New to D&D, what should I buy?

Damo_108

Hi everyone, I’m located in Dublin, I’ve been interested in dungeons and dragons for a long time now, I did a lot of research, and I’d like to play with miniatures, but I don’t know where To buy the assets, also what do I need to play with miniatures. Please help. Also is it better to play d&d without miniatures?

DinoRex

Damo_108 wrote: »

Hi everyone, I’m located in Dublin, I’ve been interested in dungeons and dragons for a long time now, I did a lot of research, and I’d like to play with miniatures, but I don’t know where To buy the assets, also what do I need to play with miniatures. Please help. Also is it better to play d&d without miniatures?

Miniatures aren't terribly important. If you're really in it for the combat mechanics as opposed the role playing then they'll probably make things more engaging for you. Expensive to collect miniatures though, especially the official ones.

Speedwell

I started playing tabletop D&D in 1979. We didn't even have D&D miniatures until a couple years after that. But you can use anything you like for map markers if you want; we used the kind of miniature diorama figures that people make who do tabletop war reenactments. Or just use spare dice (a party of six can be neatly depicted by a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20).

Damo_108

Thank you, but do you know any place in town that sells them?

Speedwell

Damo_108 wrote: »

Thank you, but do you know any place in town that sells them?

I'm an American expat living in Sligo, but on my first trip to Dublin I had a dig through the dice at this shop: https://www.facebook.com/GWDublin/ I don't buy miniatures anymore, but I'm sure they can hook you up.

Damo_108

sorry I’m asking so many questions, I haven’t actually played the game yet, would you recommend buying the “d&d starter set”? and if I’d play with miniatures, should I get terrain blocks?

Speedwell

Damo_108 wrote: »

sorry I’m asking so many questions, I haven’t actually played the game yet, would you recommend buying the “d&d starter set”? and if I’d play with miniatures, should I get terrain blocks?

Oh, no worries, ask away. I recommend the starter set because it will have the basic stuff designed for beginners and will ease your way in.

Don't worry about terrain blocks yet. Print out some hex grid from a site like this https://incompetech.com/graphpaper/hexagonal/ and tape sheets together to make a plot as large as your game table. Colour in the hexes to make your terrain and/or dungeon maps. Half the fun is making your maps! You use hex grid because you typically roll a six-sided die (d6) to determine where your character moves or in which direction something lies or is approaching from. If you want to show that a character is in flight, raise it from the map on something small (an extra die will do). That's about all you will need to start off with.

Old farts like me remember when it was the custom to give the new group member their first set of dice. I just poked through my dice box and laughed; I have dice in there that are older than my mother was when I started playing. Feel free to ask me anything you like about game play; I've played or beta-tested fifty games in the 1980-2000 time period and helped write a couple.

Bob Bob

Building up a collection of miniatures is a massive and expensive undertaking. Every single new character is a new miniature and there are literally 100's if not 1000's of monsters types each in a wide variety of poses. Typically I have found that the players provide their own mini's for their own characters and the DM provides the rest (though some veteran players might have their own collection to supplement this. For buy mini's, shopping online will give a much wider market and for much cheaper (places like Reaper Miniatures for one)

A very common strategy for the monsters is to use printed tokens (google "dnd monster token" for thousands of examples) and its certainly much more forgiving on the wallet.

Greyjoy

Have a listen to the latest episode of the Irish gaming podcast "The Adventuring Party". They give a run-through of all the core D&D source books and how useful/necessary each one is.

Adventuring Party D&D 5th ed sourcebooks

I found this series of animated videos a handy intro to 5th ed - How to play 5e

Mollyb60

When I started playing my group bought a warhammer set of elves and just used those to represent our party. I still have the little miniature (with my terrible paint job) and use her a lot when we're playing. We drew squares on polypockets with marker to make grids and put pages into the polypockets to set up the map. DIY for the win!

Tweedle Faduh

The starter set is great to get you going. Has everything you need rules wise and per rolled characters. The campaign is well laid out and interesting. It's great for a first time DM as it introduces rules gradually.
As for miniatures, you don't really need them at first. Have a couple of games with just pen and paper, drawing out the location roughly and marking where characters.monsters are.
Gamesworkshop and Gamersworld sell miniatures but not specifically for D and D but some might match the character.
If you enjoy the game then the Players handbook and monster manual are probably your next purchase. The dungeon masters guide gives you lots of information if you want to create your own campaigns/adventures. There are lots of pre-written campaigns out there so you don't really need the DM guide, it's the book I use the least.

Kendaan

If the miniature are really important for you, I'd give a look at D&D 4 which gameplay need them quite a bit.