I felt equally excited and overwhelmed when I first decided to learn to play Dungeons & Dragons. I wanted to play, but at the same time, I was also a 30-something-year-old adult with anxiety who would rather chew through her fingers than walk into a board game store and ask for help.
So I did what any reasonable person would do and grabbed the ginormous tome that makes up the Dungeons & Dragons player handbook. I lugged to the table the monstrously thick Dungeon Masters manual, and I practised bench pressing with the Monster manual before getting to work.
Many hours, YouTube videos, snacks, and games later, I was finally done with the books and ready to play, only to realise that while I had taken on the burden of all the heavy reading, my 30-year-old friends had not. It was now up to me to teach them, a task more arduous than learning the game myself.
Now I don’t say this to put anyone off from learning to play Dungeons & Dragons, and in all likelihood, I could have saved myself a world of trouble had I just gone and asked for help. However, learning to play Dungeons & Dragons for the first time is a lot. If you suffer from anxiety as I do and don’t want to ask a stranger for help, it can feel like suddenly getting a second job. One that doesn’t pay, which is where Before the Storm comes into play.
Before the Storm is disgustingly simple, the entire game is as complex as any choose-your-own-adventure book for your childhood. But it’s in that simplicity that the game truly shines. Inherently, Dungeons & Dragons is a simple game.
Dungeons & Dragons is a game that grows and expands with complexity the longer you play and the further you progress. Still, the rules players need to know and understand before playing are few and far between, and once they have the basics down, the rest of the game flows naturally.
In the 80s, when Dungeons & Dragons was first finding its feet, the Basic Set came complete with a solo choose-your-own-adventure to help introduce new players to the basic rules. However, this system never really found its footing and was soon forgotten about as future generations of the game were released, which is what Before the Storm aims to bring back.
Before the Storm is a game that payers can play straight from their browser, players can then choose from one of five characters options: human, paladin, hill dwarf cleric, lightfoot halfling rogue, high elf wizard, or wood elf fighter and adventure through a short story that introduces many of the rules of 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons.
One of the biggest hurdles my friends and I faced when playing Dungeons & Dragons for the first time was figuring out what class to play and what each class would bring to the table. Then we struggled to craft a backstory for our characters, which would lay the groundwork for who our characters are and how they came to be. Finally, and most importantly, we needed help to figure out what dice to roll, when, and how to work out modifiers.
Before the Storm explains all these things in a way everyone from a small child to my grandmother will understand. The game is entirely text-based, and players will find themselves reading and choosing one of the available responses to a situation.
While it feels overly simplistic sometimes, it does a solid job of setting players up to start playing the game. At the end of the Before the Storm campaign, players will find themselves at the start point of the latest Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set, Dragons of Stormwreck Isle, with each of the characters players played corresponding to one of the Starter Sets pre-generated characters.
Before the Storm is part of a significant push by Wizards of the Coast to make the game less intimidating for newcomers who haven’t grown up playing Dungeons & Dragons but would very much like to learn. While it doesn’t do away with the need for outside learning, it does help make the very basics set in and not feel overly intimidating.
If you want to try out Before the Storm, follow the link here. Excuse us; we have a Starter Set to dive into… I mean news… we have news to dive into and report on.