster session where you can use pre-built characters for a quick adventure and run it on RPoL or in a forum here or on skype, irc, etc.

@Gnashville Yeah, I find that to be fairly accurate. There are only a few groups I know of around my area for example but I'm sure there are more people playing it. My group don't really make ourselves known, then again, we aren't a large 'come along and play' type group, but a group of friends meeting to play a game together.

There are gaming clubs though where gamers can meet up and form groups in a communal space but I've never been to one.

Also, as a slight diversion - I typically don't play D&D very often, though at the moment my group is playing a long-running D&D 3.0 Edition game (which has some horribly broken and easy to abuse rules in it regarding combat) where I am Hextor Francis, a 12th level Warrior-Monk.

I tend to enjoy more collaborative story-telling focused games with very light-weight mechanical rulesets over the rather heavy-handed D&D style commbat-driven roleplay systems. WHite Wolf's Storyteller system in their range of horror/fantasy World of Darkness games is excellent but I find myself enjoying FATE and related systems like that in the indie RPG Don't Rest Your Head, which is probably my favourite roleplaying game ever.

0o Essay much Dark? LOL G2laP, it doesn't seem that complicated when you're playing trust me :) For me it's more like a collaborative story you tell around a table (much like I went to the store and bout cake; I went to the store and bought cake and bread) but with some dice rolls thrown in to simulate chance.

I would LOVE to get bacck into gaming... though where I"m going to find time is always the question. I never really got a chance to play D&D for a proper compaigne... I did play Cyber Punk for about two or three years. Our GM was Awesome!

Anyway I do wish there was a way I could play. I did love Dark's essay. *grin*

I alo agree with Dru. When you're playing, It's not hard, especially when you have a GM to tell you want to add. *grin*

:} Elorithryn

@Elorithryn Well, it's nowhere near the same as real, around the table gaming, but I can run play by post games happily enough, it's just a bit slow going, is all. I'd recommend you check out RPoL which has hundreds of play by post games on the go at any one time, if PbP games are something that interest you.

Ooh, what if we did an online collab for DnD?

@darkliquid I have no idea if a PbP game would interest me as I'm not sure exactly what aspect of it I enjoy most - the creating a story with others, or the socialization that comes from gathering with other people who are a geeky as I am. I would guess that the other concern of mine is timing... I've dropped doing the MMORPGs because I don't have the time to put into them... I'm afraid a PbP might lead to the same sort of thing for me.

:} Elorithryn (the scaredy cat)

@iamkathybrown13 I don't think that would work, primarily because it requires lots of back and forth interaction between characters, and for dialogue, you'd end up with a million 1 line posts, so it's not a format that lends itself well protagonize, though a PbP game could be played in a discussion group.

@Elorithryn Well there is no need for it to be fast paced, something like a post per week would be perfectly fine as long as everyone involved is fine with that, though obviously it could take a year+ to run a single sessions-worth of game at that rate. Just making a suggestion, since you said you were looking to get back into gaming. I'd still recommend checking out RPoL.net and seeing if there are any slow-paced games you can dip into, to see if you like playing by post or not if it's something you find at all interesting.

I'm am not sure if this is allowed, but what if we did it in a topic and posted it atferwards?

@iamkathybrown13 There is actually a Role Play group that, I think, was made for the sort of PbP Dark is talking about.
As far as doing back and forths in a group and then posting a story - there is nothing against that at all. That's the sort of thing the Brainstorming and Planning Group is all about. You'd probably want to do more than just post the back and forths from the topic though.

@darkliquid I did look at RPoL but got extreemly lost and didn't find much in the AQ to help... then again I'm feeling extra flustered today, so that probably doesn't help when looking at something new. Not to mention my own personality of being scared to dip my toes into anything new, especially when it comes to social activities and I'm afraid of making the wrong move... *grin* (strangely I'm slightly less hesitant in the 'real world' versus on-line...)

:} Elorithryn

@iamkathybrown13 That kind of thing would work, sure, though I agree with Elorithyn that you wouldn't just copy and paste the topic into a post, though each player could take turns writing up the next set of topic posts into a proper page, treating the game as a sort of outline/brainstorming session/rough draft.

@Elorithryn i'm not surprised, RPoL isn't the friendliest of sites to use at first glance but once you wrap your head around it it's quite good.

@darkliquid Got any hints on how to wrap my head around it? I did notice in the FAQ they said just about the same thing on how it looks rough till youget the idea of it.

:} Elorithryn