Everything You Always Wanted to Know About D&D but Were Afraid to Ask - Part Two

Welcome, adventurers, to another thrilling episode of Legends, loot and Lore, the podcast that takes you on an unforgettable journey through the realms of Dungeons and Dragons. I'm your host, andrew, along with Joe, and we are absolutely delighted to have you join us today for part two of our special series Everything You Always Wanted to Know About D&D, but we're afraid to ask. So grab your favorite spellbook, sharpen your blades and get ready to embark on a knowledge-filled adventure with us as we delve into the heart and soul of D&D. Join us as we embark on an epic quest together. Let's roll initiative and dive headfirst into part two of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About D&D, but we're afraid to ask. This will bring out my next question, joe, and you can talk about this one, because we've been doing this since the beginning Can I play D&D online?

Yes, yes, you can actually. So the crazy thing about this is obviously 2020, march 2020, the pandemic came in. Everybody was home for two weeks. Nobody could get together and play in person and the world shut down.

I was home for longer than two weeks.

Okay, okay, okay, it started out as two weeks, give me a break. I'm building suspense and a narrative here. I'm a DM, this is how I do things. So, yeah, and then, yeah, we were all home forever And, like, people were turning and the amount of resources to play online were severely taxed and they started growing in leaps and bounds. Now, the truth of the matter is, without any online resources officially created for D&D, we my group of players and I, which, of course, included Andrew from the very beginning we've been playing D&D online since March of 2019. In fact, i made a joke. This March, we celebrated our fourth year as a D&D group. It was actually kind of humorous. But from the very beginning, the people who I was playing with two of them they were a married couple, they had kids. There's no way that they were going to really figure out a way to sneak out on a Friday night or a Saturday night once a week, and everybody else has got other plans and everything. So like we were all aware of each other. Well, actually, the truth of the matter is, i was actually friends with all these people individually and then brought them all together to play D&D. So it was like, hey, give up your Saturday for the next two years to come play a game with a bunch of people that you've never met before, or I hodgepodge the system. I was using Skype at the time and I had a program I think it was called Map IQ where I would reveal it had a Fog of War feature where I'd reveal different portions of the map, and then I had a whole separate little camera. I set up Able and had the combat with figurines from a battle game that I have.

Oh my God, i forgot about the map camera.

The map camera. Yes, how many times did I drop the map camera?

Oh, my God.

Because I was trying to readjust it. I was fiddling with the light sources. I mean like literally no official resources for D&D. You're going to go out there and you're going to find something called Roll20. Roll20 is an amazing program that allows people to play D&D online. You can buy pre-made modules and stuff like that. It's great. I didn't feel like spending the money. I had known about it briefly before I had started playing, but I wasn't even going to get into the idea of telling everybody hey, you all got to spend time, spend three bucks a month or five bucks a month to do this, because all these people are brand new. They didn't know if they were interested in it. I didn't know the details, so I hodgepodge this system. You know we played on Skype. You know somewhat of a shaky video system, but it worked out. And As we went along through the years, we now use Discord and I use a program called DM helper to do the maps, to do the combat map and everything. So you, you can find a way. Yes, you can play completely online. Or our one friend lives in Virginia right now and there's no way she can show up to a weekly game. So, yeah, you know, boom, we play online. People who have kids that I know that play. You know. No, you stay home with the kid, you just play online. It's a beautiful way to do it the in-person game. Don't get me wrong. There's nothing that replaces that aspect. Playing in person Changes that dynamic of it, because when you're online, there's always the you're talking over each other because of slight delays in Conversation, because of on discord or whatever. But the in-person Comradery, where you can kind of whisper to the person next to you while it's the person on the other side of the tables turn, it makes a difference.

Yeah, that's the. That's the one thing that I have never done. I have never played well. I guess. I guess we've played in person. Get some one shot. We've done some. We've done some one shots in person, which I think is a Lot of, a lot of fun, but I've never played a full campaign in person, so it's always been, it's always been online. But I think, yeah, there are some. There are some tremendous Resources out there now. Yeah, roll 20 DM helpers. So if you're, if you're running as a, as a, as a dungeon master, there are some tremendous pieces of software out there that that can help you out as a, as a DM. You know, d&d beyond is a great tool for for building your character, managing your character, keeping track of all your stats. As far as that's concerned, d&d, or Wizards of the Coast, is now working on a Very immersive online platform for for gameplay which looks really, really interesting. It's the. I think they're in alpha at the moment from, if I recall correctly. But there's, it's crazy. I mean, there, you know, there's the argument about are they, are they trying to monetize D&D more? We're not gonna get into that whole argument, but it's a really cool platform, but it's it depends like. What's that?

There's no argument, It's just what they're doing. But the what they're doing with we're trying to monetizing it is creating a beautiful Interactive online forum to play the game.

And that that's great. Like it if that's what you're into. Awesome, i love. I love the as as they call it, the theater of the mind. You know, i love the imagination aspect of it. So Seeing everything kind of visually and and and how it plays out, you know, i think is interesting. But I just love using my Imagination to describe what happens, to describe the actions that I'm taking, describe how I, how I, defeat the enemy. All that is all. That is a lot of fun. So I, i really enjoy that aspect of it. And then I still get. I still get that in our online games as we play on on discord and things like that. But it all depends on your level of interest in in how and how involved you get with with playing it online.

And, to be honest, truly the only part of it that you truly need a map for is the battle, the combats. The rest of the game can truly be done theory, theory of the mind, because theater, theater, theater.

The mind, theory of the mind would be interesting. We can get Stephen Hawking and talk about the theory of the mind.

I was you gonna go dig them up with me, come on.

I mean, hey, i could play a necromancer in D&D.

So you dig up a future physicist, there you go. Yes, so, but no, but the idea being, though, still is that it's it's a The theater of the mind. You know, when I, when we started doing this and I started revealing maps to them as they walk through castles and stuff like that, back when they first started playing D&D, All of the content was homebrewed. Nobody had anything, so everybody had to imagine everything. Now, these maps that we have now are more convenient, they're more helpful, but really, i shouldn't be able to show you hey, there are two corridors over here, and then you can also just look at the map and say by the way, there's also those two doors back there that we didn't check. If you don't check them, that's on you. That's why you need to take notes. Hey, there were three doors there. We only went down corridor number one here. That's where the theater of the mind is more interesting, and you can miss things, but the map is a little bit of a cheat in some ways, depending on how you look in your play style. We have a more relaxed play style than some people would.

I mean, it all depends. Some people will build out on a physical table, they'll build the dungeon and walls with walls and everything. So I mean, it all depends on how you want to play. But let me ask you this question, so we've used this term homebrew a couple of times. Another question is is there a set storyline or campaign to follow, or can people create their own adventures? I think we've already answered this somewhat. I was talking about DMs Guild, which is a tremendous resource for user-created content. So there's two options. Wizards of the Coast makes a ton of source books, adventure books for you to do all sorts of pre-built adventures. They give you the monsters that you encounter. They walk you through from beginning to end the whole adventure. That way, there is a lot of user-generated content on websites and that's available out there that you can download. You can create your own adventure. There are guidebooks and source books on all the different monsters that are available in D&D that you can use to put in your own adventures and create your own monsters. There are people that just specifically create monsters for D&D. So there's all sorts of ways for you to I'll say it again choose your own adventure. Do you want to use a traditional source book and use that, or do you want to create your own and use your own imagination and go through it that way. So, joe, mostly we've done mostly the source books from Wizards of the Coast, but even those can be modified. It's not written in stone, it's written on paper. It's not written in stone. So what happens? So, for example, if we've had a larger party, or maybe the one night that we're playing, somebody in the party can't make it that night. So instead of encountering four orcs, maybe you encounter three or two. You can modify the encounters and things like that to match the ability level of the party. So if you have a bigger party, dm can throw in more enemies or things like that. So there's, i think there's all sorts of ways to go about what source material you use. You can use the Wizards of the Coast source material. You can modify that source material. You can find other source material out on the internet or you could create your own. So another question is can I play as anything I want? What are the limitations to a character? And I think the options are almost limitless as to what type of character you can play. There are numerous races and what they're now referring to as species, so different races are species that you can play. There's a range of classes that you can choose from backgrounds you can choose from. You can write your own backstory. So there's a lot of flexibility to the character. But what I would highly recommend is, when you are developing your character, talk with your DM, because the story that the DM is going to run you through and who else is going to be in the party will all come into play on how you develop your character. You don't necessarily want five half-orc barbarians. You could just storm through and just crush everything, but it's not necessarily the best as far as roleplay is concerned. So you want to really work on creating a well-rounded party. For me, some of the things I've enjoyed doing are I've created I keep talking about my Tabaxi character. I forgot when we were talking last time. I created the Harragon the rabbit, who was a magician's rabbit who got struck by lightning and received all the magician's powers. So I mean there's, i played regular wizards. I'm playing a half-vampire at the moment. So as you add on all these source books and things like that, you get access to a lot more races and things like that. You can, even through D&D Beyond, you can purchase a single race. So if there's something that you want to play, you can purchase those items individually, so you don't have to purchase a whole source book for $20, $30. You can, for like two bucks, you can buy a race and add that into your character sheet. So there's a lot of. The options are almost limitless. But you also want to keep in mind who else is going to be in the party, what kind of story you're going to be telling. Because we played with Joe, we played Rime of the Frostmaiden, which takes place basically in an ice-covered world, and a lot of the enemies that you are facing have resistance to cold damage. So if you've got a wizard and all your spells do cold damage, you're going to have a really hard time defeating those enemies. So you really want to be aware of what storyline you're playing and who else is going to be in the party when you are, when you're crafting your character Joe. What are your feelings on character creation?

Yeah, so I think you nailed it all down pretty well. There really is limitless options to stick within the bounds of the official D&D. You know, like you said, it's all on D&D. Beyond, you can buy specific races and little penny packets. But even you know, with consulting your DM, always anything outside the normal bounds consult with your DM. There are plenty of homebrew classes and races out there that you can go and look up online. People will create their own adventures and they'll sell their adventures and they'll create races and classes that you can use for playing as characters. So, throughout this whole process and everything that you do, you really need to consider that is that whatever you decide, consult with your DM. But it really is limited by whatever is out there, official or unofficial. One of the things that you tend to wanna do when creating a party is you wanna have it's a typical motif. I wanna have your fighter, so you got your main attack and your meat shield. You wanna rogue, in case you need to break into something. You wanna cleric, so you can heal yourself or heal the party or something like that. And you wanna ranged option, magical option, so you get a wizard or a sorcerer or something like that And that's your typical build around a character. But I've always liked the idea that you don't go that way. DMs, depending on what they want for their adventure, they will be like hey, we already have a rogue, try to make something else. Or they might be like we have a rogue, do you mind playing two rogues in the same party? Or two clerics in the same party. There are trade-offs to every race into every class and we'll get into that when we get further into the races in the classes. But there are all these things. it's all up to the DM. But I like it when you end up with two of the same class in the fight in the party, because it's kinda like well, how do they act differently from each other? And then as a DM, you can kinda play off themselves, each other from their different personalities and contrasts, while they're basically the same type of character. And it really is up to you, limited by your DM. If your DM is telling a story that DM's like hey, i'm gonna run a new adventure, but he doesn't tell you anything about the background. Oh, maybe he should have told you that it was a land only of dwarves. so you need to make sure your character is a dwarf, whatever it is, run everything past your DM. Don't spend the time creating the whole character and then going to your DM and say, here's my character, is this okay? Start off and be like, hey, here's my idea and he'll let you know if he or she will let you know if you need to exclude or include any aspects specifically for his campaign.

That's a great point. So let me ask you this question because after you've created your character, you've gotten through all the battles. I think another big question that comes up for people is what happens if my character dies? What do I do? Am I out of the adventure, or can we hire a necromancer and raise my character from the dead? What happens? So, what happens if your character dies in battle?

When your character dies. There are two levels of death, really. Indeed, well, i take that back. There are three levels of death in D&D. The first level of death is when you fall in combat. You technically fall unconscious. Everybody's like, oh, i'm down or I'm dead.

It's actually unconscious. So that's when you run out of hit points. When you run out of hit points, you fall unconscious.

Right, and that's when you enter a time where you need to make saving throws. Saving throws, you roll the D20. You roll an 11 or higher, you're okay. A 10 or higher you're okay. You roll a one to nine? you're not okay. You need three rolls. Doesn't have to be all in a row, but you need three rolls of a 10 to a 20 in order to be safe. If you roll three, one to nines, your character actually dies.

Well, not exactly.

Well, yeah, there's the difference between the 20, I'm gonna get to that.

Okay, i was gonna say yeah, i mean.

No, no, if you roll a 10 to a 20 three times in a row, your character is unconscious but stable, meaning you're not bleeding out. You roll the one to the nine, you're actually bleeding out. Now, the exception to this rule is the 21. The one counts as two fails And the 20 actually lets you stand back up with one hit point, the idea of the 20 being that you kind of were able to gather yourself up and stand back up and go back at that combat one more time. The idea of the natural one is like yeah, you got a critical wound inside you, you're bleeding out and your blood's pumping out to the point that you might need to be have somebody stabilize you before you die, which somebody can do. You can stabilize a player who's down, but you can also heal a player who's down. We'll get into the details of that later on.

And you can heal a player who's down and they can stand back up. Yeah, as I said, that's why you want a cleric in the party or someone with a healing spell or a potion of healing on them that can help you out.

It's always interesting when there's no cleric in the party or the cleric's already down and everybody's like is everybody got a potion? Is anybody got a? I have this weird healing spell, do it?

Do something.

So you can also do a medicine check in somebody, something we'll get through and you can stabilize them, but anyway. So that's the first level of death. The second level of death is you fail. Your saving throws. Your character is dead. Now in the official rules of D&D, there are several ways to resurrect a person who is dead. Specifically, there are several spells that you can cast. One of them is like if you do this within a first minute after a character dies, they're resurrected and they're fine. I believe that one's called Revivify. The other ones have various time limits that are on them, but basically anything after the person's been dead for a week, that's it, you're done. That's when you've reached the third level of death, which is you're dead, you're gone. There's nothing you can do. The only exception too because there's always an exception is the wish spell. The wish spell is a very interesting spell that literally allows you to do anything in the game. It is super powerful. So the DMs are very rare to ever give them out, but it is a possibility. Most adventures don't need to get to that level of a game. But let's say you've reached the point where your character is completely dead. Well, now what Does that mean you have to stop playing in the game? Usually, no, usually that's the time that you go and talk to your DM and say okay, when's the next logical point? the characters will interact with a new group of people, that I could have a new character come in, and the answer to that question usually is anytime. Very frequently, your party is going to be moving through towns and villages and you could happen to pick somebody up on the random point right then and there Or so, talking about 10 towns, the Rime of the Frost Maiden. That adventure had been going on quite a bit And you had already switched out your primary character for the Harrogen, and Kat was getting ready to switch out her character for a. She was going to be a Drow, not a Drow, she was going to be a Dorgar, a Death Cleric, and I was going to have it that her primary character, which was a, a Furbulk Cleric, was going to return to the nature because she was getting tired of all this fighting And you guys were going to rescue her from the Dorgar Fortress that you were at and she was going to join the party. I had twisted the storyline this is something Andrew had talked about before where you don't need to maintain the actual storyline of the pre-written adventures. You can always modify it to however you want, and I was going to modify the storyline to include a subtext where she was convinced that somebody was controlling her king and the king, who was being controlled, threw her into the dungeon and you guys were going to rescue her and she was going to help you only because it was truly going to be saving the kingdom. But the point is there are numerous ways that your DM can find to re-institute you as a player, as a new character, into the game, and there's even going to be some circumstances where there are times that the characters get help from NPCs in combat. Maybe the DM will let you take over an NPC, given the circumstances. But just because your player dies and goes through all three levels of death doesn't mean you have to stop playing in that game And you can watch different Dungeons and Dragons playthroughs and you will see that people will get quite emotional Overlosing their characters because you spend so much time with them and playing with them, and then you realize I'm about to lose this character in my story, me, my character, and and It's it's it's an emotional moment.

It's, certainly, it certainly can be. I And it's funny even even not necessarily when a character dies, but When, when we, when we start playing a new adventure and create new characters and things like that I always, i always tend to miss those, those older, older characters, because I, i really have quite, a quite a fondness for them, after playing them for For months and sometimes, well, you know, close to close to a year, it's you, it, it's it's it kind of becomes part of you.

Part of your own family, if you will absolutely we were playing an adventure with our friend Chris. My friend Chris was DMing us and We had defeated the bad guy, a dragon, but there was a. Somebody had to do something to, to sacrifice themselves, to be some kind of hole. I forget the exact Instance, but the whole point was somebody had to be sacrificed in order to seal this evil away. And I had my character who was a little bit of a brash, half-giant wizard step in and be like I'll do it. And It was really weird because after I did it I was like, yeah, he's dead. Mm-hmm and he's not coming back.

Nope, the characters become, become part of you. Yeah, all right, let's. Well, let's wrap up today's episode with with another one of the most asked questions, and Again I hear this, i hear this all the time from people when, when I, when I talk about dungeons and dragons What's the object? What is the object of D&D? Do you, do you win? Like, what is what? What is the? you know, how do you, how do you finish the game? and You know? for? for me, i think the answer is there. There's no, you know with, with the kind of pre-built stories that, yes, there is a storyline, so you go from start to end, but I don't think there ever is. The object is never to to win the game. Yes, yes, you can finish the adventure, you can defeat the, the big, bad, evil guy, but the, the journey for me is, is the, the most enjoyable part. It's the, it's the character development, it's the, the interaction with your other players, it's it's the, the fun, the adventure, the, the, the role-playing, all of these things are really what makes D&D a lot of fun, because some of these, some of these games can, can go on for for years, for, for months, for years, you know, depending on if it's a homebrew or or what. You know that there's there's almost sometimes no end to To particular campaigns. So it's really and we've been playing for what roughly four years now different campaigns and things like that and You know it's never about. You know there's always another adventure to to join, so it's never really about finishing It's. It's always about the, the journey that you take for your character and and what you learn about your character, what you learn about yourself Throughout the, throughout the journey. That, i think, is the the most important part of D&D. You know, building friendships, creating memories that are going to to last a lifetime That's that's really the best parts of of D&D for me. But whatever happens, if your, your character, lives or dies or Or what happens in the end doesn't, you know, is not, not, i would say, is irrelevant, but it is not the main Focus for me. It's really about the, the journey that you take both for your character and yourself. At least, that's how, how I see it, joe. How would you, how would you say? what is it? I mean theoretically, yes, you can, you can win a campaign, but What?

what would you, what would you say is What's that? yeah. So you took that a little farther than I was I was actually thinking of on my response. So my initial response was why do you read a book? Most people tell you to read a book together to learn to have the story, and that's absolutely correct. But you know, you read a book to get to the end of the book and and now you know the whole story And it's like, but you know how many times if you read a book or a series of books and said, damn, that was so good, i wish I could forget it and go back and read it again. And I was going to agree with you on that fact that it's it's not so much The completion of the story, which is always amazing, it's always great, it's always nice, but it's, it's that adventure. And it's like they say in life you know, getting there is half the fun. Well, you know what playing the game is more than half the fun than then then winning the game is. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's about that adventure. And then, yeah, to take a step out from the actual playing of the game and Saying what is the point of playing D&D? You look at it and you say it's like Why do you sit down and play Monopoly? Why do you sit down and play chess or Scrabble or any other of a thousand and one different board games that are out there, or video games that are out there that you play Online with your friends, and stuff at that? What? what's the point of any of this? our whole lives as human beings, that we some people, not everybody, but I would say a majority of the human race Are social beings. We, we thrive on social interaction. Some like less social interaction, some like greater amounts of social interaction, but for the vast majority of us, we all like social interaction. And this is another Vehicle to make that social interaction, where you can get together with people of like-minded interest and like-minded Thought processes and say, let's go do something crazy together. But you don't actually have to do something crazy. You know, like You hear about these people like, hey, we're all gonna go skydiving together. You know that's a really cool idea, y'all have fun. I ain't getting up, no plane and worrying about no parachute, but here I can talk about, hey, let's go raid this or camp together and we'll all have fun doing that, and, and you know, there's no risk of death or injury. I think that's what it's about. We're social people, we like to interact with people in general and and we don't want to have our lives Stagnant in this. You know, yeah, i didn't do anything else today. I want to do something I want to do with friends, and D&D is another vehicle for that.

I'm gonna disagree with you on one point and and you said it's a group just one. That's a rare for this time When, when you said it's a group of like-minded people, because I, i Don't think. I don't think that's the case. Because you think, even even if you as as people, as Players, are maybe like-minded, your, your characters, are all coming to the adventure for different reasons. Some, some may, some may be Motivated by by the deity that they, that they follow. You know, they've got some noble cause that they're trying to To to to pursue. Maybe some are after the money, maybe some are after there's a promise of a reward, so maybe they're after a reward, maybe they're running from something. So there there's a whole bunch of reasons why, why this party may be coming together for this, for this single cause, for the single adventure. So I mean, think about, like Lord of the Rings, you know, everybody's got their own kind of motivations for, for why they're doing this and what and why they're coming together. So So, while I don't necessarily think you have to be like-minded to To come together for this adventure and and have the the journey together, Yeah, i was thinking more about the, the actual players.

You're absolutely right. For the player characters There is no like-mindedness required and in fact, if you watch the D&D movie, if you watch just about any D&D movie, no matter how you know ridiculous it is, you'll find out that every single character's motivation is different, and that's a really great point. As much as we can all get along as players, the characters, they don't have to get along, and You know that's a whole nother thing We can talk about a character development, about creating little bits and pieces of Not animosity but the testiness between the characters, just to make it a different dynamic.

Absolutely we can. We can definitely talk about that as far as character creation is concerned, but but again, it's there. You don't have to. There is no What you're talking. We've talked a lot about us playing chess. You know that the objective of chess is to win the game. You know here, there, there's there, there's multiple objectives, so it's whatever you want to bring to it. And and again, have fun along the journey. And with that we come to the end of another captivating episode of legends, loot and lore. We hope you've enjoyed delving into the depths of Dungeons and Dragons with us today in our exploration of everything You always wanted to know about D&D. But we're afraid to ask. Remember, the world of D&D is vast and ever-evolving. Keep exploring, keep creating and, most importantly, keep rolling those dice. We want to extend a heartfelt thanks to our amazing listeners. Your support, questions and stories truly inspire us. If you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe to Legends, loot and Lore on your favorite podcast platform And be sure to leave us a review. Your feedback means the world to us. Stay connected with us on social media, where we continue the conversation, share additional resources and even an interesting story. Until next time, fellow adventurers, keep chasing legends, seeking loot and reveling in the boundless wonders of lore. May your dice rolls be ever in your favor.