Dungeons & Dragons is a game you play by talking. A few people sit down, one of them describes a place, and the rest say what they do about it. The rules exist for the moments when what happens next is genuinely in doubt — that is when the dice come out.
If you have never played, start here. This page covers what the game is, what an evening of it looks like, and what you need to begin. None of it is a rule you have to memorise.
There is no board and no screen. The game happens in description: someone tells you the door is iron and slightly ajar, and you decide what to do about a door like that. Everything else follows from those two halves.
Most of what you decide simply happens. You walk down the corridor, you ask the innkeeper who owns the mill, you draw your sword — nobody rolls for any of it. The dice are reserved for the things that could plausibly go either way, and they almost always take the same form: someone rolls a twenty-sided die, adds a number, and compares the total to a target. That is a D20 Test, and it is the engine under nearly every rule on this site.
What makes it a game rather than a story you are told is that nobody at the table knows how it ends. Not even the person running it.
Everyone at the table plays one character. One person instead plays everything else.
Most of you will be players. You each control a single player character — one person in the world, yours to speak for and decide for. You say what they try; the dice and the rules settle whether it works.
One of you is the Dungeon Master. The DM describes the world, runs every nonplayer character in it from the innkeeper to the dragon, and decides what the world does in response to the players. They are also the one who says when a roll is needed and how hard it is.
The DM is not your opponent. This is the misconception most newcomers arrive with, and it is worth putting down early: the DM has no side to win for, and a DM who wanted the party dead would not need dice to arrange it. Their job is to make the world respond honestly — generously when you are clever, harshly when you are careless — not to beat you.
Three or four hours, most of it conversation.
Someone recaps where you left off. The DM sets a scene — you are in the market district, it is raining, the contact you were promised is not here. The players say what they do. Someone talks to a guard, someone else goes looking at the rooftops, and the DM answers each in turn. That back-and-forth is the bulk of the evening, and much of it involves no dice at all.
When something is uncertain, the DM calls for a roll. You want to know if the guard believes you, or whether you can get up the wall — that is an ability check, and the result decides what happens next rather than whether you are allowed to try.
Sometimes it turns into a fight. Then the game tightens up: everyone rolls Initiative to establish an order, and play goes around the table in turns until it is resolved. Combat is the most rules-heavy thing D&D does, which is why it has a chapter of its own.
Then someone checks the time, you stop somewhere memorable, and you pick it up next week.
Less than you would think.
People. Three to six is comfortable: one DM and a few players. Fewer works; more gets hard to give everyone a turn.
Dice. A polyhedral set — d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20 and a percentile die. The d20 does most of the work; the rest mostly measure damage and healing. One set between two people is survivable, and any dice-rolling app is free.
A character each. A character sheet is just the record of who your character is and what they can do. You can fill one in on paper, or use the character builder here, which walks the same decisions as a form.
Somewhere to play. A table, or a voice call. The game does not care.
You do not need to have read the rules. One person who knows roughly how it works is enough to get five people through a first evening.
This section is the one piece of advice on this page that is not a rule — no book requires it, and it will improve your game more than any rule here.
Before the first session, talk about what you are all in for. How often you can realistically play and for how long. What kind of story you want: grim survival, heroic adventure, comedy. What nobody at the table wants to encounter in a game — everyone has something, and it is far easier to say so in advance than in the middle of a scene.
It takes twenty minutes and it prevents most of the ways a group falls apart.
This site covers the 2024 rules, and it is arranged so that nothing is explained twice.
Terms with a dashed underline are definitions. Point at one — like Advantage — and the full text opens where you are. Every one of them lives in the Rules Glossary, so the wiki pages can explain how the pieces fit together without restating what each piece is.
Anything the database holds in full is linked, not copied. The classes, species, spells and monsters have their own pages, with the real numbers on them.
Where to go next:
If you would rather just start, make a character and read the rest as it comes up. That is how most people learn this game, and it works.