Dungeons and Dragons
The basics
What is Dungeons and Dragons?
Dungeons and Dragons is a roleplaying game. What is a role-playing game? Did you ever play cops and robbers? Or how 'bout house? Those are both role-playing games. Of course one difference is that Dungeons and Dragons is acted out in the mind and through imagination. It's not that santanic crap that religious fanatics rave about. If anyone ever died while "in character" they were mentally unstable before they started to play. Sorry to rave but one of my pet peves is to be called a satanic because I play a game! So anyway...
Characters
You start Dungeons and Dragons (From this point D&D) by creating a character. You wouldn't belive how many people I lose while explaining this, even though it seems simple to me. :-) Think of it as "making a person". You describe what you look like, and then you go into attributes, things like stregth and dexterity. Of course this should be done by rolling the dice. Ooops...I forgot about the dice. D&D would be very hard to play with out them. They are the randomness of the game.
Dice
There are six standard dice. All have a different number of sides. The come in 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 20 sides. They are usually refered to by the letter "d" and then the number of sides...So a d6 would be the 6 sided die.
After you make you charaters up, you must have a Dungeon Master (DM). This is the storyteller. He/she puts you in a situation, and you react to your surroundings.
What are "classes"?
Classes are in essence, what occupation your character is. Fighter, Magic User, Cleric, Thief, Assassin were the original basic classes. There're many subclasses....especially to the fighter class....then you get Rangers, Paladins, Cavaliers, Barbarians.....All sorts of cool stuff
The cool thing about D&D is that you can be anyone or anything you want to be...Okay, well there are some rules, but everything is really at the DM's discretion.
For right now this is a short page just telling people the basics. Real basics. I hope to expand it little by little each day. Maybe go into more details about the making of a character and such. But for now, This will have to do.