Mastering the Game: The ABCs of D&D - Part Two

Welcome to the podcast. This episode is part two of the ABCs of D&D, where we will finish talking about the terminology of Dungeons Dragons and also start delving into the lore of where many of these adventures take place. Let's talk about now our spellcasters and what that means.

So the spellcasters are? they fall into a couple of different groupings, but the basic concept is you have different types of spells, and there are seven different types of spells. We're not going to get into them here, but there are different types of spells that generally do different types of magic. Your spellcasters are going to be using different ability scores to feed into them. So a wizard is a person who spends their time studying magic. So there, spellcasting is based upon their ability to learn and to grow, and that means their intelligence tends to be a higher stat, the warlock or the paladin. their spells come from their connection to a greater being and that is based upon their charisma. So that charisma stat will be based upon how powerful that their spells are. We'll get into that when we get into actual character creation. There are several different types of spells that you can use, and there are two general categories. One are just they're just called spells and they use spell slots. The other ones are cantrip, but, andrew, the spell slots. now tell us how they work.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to describe the spell slots. The official, if you want to talk about the official definition, it's the resources that you use to cast spells, and the higher the spell slot, the more power, right? Yeah, well, i mean, there's spell levels and spell slots, so spell slots are how often you can cast a spell. I guess you would say, right?

And then each spell level that you have has a certain number of spots, a slot, but you have to level up, you have to be a higher level character to access the higher level spells.

Right, exactly So. If you're again, if you're starting out and you have a level one character, you're going to have. You'll have cantrips, which we'll talk about, but you will have a couple level one maybe, what probably like three or four Yeah, typically about three to start off with Three to start off with as a level one character. So that means you can cast level one spells three times And then, as you level up and gain experience, you might gain some more level one spell slots, but then you will be able to cast. You'll be able to learn because your, let's say, your wizard, for example, has gained more knowledge and now he has the ability to cast higher level spells, so now he can cast second level spells. So he will have one or two second level spell slots as well that he can, that he can cast from.

And then think of it this way. Everybody's seen Fast and the Furious. When you push that nitrous oxide button on the the steering wheel, the car gets that huge boost and goes really fast. Briefly, that's what you can do is you can upgrade your spell from a level one to a level two spell. Andrew had been talking about this. before It increases that damage dice, it gives you like a quick boost right on top of it, real quick boom, faster hitter, harder hitting, and that's how the spell slots kind of break down into functionality. We'll get into all of this more when we start looking at building spell casting characters, right, so let's talk about so we talked a lot about kind of spell slots and spell casting stuff.

What are what are now? let's? let's talk about the basic, the basic spells, that that don't necessarily need a spell slot, and these are what are referred to as cantrips.

So if the spell slot is something that is going to take, what you would play in an RPG would take your mana points, your MP. The cantrip is something that you have learned so well And by rote that you don't have to actually spend any magic points on it. It tends to be a much weaker spell, not even always an aggressive, an attack spell. One of the most common cantrips that you come across in the game is light And all it does is it takes a little object, whatever one you do. Usually people put it on the end of the staff to put a rock and they cast light on it And it's basically like turning a light bulb above the cat. the party. This way people can see is they're moving around. There are other ones that are attack spell, are attack cantrips, and they they have attack rolls and saving throws, and we'll talk about saving throws in a few minutes. But you know they have these basic level spells that. so as a as a spellcaster, you have a limited number of spell slots, so people always try to save them and conserve them. But when you're in a very long dungeon where you can't rest up to get those back, guess what? You don't. you run out. you're not stuck as a wizard with no strength slapping things with the staff. You have these basic attack spells or other types of spells that will carry you through the combat.

Absolutely. It's interesting, like I always when, when I've played a spellcaster, i've always kind of discounted the cantrips. But but again, when, when you do run out of spell slots for your, for your higher level spells, it's you rely on those cantrips. So you want to, when you, when you're building your character and and deciding what cantrips you're going to select, cause you can you can only you're you're given a certain amount of spots that you can, certain amount of cantrips that you can select that your, your character can cast. So so be very cognizant about, like Joe said, like casting light is a great, very useful one for when you're in in dark places. So you want to think about what, what kind of things you might encounter on your, your adventure and and and what cantrips might be useful. I, i, i loved cause I think of. Again back to the Dungeons and Dragons movie with, with Simon the so-so sorcerer, i think it was, i think it was Prestidigitation that he cast, when, when he was, he's in front of this crown, he's like, look, it's the smell of fresh cut grass And it's, it's like that. That's really not not a very useful spell for for an adventure, but it's, it's a very clever spell. It can. It can do some interesting things to to distract somebody, but but you want to be very aware of of kind of what you're selecting as far as those cantrips concerned, because when you do run out of the spell slots, they are what you're going to rely on.

And that's a. That's a good reminder for the over impact of Dungeons and Dragons. This is not just a combat game. There are plenty of spells. I would probably say 30, 40% of the spells that have no combat usage, but they're used for other aspects, other ideas. You want to try to convince somebody. You think somebody's lying to you. You can cast a spell called zone of truth, which will encourage them to tell you the truth. Taking combat spells all the time is fine, but remember that this game is more than just combat. So always consider the idea of what you want to do and how you want to use it. So when you're picking your spells, there's, there's, there's more. It's not a two dimensional game of just combat, it's all these other things.

Absolutely. I mean, it's not a cantrip, but I loved when I used invisibility in a recent, recent encounter. I'm not going to go into all that right now but, I used it to to sow some mayhem between between people that were trying to attack us and kind of using that to throw my voice sort of by.

It was only successful because he rolled 20.

Hey, i will say it was one of the great times when I did roll 20 and it worked. So that's that. That's one of the fun things. When you, when you, you come up with something clever, you have to, you have to roll against it and sometimes you're successful and sometimes you're not. So that was one of the times when I was successful. I will I'll bring up one other time. So there is, there is a spell called Maximillian's earthen grasp.

Oh, that was clapp, that was epic, that was great.

So one of one of our was he. was he bewitched or or what would you? how would you describe the other, the other character? What? what happened to?

him, so the character was being possessed by a back of a dead of a dead adventurer and somebody. they found out that it was, that it was possessed, and one of the other people threw the backpack off of a cliff. This character went after it and Andrew Yeah.

So this, this character goes running after the backpack off the cliff, i cast Maximillian's earthen grasp, which which basically creates if you've seen the D&D movie, he uses it in the movie A hand, a hand shaped piece of earth comes out of the ground and this, this grabbed the character as he was jumping off the cliff and pulled him back to keep him from jumping to his certain demise by by chasing after this, this backpack, and it was. I was amazed that it worked. I was. It was like I had no idea what I was going to do with this spell when I when I first learned it from my character, but it certainly came in handy when, when this character tried to jump off a cliff and and I was able to to rescue him. So that was, that was so much fun. And that and that's that's what I enjoy so much about the game is is you never know when you're going to need this spell, or how it, or or a weapon, or how something's going to play into it, but it's, it's, it's a lot of fun.

It was an epic moment And you come across those. You play the game enough. You come across the moments that are just story to worthy that tell the story over and over again, because it never dies.

Absolutely That's. That's one of the fun things, all right, so we're going to talk now about one of my probably least favorite things and what is called a saving throw. Now, these are based on your ability scores, your strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom and charisma. You can make a saving throw against one of those abilities. So, for example, if you are, maybe if you're walking through the dungeon and you fall into a trap, or a trap is set and and the, the DM, wants to determine whether or not you are you've fallen into that trap or you get hurt by that trap, for something like he will say make a dexterity saving throw. And so you will see something on what's called your character sheet, which is what keeps track of all your stats and spells, etc. You will see what are called saving throws, so you can make a saving throw to see if you survive. Or it could be a lot of, a lot of spells Yep, a lot of spells require saving throws. So, instead of a, instead of an attack roll against your AC, they will, they, the spell will require you to make a saving throw to see whether or not you are impacted by the damage of that spell, and sometimes, no matter what you may be impacted by the spell, but it may be half damaged. So, as long as you succeed on the saving throw, so spells will have, let's say, like a save, let's say like a 15. So you have to, you as as the, the PC, as the player character, have to roll 15 or higher to avoid the effects of a particular spell. So so, depending on how you roll determines how you are affected by a spell, by a trap, by by something like like that. And as long as you roll, well, you will, you will not be or you'll reduce the effects of that particular spell or that particular trap or or whatever it might be.

So that's, you'll see a lot of those, a lot of those saving throws and your ability score, like we talked about when we talked about the ability scores, while back when we first introduced them, the ability score gives you a modifier to your ability there. So when you roll that 20 sided dice, it's not just a flat roll. If you're doing a dexterity saving throw, you have to look up what the modifier is for your current ability score and then you get to add that to your dice roll. That works out very similarly to skill checks. Now, a skill check is you trying to perform a very specific type of task that the dungeon master, the DM, has decided. This is not something every single person would be able to do, so now you need to roll for this. Now, an example of this would be when you go up and try to pet a dog or another animal. That's not really something you need to do a skill check for. That's something everybody can do. But if you have a rabbit dog or a wolf who's been tied to a chain and you want to try to calm that animal down, you do something called an animal handling check, and then you would have that. You would roll that dice and add a modifier based upon your wisdom, modifier meaning how well your wisdom is, your knowledge of animals in general, and you would add that modifier to your roll And if you rolled high enough, the dungeon master would either have a number from the adventure or would make one up based upon how difficult the task would be. And if you roll high enough to do that, you success, succeed on that ability check. Now there is a slew of ability checks and we're not going to go through all of them. They're known as skills, but some of the bigger ones are animal handling, perception, which is basically your ability to kind of perceive different things around. It's kind of like noticing little details without doing a thorough investigation of them, something you just kind of pick up off the top of your head. Then there's there is an actual investigation one where you go around looking for different aspects. There's also and because it's kind of the fun one it's called sleight of hand And this is something you would do. Is if you're trying to pick somebody's pocket when you're a rogue character even if you're not a rogue character, you want to steal something out of somebody's pocket you would roll sleight of hand check. You also would do this if you're trying to confuse somebody by passing an item to another player but you're giving it to a third player. A sleight of hand would have other options like that. All these kind of things come into it and they're all based upon the modifiers that you get off of your ability, check your ability, scores And, as we develop, go through the character creation and as we start playing talking about playing characters we'll get into all the different types of skills.

I think this is probably for me one of the most maybe confusing parts of trying to describe for somebody that is not familiar with D&D. So imagine you have, as a person, you've got innate abilities. Some of the other skills are stealth, which is one I'm always trying to pull off. Stealth, deception, even persuasion or intimidation. Persuasion or intimidation You're always trying to intimidate somebody to do something or persuade an enemy to not attack you or something. There's all sorts of things. But these different skills are based on those abilities that you had set earlier. So a persuasion is based on your charisma. So if you're like a bard and very charismatic, you have a high charisma score. You're more likely to be able to persuade somebody to do something than, let's say, a very unintelligent barbarian who is brute strength and their skills of persuasion are not very good. So you get these bonuses based on those ability scores that you have. So if you are a bard, you're more likely to be more persuasive. Again, and other things affect these skills. If you have a big, heavy suit of armor, you might have what's called disadvantage on a stealth score, which means we'll get into that. But you roll the D20 twice and take the lower of the two scores. So you're a disadvantage because that armor makes a lot of noise. So even no matter how hard you try to be quiet, you're still going to be making a lot of noise. So there's a lot of things that come into play as far as these are concerned, because you can have proficiencies in skills. Your ability scores impact those skills. So there's a lot of things that impact these skills. So, depending on what type of character you build, you will have different strengths as far as those are concerned And I was just saying we're talking about the proficiency bonus, so it's a bonus. So, based on your, a lot of them are race based, i believe.

The proficiencies are like race based. Well, the when you get a proficiency and a skill that's typically race based, you're thinking. You're thinking of the basic proficiency bonus, which deals with your level.

Yeah, well, yeah, so the others, a bonus. There's a proficiency bonus, which is a bonus, as it says, a bonus added to certain roles and checks for first skill character. So as you, as you, as you progress in levels and things like that, there is a proficiency bonus added to a lot of these scores. So things that you have proficiency in, add that proficiency bonus to them, Correct?

That's, that's yes, I see what you're saying before. I misunderstood what you're saying. As a certain race, you will get proficiency in certain skills And, depending on other things that you choose, you'll be given options of other proficiencies that you are allowed to have in these skills. Right?

So if there's, it's, it's, it's a lot of I don't want to say it's a lot of math, but there's a lot of numbers and they all kind of come, come together And and when we will probably do an episode talking about the character sheet in general. just walking you through net, now that you know all these terms, we'll talk about a character sheet and how all that kind of come, how you put all of this together.

But yes, yeah, and, and and that's. That's the thing is also is like there are so many different aspects of all of this and there is a lot of math. But when we look at the character sheet in a later episode you'll see that if you use D&D beyond to make the character sheet, all the math is done for you. If you make your own character sheet by hand, you only have to do the math once and then you look at that total. You'll have a total on your skill. On your sheet says oh, i add a seven, i add a four, i add a two, and you'll just add that to the dice roll. So your math will always be basic addition or subtraction once you get into that level Exactly.

Now, after, after we've gone through all of this, we were in a dungeon. We've encountered an enemy, we've rolled initiative, we've made our attacks, we, we've cast our spells, we've been attacked. We are, we probably have incurred some damage at this point. So we are hopefully, says, says the DM, So you've probably been hurt a little bit, So your hit points have been lowered. So you've got some cuts and bruises, maybe a broken bone, depending on how much damage you have taken. There are ways to recover those hit points. And what's what's? talked first about the short rest.

So short rest is your ability to. it requires about an hour. More can be taken, but usually it takes about an hour And what it does, is it in real life concept is you go off and you hide in a corner so nobody can find you and you, you catch your breath. You're not living on the edge of that adrenaline for that moment, you're just relaxing, you're. you're healing yourself by you know, healing up with potions and stuff like that. But during this time, certain classes again we'll get into all of this certain classes have abilities and powers that regenerate during a short rest. Everybody has something called hit dice, which are used to help recover their hit points.

Correct and Joe's pointing to me because I'm going to talk about. He's like and here we go. So what, what are hit? so hit dice, so as, as you go up in level, you get hit dice available to you that are for for your particular character. You can roll these dice and and use them on a short rest to recover some of your, your hit points. So we'll also talk about what a what a long rest entails. That's like a full rest period of of of eight hours. That's a good night's, a good night's sleep. But this is you're kind of hiding behind a rock or a tree, trying to just avoid, avoid being noticed by any, any type of enemies, and you're kind of bandaging yourself up, kind of, you know, just kind of quickly trying to. You know kind of, like I said, bandage all your wounds, not really heal up, but just kind of recover so you can catch your breath. Catch your breath, that's exactly it. This is, this is the way a short rest is to catch your breath and and get out and and continue on. So you can use a couple of hit dice. You can use all, you can use some or all of them, but you don't work, you don't get back those hit dice until you have taken a long rest. And what, what's the what, what's the cause? Joe, we were talking about this the other night. What, what is the? how do you get? cause you don't get. You don't necessarily get back all the hit dice from a long rest. So what's the? what's the equation there?

So the long rest, you are able to recover half of your total hit dice and a long rest. So your hit dice is based upon your character character level, not not your class level, cause you can multi-class, We'll talk about that. Your character level, that's how many hit dice you have. So, assuming you have a level eight character and you use three hit dice before you take a long rest, you get all three of those back. Now, let's say you use six of your hit dice, you're only allowed to get four of them back on a long rest. on your next long rest, assuming you haven't used any or didn't use more than then two more, you can get the rest of them back.

Excellent, thank you. Thank you for that mathematical equation, because I can never remember how many hit dice it is. So now maybe we're taking a short rest. but now we've gone through the dungeon, we've defeated all the enemies, we've gone back to kind of like a base camp, or we've been able to set up camp somewhere for the night so we can take what is officially known as a long rest. So what is entailed in a long rest?

So one of the most important factors is for the magic users. During a long rest they get back all of their spell slots. They get everything back of their spell slots. Other creatures will get certain other characters, depending on what it is. They get uses of certain abilities back. Every class has certain class abilities and those abilities are, you know, one, two, three time use between long rests. Those abilities will come back, also without using the hit dice we just talked about. If you succeed in a long rest without an interruption that's more than an hour, you get all of your hit points back. So it's basically a regenerative night's rest.

It's a miracle, you, those broken bones, heal overnight. It's incredible. Whatever is in the air, the water in the lands of Dungeons and Dragons is incredible. It is the elixir of the gods. Exactly, exactly, so that's so. There's a lot of benefits to a long rest and typically what will happen during the long rest? you'll also set up watches. So during the long rest you'll have, each person will take a watch to kind of look over the camp. Sometimes there are spells like alarm, so you can set a spell to protect the area and wake you up in case an enemy or an animal or something kind of enters your camp. But you'll typically set up watches as well over the long rest to make sure that nothing happens. So that is a long rest, one of the things that as you go on through your adventure. You typically start out an adventure as a level, one character, and there are really two ways to level up. In D&D They're what are known as milestones, so maybe you've defeated a big bad and you've defeated them. So as you gain more experience interacting with people, completing missions, defeating enemies, you may level up that way. The other way is through what are called experience points or XP. So based on, and if you look in like, let's say, the Dungeon Masters guide, certain enemies, for defeating them are worth a certain amount of experience points. So as you, the more guys you defeat, the more experience points you get, the quicker, the faster you level up. So it depends on how your DM has set up the campaign. Is it going to be a milestone based leveling up or is it going to be an XP based level up? There's differences, so it depends on from game to game how that's done, but typically, if you're leveling up based on XP, it really depends on how many people you're defeating. As you defeat them, you gain experience from those and get to level up.

Yeah. So the thing is he's explaining and he kind of looks over at me and I'm like, yeah, you nailed it. There's really not much else to do. You do as much as you can, you fight as often as you can and you try to do all the side quests that you might hear the DM mention to get additional XP. The milestone is a lot easier. Nobody has to keep track of their XP. Everybody levels up at the same time. Occasionally somebody's not there in a night and you have to decide. They didn't partake of the night, so technically their character didn't partake in the battle. Do we give them the experience points for this or not? So that's a question to be answered between you and your DM. Milestone makes it easier, cleaner, but the experience points adds a little bit of more flair to it, i think. I think it's a little more like personality to it.

Yeah, because we've played it both ways. We've played some campaigns that are experience points based. And what's if you have a party that likes to kill things? they're all about the experience points because they will just kill anything and everything in their path to get more experience points and level up. So it depends on the party and what they're like sometimes. But I personally prefer the milestones because I think it's focused less on the battle than trying to gain the experience points and you can focus more on the role play and the actual storyline of how you progress through the adventure.

And as a DM, i tend to prefer that as well, because each player is responsible for their own character's experience points, but after the battle they're like well, how much experience points was that? And you have to pre-calculate okay, this guy, they had six of this character, this monster, and those are worth this much. And then you have to like all right, how many people are actually here tonight? Okay, we only had four instead of five. All right, we divide by four. It's one less step for everybody to have to do the math, though, like I said, it does provide a little bit of flair and character to the idea. and there's that hey, you know I'm achieving, because you can watch the number crawl up until you hit that point. When you're doing milestone, you just wait until the DM says yeah, hey, you leveled up. now It's a little less, it's a little more boring, stagnant, but I think it's easier for most people that way.

Definitely easier And it's one of the when. When you're, if you're using D&D Beyond and we'll provide the link in the show notes for that if you're using D&D Beyond to create your character, i think one of the first things it asks you is it milestone based or XP based? So you can always change it after the fact, but it's going to be one of the first questions, so it's a good thing for us to talk about. So if you're, if you're building a character for a specific campaign, you know, make sure you understand from your, from your DM, how they're, how they're going to level up your characters. Is it going to be milestone based or XP based? So you can, you can kind of set that right at the beginning and and and work from your work, your character from from there.

Yeah.

All right, So that is, that is the official ABCs of of D&D. Now we are going to get into since this is legends, loot and lore, we're going to get into a little bit of the lore of D&D, and Joe, Joe has been waiting for this.

This is the moment that I've been waiting for. Yes, i was trying to make it a little more dramatic, but nope, nope, that just fell flat.

That was it. That was your intro.

So so, uh, you know you're probably sitting there like you know where, where, where does this take place? Maybe you don't think that, maybe you're not as inquisitive as I am, but you know, you know, get ready, because we're not going to be on typical earth, we're going to leave.

Wait, this doesn't take place on earth.

No, it does not take place on earth. Tell me, joe, where does it take place? Well, it takes place on a far, distant world, not in Star Wars, not far galaxy, far away. Uh, it takes place in in a, uh, a continent called Faroon, on a fantastical planet known as Toril. Now, faroon and Toril are not the only places you play D&D. There are several different worlds. However, vast majority of the content takes place on Toril and in the continent of Faroon, specifically in an area called the Sword Coast.

Well, let's just be clear We're really talking about traditional dungeons and dragons. Written That's correct. Adventures There. There's also what is referred to as as homebrew content, so so people can really create adventures in in any world, but the the typical D&D campaigns are are based here.

Yes, and there are. there are several official worlds that do take place also, but, like Andrew was saying, people will create their entire own worlds. You'll have DMs who make their own campaign. They'll create their own world down to the fact that they draw maps out for them for the coastlines, for the mountains and the towns and everything. It's a massive project for people who have that creative juices. But for our purposes in general, you're going to be dealing with an area called the Sword Coast. The Sword Coast also was in the D&D movie And there are many known cities up and down this place. Some of the most popular ones you may have heard of is either Waterdeep or Boulder's Gate. Waterdeep has a lot of intrigue. There's a lot of change, shadows and deals going on in Waterdeep. It's one of the more populous cities in favor of ruin on the Sword Coast. One of the other Wait, are you saying there's a dark underbelly.

And what are the rules? Is that what you're saying?

I would never suggest it as a place for a road to start There. background is a West drill on the streets working their way up into the guild. Okay, i was curious. Okay, okay. Then there's another one is a boulder's gate. Boulder's gate is a very popular, very busy city a little bit further south on the coastline. That is a starting point, if you really think about it. There's plenty of boulder gate games. They're based on this D&D location. A lot of adventure, a lot of danger. Now, if you go north from here, you enter this icy expanse known as Icewind Dale and it's just frozen from side to side. And there's even a place called the Frozen Sea, which is just chunks of ice floating around in an ocean that just has never frozen. This is home to a collection of towns called Ten Towns. They're literally ten little towns. They're all separated by a day or a half a day of journey from each other And they have like a loose association of each other's. You may have heard of this place. This is a very common setting for the Driz D'Ordin series penned by RA Salvador, masterful storyteller. The first, like third, of his books take place exclusively in this region and he's constantly returning to them.

Question for you. Yeah, in the D&D movie, the prison. Yes, when it starts out. Is that up here?

That is up in the Icewind Dale. Yes, It is Okay.

I couldn't remember, so thank you. So if you're watching the D&D movie and that whole prison, what is the prison complex called? again, I can never remember.

So Realm.

Realm, something We're going to have to look that one up I can't remember, but yeah, so that whole prison area is when they first start out in the movie is up in Icewind Dale.

Yes, and that prison location is. If you follow any of D&D recent stories, they recently released a book about heists and one of the heists has to do with that particular prison, where you break a character out of, you break an NPC out of the prison there. So and there's an entire adventure that takes place only in Icewind Dale And it's a massively expansive adventure with all the details you need about each city, each town.

And what's it called Joe?

The Rime of the Frostmaiden.

Ooh, yes, it's fun.

We actually played that. Yeah, we're about. we went about halfway through it and then we were kind of like we need to switch off to something else, and then we had party issues, and then we switched to a new adventure and then we might go back to it, but I think everybody was kind of burnt out. It was a very long adventure.

It was a very long adventure. I mean, there's 10 towns to explore, so there's a lot. There's a lot going on to it And that's the thing. So I don't want to veer too far off the Lord at the moment, but Excuse me, i know This is Joe's favorite part, but you can. Adventures so they're what are referred to as one-shots, which are very short, intended to be kind of one one day, kind of one time adventures. They could go over a couple of days, but adventures could last one session. Adventures could last months, years, depending on how it goes. So don't it's probably one of the things you would want to ask a DM like how long do you anticipate a campaign going on? Because they could go on for quite some time or they could be relatively short. Like my wife she let's not get into that She tried to be a DM for a little bit and was not prepared for how complex the campaign was, so she no longer participates in DM, in Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. Yeah, so she will. She'll participate in one shot which is just a one-off adventure that we do for special occasions. We've done holiday themed ones, halloween, we've done all sorts of different one shots and she will participate in those.

But I think my favorite was the Home Alone series.

Do we really want to go into that for beginners?

No, not right now.

So it was interesting.

It's an important question to be asking your DM as well is how long are you going to be playing per session? So a lot of these things will say. You know, you'll read people online. They'll say, oh, this is a good adventure for six to six to twelve months. You know, yada, yada. It all depends on how long you play. We typically get together once a week per campaign and we play for about two hours plus or minus. There are people who play this game for six, seven, eight hours on a weekend and they will go through a campaign and a storyline much faster than anybody else does because they have time availability. We're our group, we've agreed that. You know, this two hour time span, from about eight PM to 10 PM, works out the best for everybody. It means that we stop a lot, it means that we're in the middle of stuff and is like you know, it's 1030. We're not going to get into anything deeper, but it works for us and it stretches out the adventure. So it works.

I would say don't, don't be intimidated by the people to talk about these long marathon sessions of D&D. What I, what I would highly recommend, is going on to a place like like Facebook, because there are a lot of D&D communities on Facebook always looking for players. So you can you can typically find something that that suits your schedule. So we we play on Monday nights from from eight to ten, give or take. So you know some. Some will play on a Saturday for for many hours. So it all depends on your level commitment and what fits into your schedule. But but there's there's always groups of differing abilities and differing time. So so probably one of my my best resources would be either either Reddit, reddit There's a great D&D community on Reddit. Facebook has a ton of communities You know word based in New Jersey. There's several New Jersey based D&D groups on Facebook. So so, find your community, find somebody that's looking for for like a beginning player and and kind of ease into it and and go from there.

Yeah, exactly, and it's just a conversation to have, don't be? you know, you look at these videos of critical role and they play for four or five hours at a time. Well, so remember, the camera is not active on them, so they look like they're sitting there for four and a half hours five hours But when the camera is not focused on them, they're getting up, they're stretching, they're doing these things. Don't think you got to sit down for a five hour session. Work it out with the party that you're going to play with and you settle it into a comfortable timeframe.

Yes, So sorry, sorry to deviate, sorry to deviate from you.

Can I go back to my Laura now, please, please, go back to your Laura. Let me get back to my Laura here. I'm dying here.

I know, i know, go right, go right ahead.

So, anyway, we're talking about Faerun, we're talking about the Sword Coast and we talked about Icewind Dale, so Faerun is actually a word from, derived from the magical realm of fairies, where the ancient elves are once round roamed. That's not necessarily where this is, but that's basically where the name comes from. There are multiple, diverse tapestry of different races here and we're going to get into all of them at some point or another in this podcast. But the three most known, most important, one to three most prevalent, let's say our humans, elves and dwarfs. Now, your humans are your basic resilient. They tend to form bigger and larger communities, and everybody else They tend to be about average in everything that they do, which gives them the ability to excel at different things at different times. Your elves they tend to be smaller in community. They're very nature based. So, while the humans will build a big brick city, your elves will build a community inside the woods. They'll have, you know, tree forts and things like that. They will also build cities at certain times, but there's are much more in tune with the nature around them. Elves tend to have racial qualities that make them more advantageous for dexterity based items and weapons, so they are kind of not pigeonhole, but they tend to go this way. The similar thing happens with the dwarfs. Dwarfs, as we know from most lore. They love the mind, they love to dig into the ground. Most of their homes are inside caves and fortresses underground. They tend to be very sturdy, strong people, so they tend to have more melee characters. They tend to be more about swinging that axe or hitting somebody with a club or something.

Just real quick. We've used this term melee a couple of times. Just.

So a melee attack? thank you very much. That's a great point. A melee attack is when you take a weapon and you stand next to the person and you swing that weapon at them to hit them. A melee attack is up close and personal, whereas a ranged attack is throwing something or shooting a bow from a distance. So melee right next to each other.

That's not I just. I just want to like it's not a term we define, but we use it a couple times. Yeah, so melee is your hand-to-hand kind of face-to-face combat and you and you've got ranged attacks Right and we'll talk and spells to the spells are broken down into that way as well. Exactly, so, and And we'll talk about advantage and disadvantage as far as ranged and melee is concerned, but I just wanted to find that no, it's good.

It's a very important key term that we should have put up earlier The, the, the dwarves. Again, just to wrap them up, they tend to make also really good weapons. They're forgeries, like every piece of lore about dwarves typically says so. They tend to be hardier folk, they tend to be a little bit strong and their hit points are gonna be a little bit higher. So that's why I was saying the humans, they're kind of average. You can do anything with a human. The elves, they lean this way. The dwarves, they lean this way. That doesn't mean you have to sit in that quote-unquote pigeonhole. You can make an elf and make them as strong as you possibly can and make them a regular old fighter. You can make them have a sword and have them run into an attack. You can make a dwarf sit back and cast spells from the back range. Just because it's not typical Doesn't mean you can't do it, and that's another thing that comes back to this game Is that anybody can play it and anybody can be anything.

I I, you're absolutely right, i, i love making characters that are not typical. Like I, i, i don't like making a typical character. So You know, we've got some players like like one loves to be a barbarian, and that's really. He's an. He's an expert barbarian for for sure. I just, i just like to make random characters. My my latest characters is a half vampire character. I've played a feline, or what's called a tabaxi Monk. I What, what else has there you were.

You started off as that wizard in the beginning. I was a wizard at the beginning, absolutely that was human Oh the human was a fian was a human.

Fian was a human. Okay, so it's. There's all sorts of random characters that you can create, all sorts of different races, so be it. Beyond just these basic races, you can.

There there, feb rune is filled with countless other races and we'll talk about them in detail as we get into it. But there are also the dark races, like the The door guard, which are dark dwarves, and then there are drow, which are dark elves, and there are goblins and there are Bug bears and these, most of these, have stat classes. You can make a character like them and my wife favorite, the owl bear. Oh, my goodness, she loves the owl bear, the owl bear, and they all have things that you can make stat classes about them. So, the idea being is, you literally can be anything, even one of the monsters that you typically fight. Most of them have some type of stat block that you can use in.

Was it Mines of Phandelver? That, what was the monster that we befriended? That really one of our other players befriended the no thick, the no thick, yes, yes, so go ahead.

So the Nothic, is it not a character? It was. It's a monster that would speak to you in like weird whispers, and It was subsisting off of killing Members of a gang that had taken over this keep. And And When they, when the party, ran into it, they got the great idea. They went back to the room where they killed like three or four of this good, this, this gang, and dragged it out to the Nothic and said Hey, look food.

And they became friends with So it's again, it's for for the party. It's about doing whatever you possibly can to derail the DM's plans and and come up with something creative. The DM, they're they're kind of stereotypical role there. There, their love is to try to kill the party. So they will, they will do whatever they can to kill the party and your job is is to Thwart, thwart their plans at at every turn. So that's that's the, that's the unwritten basics of dungeons and dragons.

Absolutely, and you couldn't see it. But I had this huge grin when he said kill the party. Yeah, that's what we do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Thank you for joining us as we completed the ABC's of D&D and our first piece of lore on the land of Faerun. We always like to thank you for joining us into the world of Dungeons and Dragons and we hope that this episode has given you some foundation for your Beginner journeys into this incredible game.

Thanks, joe We're. I'm just, i'm super excited. This is episode two now, so Continue to listen along. We're gonna talk about things, but we're gonna we're gonna dive into character creation and and all these different terms that we've talked about. We're gonna we're gonna Put that all together into creating our first character, and that that's gonna be a lot of fun. If you want to get ahead of things, again, you can go to the show notes. We're gonna have the link to D&D beyond, so you can, you can start creating your character there, start playing around with, with, with what's available and, again, if you have questions, email us at podcast, at legends, loot and lore, calm, and, and let us know what questions you have, and we're we're happy to answer those in future episodes. Thanks, thanks for watching, thanks for listening whatever watch, watching, well, that's.

That's a future episode, if we ever get to the point that people actually want to see us.

No, they don't want to do that.

No, no, no, no, no you guys are better off with our voices strictly strictly podcast.

Thank you very much everybody. Thanks for listening You.