Dungeons & Dragons

“	This is a game that is fun. It helps you imagine.	”
	— Frank Mentzer, Dungeons And Dragons 1st Edition Basic Set (1981), first sentence

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is the main roleplaying game system played by the Dragon Friends. D&D is credited with creating the roleplaying hobby in 1974 and remains the most popular roleplaying system in the world. Dungeons & Dragons was originally created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, but has been worked on and updated by a many writers and designers over the decades.

The Dragon Friends play the fifth edition of D&D, abbreviated as 5E, launched in 2014. As of Tyranny of Dragons, they seem to have switched to the newer 2024 version of the rules. (These are a mostly backwards-compatible revision of the existing rules, and they play pretty loosely, so you’re unlikely to notice.) As a long-time D&D player, God/Dave occasionally used terms from the third or fourth editions, but most of these translate pretty well into the fifth (see below).

Terminology

This section explains roleplaying and D&D-specific terms commonly used in the podcast.

Game rules

Roll/Check: Rolling a 20-sided dice (or "d20" for short) to determine if a character succeeds at a task. This is D&D's standard mechanic for introducing uncertainty to the heroes’ actions. There are three kinds of roll: Attack Rolls determine if an attack hits an opponent during combat (see Damage below for what happens when they hit); Ability Checks check if a character’s attempt to do something succeeds; and Saving Throws (see below) determine if a character can avoid or resist something bad happening to them. In the 2024 rules, these three kinds of rolls are collectively called “D20 Tests”.
Modifier: A number that is added to or subtracted from a roll or check (as above), to account for the differing abilities of characters. For example Philge is stronger than Freezo, so for rolls based on Strength - bashing down a door, pulling on a rope etc - Alex Lee gets to add a higher number to her roll than Michael Hing does. In later seasons, players often don’t say what their modifier or total result is when saying what they’ve rolled, especially when the dice result suggests success or failure all by itself. e.g. “That’s a 12 plus Perception.” A positive modifier is often called a “bonus”, and a negative modifier is often called a “penalty”.
DC: The number a player needs to succeed on a roll or check. If the result of a roll (including any applicable modifiers) is equal to or greater than the DC, the task succeeds; otherwise it fails, only partially succeeds, or succeeds with some kind of complication. Dragon Friends DMs often use slightly lower DCs than standard, to make sure the show isn't held up by repeated failures (except when it’s funny). Early on while everyone was learning the rules, Dave usually just gave the appropriate number, but in later seasons he uses the term DC often. DC is an abbreviation for "Difficulty Class".
Skills: Areas in which a character can be "proficient", which means they have a level of training or expertise in that area. When making a roll or check where the skill is relevant, the character adds an extra "proficiency bonus" to the roll, on top of their Ability modifier. Examples include Deception, Intimidation, Perception, Persuasion and Sleight of Hand. God/Dave - and most Dungeon Masters - will usually call for a check using just the skill name (e.g. "a Perception check" or "Intimidation check") as short-hand. Michael Hing frequently requests Arcana checks.
Save (or Saving Throw): Another form of roll, made by a player when their character attempts to avoid something bad happening to them, for example the effects of a spell or being caught in a dragon's fiery breath. In fifth edition D&D, saves are based on the six ability scores mentioned above; since Dave is an old-school GM, he sometimes asks for a "Fortitude" (equivalent to Constitution), "Reflex" (Dexterity) or "Will" (Wisdom) save, which are the saves used in the game's third and fourth editions. (Earlier editions used very specific saving throw categories based on various sources of magical effects.)
Hit Points: A measure of how close to defeat a character is. If someone gets hit with a sword or spell, or is otherwise affected by an attack or hazard, they lose hit points. If they run out of hit points, they're either dead (this is assumed the case for monsters and NPCs) or incapacitated (player characters don’t immediately die; see Death Saves below). A character (or monster etc) suffers no ill effects until they reach zero hit points, so many groups choose to describe losing them as the character’s luck and stamina running out. Dragon Friends is a bit more old school and often describes losing hit points as injuries, even out of combat, and the rules do describe losing hit points as “taking damage” (see below). In fifth edition, characters don't go into negative hit points, though there are rules for dying instantly from taking massive damage.
Damage: A measure of how many hit points a character loses when something dangerous happens to them. This is usually determined by rolling dice of varying sizes. The bigger and more numerous the dice, the more dangerous the source of the damage: a longsword uses an eight-sided dice (a d8), while a Witch Bolt spell uses a twelve-sided one (a d12). Physical attacks generally add the attacker's Strength or Dexterity bonus to the damage, while spells just use more dice.
Death Save: A special kind of Saving Throw made by a character who has zero hit points. Each round, the character rolls a d20 without adding any modifiers; if they roll 10 or above they succeed, otherwise they fail. If they fail three times, they die; if they succeed three times, they become stable, and don't make any more death saves. Normally a miraculous recovery is only possible when rolling a natural 20, but Dave is pretty merciful and has often allowed this to happen with less impressive rolls. (During Season 8 he goes the other way, removing the characters’ ability to roll Death Saves, culminating in the events of “These Consequences Weren't for You”.)
Spell Slot: Most magic users in D&D, such as Freezo, have a limit on how many times they can use magic. A spell slot represents one opportunity to cast a spell of a given power level, and once used usually don’t refresh until the following day (after a “Long Rest”, i.e. a good night’s sleep). Most spell casters (including Bobby, Bassbass Wihouveberry and potentially Philge) have spell slots of various levels. In many cases, casting a lower level spell using a higher level spell slot makes that spell more powerful. As a warlock, Freezo's spell slots are all the same level, and he has very few of them; to balance this, they are refreshed after a “Short Rest” (by the rules an hour or so of tending to wounds, eating, drinking water etc).

Characters

Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma: The six standard Ability Scores in D&D which represent a character's basic abilities and talents. Most players call them "stats" (short for statistics).
Level: a measure of a character's overall ability. A level 7 character has more powerful abilities than a level 6 one, and so on. Classically in D&D, your level was advanced by earning "experience points" (XP) by slaying monsters (and, in the very earliest versions, collecting treasure); however, it is now more common for DMs to award XP or even levels based on momentum in the story of the campaign, so that the PC's power escalates throughout the story. In Dragon Friends the characters usually level up at the beginning of a season, and as of season 8 the original characters are level 9. In the fifth edition the highest level is 20.
Class: The fantasy archetype a character embodies: Philge is a Barbarian, Freezo is a Warlock, Bobby is a Rogue etc. A player's choice of class determines the kind of abilities they have, and how they develop as they increase in level (see below). Most classes also have "sub-classes" - variations on the main class idea that are chosen by the player early in their career. For example Freezo began as a Warlock whose pact for power was with the Fiend, which gave him specific powers, including the "Dark One's Blessing" which allowed him to gain temporary hit points by killing enemies (or, indeed, Horsey Two-Horse). During season 4, he changes his pact to that of the Hexblade, which swapped many of his powers to completely different ones that he almost never uses.
Multiclassing: Choosing to take levels in more than one class. This is usually written by listing the classes taken with a slash between them, each followed by the level of each class. Many of the Dragon Friends are now multiclass characters: Baston is a Fighter 4/Monk 4, and in season 6 Bobby becomes a Rogue 7/Bard 1. (Philge is a special case; Wizards rely on a good Intelligence score, which Philge...ah...does not have, so Dave developed the special hybrid Barbarian/Wizard class for her.) Some home games of D&D discourage multiclassing because it increases complexity, requiring a player to learn the rules of two different classes and how they interact. Since a character can’t get higher than level 20, it also means that the player will never reach the highest levels of any one class, which can result in a weaker character.
Feat: Special training that a character can choose instead of improving their basic Ability Scores when levelling up. These are an optional part of the game. During the Downtime Episode, Philge earned the Arcane Initiate feat, which allowed her to learn a small number of additional spells without taking another level of Barbarian/Wizard.

General roleplaying terms

Homebrew: Rules created by players and DMs for their own use, modifying or adding to the officially published rules. Homebrew is common throughout Dragon Friends, from altering some of the basic rules for initiative and adjusting the difficulty of rolls, to custom-made monsters, classes and playable species. The Heroes of Yearth player characters make fairly extensive use of homebrew, e.g. Polly Waddle being a “ducklin” or Dinner Munchabout being a “pity wizard”.
Campaign: an ongoing adventure featuring the same characters over many sessions of play. Campaigns can run for anywhere from a few games to many years, like Dragon Friends.
One-shot: a short adventure that’s expected to be completed in a single session, or at least no more than a few. Many of the special episodes of Dragon Friends are one-shots, though they are still usually split into two separate episodes.

I wanna play too!

Great! Dragon Friends has been responsible for a number of players getting into D&D or roleplaying games more generally.

What You’ll Need

You'll need at least a couple of friends to play, one person to be the Dungeon Master, and a set of dice (which can be ordered online or bought from any gaming store; starter sets also include one set of dice).

To get started, you can grab the free rules for the fifth edition of the game. There are two versions available online via the D&D Beyond website: the older Basic Rules (2014), and the current Free Rules (2024). (You can also download an official PDF version of the older rules.) Either contains all the general rules for the game, as well as basic character options (i.e. a subset of stuff from the Player's Handbook; see below), plus a bit of info for the Dungeon Master. Many new players find D&D Beyond a useful resource, since it can guide you through character creation and automates and tracks many of the rules for you. (There are similar sites for other games; Demiplane is the biggest.)

Another option is to buy one of the various starter sets, which include a printed version of the 2014 Basic Rules, plus some dice, character sheets, and a ready-to-run adventure. The Dragon Friends played through the adventure from the 2022 starter set in Dragon Friends of Stormwreck Isle. There will also be a new starter set using the 2024 rules, Heroes of the Borderlands, but its not due to be released until September 2025.

Once you’ve got the hang of things, you’ll probably want the full D&D rules, which come in three books:

The Player’s Handbook contains all the general rules, as well as rules for making characters, combat and magic spells. Every player will need to read this one, or at least bits of it.
The Dungeon Master’s Guide contains rules and guides for the “Dungeon Master”, like traps, magic items and how to construct scenarios.
The Monster Manual is a bestiary of creatures and adversaries for the players’ characters to fight.

All three books were revised for the new 2024 rules, and its probably best to get all three for the same version, though the new rules are (largely) backwards compatible. They’re big hardcover books and so not cheap! Try to share the cost with your group rather than the DM having to buy everything. You can also check your local library - many have roleplaying books these days, or might get them in if you ask! The older rules are probably also going to be available secondhand much cheaper than the current rules (and they’ll still work). You also don’t need to buy physical books; all the official D&D books, and a few from other publishers, are available in digital format from D&D Beyond.

If the rules used in Dragon Friends seem complex, there are also simpler games, usually based on earlier editions, for example The Black Hack or Cairn. Or, if you’re more interested in adventures outside traditional fantasy, check out the list of other games below.

Tips For Your First Game

For your first game you might want to purchase or download an existing adventure, rather than improvising the adventure as God/Dave does, which requires experience. (Murphy's law of RPGs states that the players will always do something that nobody was expecting and you'll end up improvising anyway, but at least an existing adventure gives you something to use as a basis.)
- You can always grab The Gribbits Detective Agency as a starting point; or, if you want to play an adventure that the Dragon Friends also played, Tomb of Annihilation (although the Friends only played a small section of it, and the full version offers a challenge for even experienced players). Season two is based on Castle Ravenloft, a popular horror adventure from an earlier edition which was more or less adapted for fifth edition as Curse of Strahd.
- Other seasons aren’t direct adaptations of published adventures, but seasons six and seven draw on ideas found in Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, and because of D&D sponsorship, Beef Babes features a lot of stuff from the adventure Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus (a semi-prequel to the videogame Baldur’s Gate 3) and sourcebook Mythic Odysseys of Theros (a tie-in with Magic: The Gathering).
Remember that Dragon Friends is primarily a comedy show, not an actual play podcast. The antics of some players and characters (most notably Freezo) would be considered disruptive at an actual table - especially with a beginning DM. Dave's rant at Hing in “A Fistful of Shrimp” would indicate a genuine issue in a regular D&D group. But you already know that Freezo's not an example to follow, right? ...Right?
On a similar note, when you first sit down to play, remember that you’ll be making stuff up and you can’t know what kind of stories or situations will arise at your table. Be mindful of each other’s comfort and safety, and find ways to make sure that if someone is made uncomfortable by anything that happens in the game, you are ready to deal with it. It can be worth asking if there’s anything that is off the table before you begin.
Don't compare your game to Dragon Friends or any other podcast - the motivations and goals for a home game, where you are playing for yourselves rather than an audience, are quite different. This does not mean it's any less fun, it just means you get to play and listen.
Don't worry about the detail of the rules. (The Dragon Friends certainly don't...)

Other Games

The Dragon Friends haven’t only played D&D, and even some of their D&D adventures have drawn on other games as major influences. If you're interested in those other games, you can look into these:

Hogwarts Adventures is a free, unofficial Harry Potter RPG used for the Harry Potter themed one-shot episodes. It's a short, single-page game. These sort of brief rules will suit groups and GMs with a fair amount of experience, since the rules assume you are very familiar with the basics of roleplaying, and expect more improvisation when in both the roleplaying and applying the rules of the game.
The Star Wars Special used the 2012 Star Wars RPG originally published by Fantasy Flight Games. It was released as three games focussed on different kinds of campaigns, but sharing the same rules: Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion, and Force and Destiny. The adventure played by the Dragon Friends is from the Edge of the Empire Beginner's Game, a boxed set aimed at new players. EDGE Studio took over all of Fantasy Flight's RPGs in 2020, but they've had problems getting Star Wars back into print; as their license doesn’t allow them to sell an ebook version, as of early 2025 your best bet is to find this game secondhand. It was pretty popular, though, in part for its “narrative dice” system that uses custom dice with unique symbols to provide lots of information with a single roll. You can substitute regular dice, find the special ones secondhand, or get the digital Star Wars Dice app which is still available. (There are other unofficial Star Wars RPGs which are more readily available; these are either free fan works like Star Wars 5e, or games that capture the spirit of Star Wars without the IP, like Scum & Villainy.)
The End of the World one-shot used another Fantasy Flight game, The End of the World, also now owned by EDGE Studio. It has multiple versions too, each focussing on playing as yourselves in a different kind of end of the world scenario: Zombie Apocalypse, Alien Invasion, Wrath of the Gods and Revolt of the Machines. It’s not currently available in print, but you can get digital books via DriveThruRPG. The Dragon Friends used a version of one of the scenarios in the Zombie Apocalypse book.
Season 3 draws from the setting of Shadowrun, a 1990s game which fused cyberpunk with D&D-style high fantasy, but the Dragon Friends used fifth edition D&D rules rather than the Shadowrun system. Shadowrun is much more complicated than D&D, with a lot of emphasis on specifics in combat (e.g. different kinds of guns and ammo etc), so it’s not a great first game for a group new to roleplaying. There’s also a lot of disagreement amongst Shdaowrun fans about which is the best and/or easiest edition of the game to play. If you’re keen, you may be able to find and join an existing group who can introduce you to the rules gently.
Season 5 is inspired by Call of Cthulhu, an RPG almost as well-known (and almost as old) as Dungeons & Dragons itself, though again the Dragon Friends used D&D rules. Call of Cthulhu uses the Basic Roleplaying system which, as the name suggests, is fairly simple, and there are many well-written published adventures and sourcebooks available (including Terror Australis, set in Australia!). This makes it easy for beginners to pick up, but don’t go in expecting it to be very similar to D&D - Call of Cthulhu has its own set of traditions, and a different tone and style of play. For starters it's set in a version of the real world (most often the 1930s, though supplements exist for many other eras), and player characters are (relatively) normal people who are often killed or driven insane by the occult mysteries and monsters they investigate.
OK Computer uses Paranoia, a retro-futuristic dystopian dark comedy game first published in the 1980s. It’s been updated several times, most recently in 2017 and 2023; the edition played by the Dragon Friends is that newest one, known as the “Perfect Edition” or “Shiny Edition”, published by Mongoose Games. It’s no more complicated than D&D, but it has very different goals as a parody game. It also expects conflict between player characters, and between the players and the Game Master, which won’t suit every group.