If you’re a Dungeon Master, you’ve got it pretty good when it comes to instruction and inspiration. There are YouTube channels, blogs, and whole podcasts dedicated to how to prep an adventure, how to run a session, how to build a campaign. That’s one of the things I try to help with here on Ruckerworks. The official rulebooks give you entire chapters walking you through adventure prep step by step, and the 2024 version of 5e from WotC does an especially good job of it.
If you’re a player, what’s actually out there to help you not just learn how to play, but how to play well?
Go look, and you’ll find the choices from WotC are thin. That’s a real gap, and it leaves the rest of us in the D&D content space on the hook to fill it in. In this article, I want to talk about why that gap between DM resources and player resources exists, and share two approaches that have actually helped new players get up to speed a bit quicker.
The Rulebook Gap Wizards of the Coast Left Open
When I first started playing D&D back in 1980, there was no YouTube or World Wide Web. You and your friends bought the books, or the basic set, sat down and figured it out together. If you were lucky, you found an existing group, or a DM who maybe had three sessions more experience than you did. That was the entire learning process.
Learning D&D back in the day was trial and error, like getting a bookshelf from IKEA with no instructions for how to assemble it.
There was no player education back then. There was barely any DM education either, other than the little bit tucked into the Basic Set’s rulebook. Everybody was figuring it out as they went.
Here’s what’s strange when you look at the situation today. DMs have an almost endless well of instruction available to them, while players get plenty of “here’s how to do it” content online, but it’s far less coherent. It tends to be specialized around a particular edition, or shaped heavily by the preferences and opinions of whoever’s making the video.
Learning 5th edition is admittedly a bit different than learning Shadowdark or Old-School Essentials, but the fundamentals are the same across all of them. I’m not talking about the syntax of one edition’s rules versus another. I’m talking about solid, instructional material on how to be a genuinely good player, something that holds up no matter which rule set you’re sitting down with.
The reason this gap exists for players is simple. The official Wizards rulebooks left a hole, and that hole is still there.
How I Learned D&D (Twice)
Back in 2016, when I started playing 5e, the first thing I did was buy the three core rulebooks and read them cover to cover. Keep in mind, at that point I’d already been playing D&D for over three decades. I went down to the local game shop for open-table night thinking I’d slot right into a group and play with the best of them.
I realized pretty quickly that despite having the fundamentals down, enough had changed that I still needed to brush up. I got up to speed at a decent pace, but only because I learned it the old-fashioned way.
I sat down with a DM and a group of players who already knew the game, and they walked me through it as we went. It was learning by example.
I still think that’s the best way to learn. But it comes with a caveat. You end up learning a style of play that mirrors that particular group, which isn’t a problem if you never plan to sit at anyone else’s table, but it’s worth knowing that’s what’s happening.
Teaching a Revolving Door of D&D Beginners
These days, my primary D&D experience is running the teen program at my local public library. I’m one of two DMs running biweekly games there, and about 98 percent of the kids who show up have never played before in their life.
In two years, I’ve had 21 different kiddos play D&D for the very first time at my table.
That means what constitutes a Session 0 in my group (it’s different; see below) usually eats the entire two-hour block. I’m not just rolling up characters with them. I’m teaching them, in real time, how to actually play the game. We cover what a DC check means, how armor class works, and what initiative is. We even go over table etiquette and the social expectations that a lot of us take for granted after years at the table. Even after all that, I’m still teaching them as we go, session after session.
That’s fine, and honestly it’s the best way I know to teach the game. But here’s the thing. If the official Player’s Handbook actually did its job, I wouldn’t need an entire two-hour block just to get new players to a point where they can play at a basic level.
Here’s why we don’t have a formal Session 0 in our group. My situation is complicated further because we don’t start fresh with everyone at once. We have an established group, and when one kid drops out, a new one takes their seat. The rest of the table has some experience but is still learning the ropes themselves, so I end up integrating a total newcomer while the actual game is already in motion.
If new players showed up with even a little decent training already under their belt, my job would be a lot easier.
D&D is Simple to Learn But Hard to Master
The fundamentals of playing D&D are genuinely simple, and they take about a minute to explain.
The DM tells you what you see. You tell the DM what you do. The DM tells you what happens. Rinse and repeat. That’s it. You’re playing D&D.
Playing it well is an entirely different matter, and that can take months or years. What counts as good play is also genuinely subjective. What one table finds fun and engaging, another table might find slow or pointless. There’s no single correct way to play (that’s a good thing), which is exactly why there are so many videos online about how to play D&D that don’t agree with each other. Learning to play D&D well is a bigger challenge than most people realize, precisely because there’s no consensus on what “well” even means.
Why Online D&D Instruction Isn’t Enough
This is the actual point of this article. The official D&D rulebooks don’t adequately prepare new players to become effective, confident players at the table. Not because it’s impossible to teach. WotC just never really tried.
There’s a mountain of content online trying to fill that space, but most of it comes with a catch. It’s somebody’s personal brand of how to play D&D, or a claim that one edition is the right one, or one play style is the best way to do it. A new player wading through all of that isn’t getting neutral instruction. They’re getting someone’s opinion dressed up as an implied best practice.
Two Ways To Learn D&D That Have Actually Worked For Me
I can tell you what’s worked for me, both as that brand new player back in 1980 and as the guy teaching a constantly rotating group of teenagers experiencing the game for the very first time.
Reading a transcript of actual play.
This is a no-pressure way to get exposed to the game. The old Basic Set rulebook included two of these transcripts, and they were fantastic. A new player could sit with one and absorb the rhythm of the game before ever picking up dice. When I wrote Ashes of Isar, my own WWII espionage RPG, I made sure to include a sample play transcript in the rulebook for the same reason.
You might ask why not just watch an actual game on YouTube instead. That can work, but something subtle happens when you learn that way. You get exposed to the mechanics, but it’s conveyed in a way that implies a particular social style of play is the way the game works. I’ve noticed that teens who show up to the library’s games after watching actual play online arrive with a strong sense of how the game should feel or how everyone should behave, but very little understanding of the mechanics and almost no sense of how to actually play well. It’s an odd phenomenon I haven’t fully figured out.
I had one teen show up thrilled about D&D because he’d seen it on the hit Netflix show, Stranger Things. He figured our sessions would go exactly like the show, and told me flat out that the character Eddie was the greatest DM who ever lived. No pressure. What threw him, though, was realizing our game wasn’t connected to the show at all. He genuinely thought every D&D game followed the same plot and the same events.
Running a sample combat before the real thing.
A short demo session, especially a sample combat encounter, is one of the most useful parts of an expanded Session 0. Combat is usually the most overwhelming part of the game for a brand new player, so walking through one together, with low stakes, before the real game starts, does more good than any amount of explaining the rules out loud. With new players joining an existing group mid-campaign, this gets trickier to pull off, but I try to carve out ten or fifteen minutes of practice play where damage and death don’t count, with the veteran players joining in, before we dive into the real session.
I’ve also tried writing up a tutorial handout for the kids, and it never worked. To them it felt like homework. Written cheat sheets have occasionally helped adult players, mostly for summarizing character creation options, but they’ve never done much for teaching actual play.
What’s Worked Doesn’t Mean What’s Required
Both of these, written transcripts and demo play inside an expanded Session 0, have worked for me. That doesn’t mean they’re the only way to do it. Every table is different, and every group of players is different. But if you’re a DM bringing in new players and you’re waiting for the rulebook to do that teaching for you, you’ll be waiting a long time.
If you’re brand new to the game yourself, the Player’s Handbook will do a fine job walking you through character creation. Just don’t expect it to teach you how to actually play. That part is still on the rest of us. And be aware that watching live-play sessions on YouTube should be considered entertainment more than education.
