This is a total, complete newbie's guide to D&D, so let's start with the very basics: How to D&D. The primary mechanic of D&D is that you roll a twenty-sided die (called a d20, and if you roll two of them it'll be written 2d20, whereas rolling 2 standard six-sided dice would be 2d6, and so on), you add a modifier number from your character sheet to the roll, and you compare the total to a target number that the guy running the game knows. If you got at least as high as the target number, you succeed. Otherwise, you fail. There may be additional benefits for getting at least a certain amount above the target number. Most games call target numbers "target numbers" because that makes sense, but D&D has lots of archaic terminology that persists largely because of inertia (5e cut down on this kind of thing compared to previous editions, but there's still some niggling weirdness). In this case, you'll see target numbers called the "difficulty class" or more often DC for short. So a DC 15 is something which you need to get a total of 15 on in order to succeed at. If you want to stab a goblin, the DC to stab him is 15, and you have a +3 to stabbing, you need to roll a 12 or higher on the d20 in order to stab him.<br/><br/>Now in order to make a character, you will need to do one of two things:<br/><br/>-Download the basic rules (http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/basicrules) for free from Wizards of the Coast. This contains everything you need to play, but not all races, classes, and backgrounds are available. Also, it only goes up to somewhere around level 5, but that's as high as Lost Mines of Phandelver goes, so it's cool.<br/>-Acquire the full Player's Handbook. This goes all the way to level 20 and has some extra races, classes, and backgrounds.<br/><br/>You'll also want a character sheet on which to keep track of all the stuff we're about to write down. Easiest way is to make one on myth-weavers.com for free. You can also google for "D&D 5e character sheet" and find one you can print off, although that means sending me pictures of the character sheet periodically instead of just giving me the link to your myth-weavers sheet and then whenever you change anything on your sheet, I'll see it automatically because it is on the internet. Bonus stuff from Elemental Evil, Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, and Volo's Guide to Monsters isn't going to be allowed in this campaign because it's supposed to be simple for new players. We're going to build a sample character named Example McDemonstrate and you can see his finished sheet here (http://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=1024214) to follow along.<br/><br/><strong>Step One: Class</strong><br/><br/>Ability scores and races are both described before classes for no particular reason except that older editions did it this way, but you actually want to start by selecting a class. Example McDemonstrate is a first level Fighter, so that gets written down as "Fighter 1." Don't worry about why we mark down the level after the class when there's already a spot for level on the sheet, it has to do with leveling up, which we'll get to later. Your level is going to be 1, current XP is going to be 0, and XP to next level is going to be 300. Deity is not important unless you are a Cleric.<br/><br/><strong>Step Two: Ability Scores</strong><br/><br/>Next up, ability scores, which you'll probably hear me call "attributes" a lot. I'm not actually sure where I picked that nomenclature up. Anyways, your ability scores are Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. These are the basic building blocks of what your character can do, and they are also a legacy mechanic more complex and confusing than any other stage of chargen. The easiest way to explain how this mess works is to explain how we got here. Clear back in OD&D, attributes went from 3 to 18. Don't worry about why, because the mechanics that used those scores are completely incompatible with 5e. However, for whatever reason, the people designing later editions of D&D decided they still wanted ability scores to be about the same range, even though the mechanics for 5e are such that you actually want the bonus to go from about -1 to +5. Here's how they made that work: Every two points of ability<em>score</em>changes your ability<em>modifier</em>by one point. So, if your Strength<em>score</em>is 10 or 11, you have a +0 Strength<em>modifier</em>, and that modifier is the thing you actually add to your d20 rolls when you are doing Strength-related tasks. If you think this is confusing bullshit that should've been simplified to just actually having the scores be -1 to +5,<em>you're not wrong</em>, but it's pretty much the only thing like this in 5e, so we won't have to deal with this again (the amount of confusing bullshit in most other RPGs is staggering - explaining 3.5e means untangling stuff like this at almost every stage of chargen).<br/><br/>So you're going to assign your ability<em>scores</em>of 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, and 8 to the six attributes, and that's going to give them ability<em>modifiers</em>of +2, +2, +1, +1, +0, and -1. Generally speaking this is written as 15 (+2), 14 (+2), and so on. Remember, the number in parentheses isn't added to the first number, it's derived from the first number and added to your d20 rolls. Going over the basic rules classes real quick, if you are a Fighter you want your Strength and Constitution to be high, if you are a Rogue you want your Dexterity and Intelligence to be high, if you are a Cleric all you care about is Wisdom, and if you are a Wizard all you care about is Intelligence. Nobody in the basic classes particularly cares about Charisma. You'll also want to give some consideration to the character you're building, of course, but if the character you're building has terrible Strength, they are probably not<em>actually</em>a Fighter. There are other classes who hit people with swords.<br/><br/>Example McDemonstrate is a Fighter, so he's putting his best stat into Strength and his second best into Constitution (how hard to kill he is). His lowest stat will be Wisdom, because he's kind of a short-sighted blockhead, his third-best stat will be Charisma, because he's too sexy for his shirt, and we'll just fill in Dexterity and Intelligence with whatever's left.<br/><br/><strong>Step Three: Race</strong><br/><br/>Race gives you a couple of neat little features like being able to see in the dark or knowing a minor magic spell or being good at hiding behind people bigger than you, but the main thing about races is that they come with attribute bonuses. These are added to your ability<em>score</em>, and don't necessarily increase your ability<em>modifier</em>. All races but Human and Half-Elf have +2 to one ability score and +1 to another. Humans have +1 to every ability score and Half-Elves have +2 Charisma and +1 to two other ability scores of their choice. A +2<em>always</em>increases the ability modifier by 1, for example, the 15 (+2) becomes a 17 (+3) and the 14 (+2) becomes a 16 (+3). The +1 only increases an ability modifier if it the ability score is odd. For example, the 15 (+2) becomes a 16 (+3), but the 14 (+2) becomes a 15 (+2). Now, an important thing to remember about D&D is that you are on a team, and if you are bad at something someone else is probably good at it. You have an 8 (-1) on your character sheet, but your solution to that should not be to dump resources into shoring up that weakness. Your solution should be to avoid ever having to roll anything to do with that particular ability. Have your friends do it instead. If you're picking a race for their ability bonuses at all (as opposed to just picking whichever one you like the best, which is also fine), pick one of the ones that has a +2 to your<em>highest</em>stat. Fighters want to be mountain dwarves, half-orcs, or dragonborn, Rogues want to be halflings or elves of any sort, Wizards want to be gnomes, and Clerics are fucked because there are no races with +2 Wisdom. Example McDemonstrate wants high STR and CON, which means mountain dwarf looks good since they're goddamn cheaters with +2 to both, but he also wants to be too sexy for his shirt, and while mountain dwarves do not technically have Charisma penalties, they are still hairy midgets, so he'll instead take half-orc, which has +2 STR and +1 CON.<br/><br/>I'll point something out here: If Example McDemonstrate picked his race<em>first</em>, he'd know to make his STR the<em>fourteen</em>and his CON the fifteen instead of the other way around, so that the half-orc bonuses would make them both sixteen, so they would both be +3. Picking race as step two is actually the smart way to build a character, but picking ability scores first is the least confusing way, since ability scores are such an important part of race selection.<br/><br/>In any case, McDemonstrate gets a couple of other things from being a half-orc. His size is medium, his speed is 30 (like most medium creatures), he gets the languages Common and Orc automatically, he's automatically proficient in the Intimidate skill (we'll talk about that shortly), and he gets three special tricks for his Features and Traits section: Darkvision out to sixty feet and some stuff that makes him hard to kill and good at hitting people very hard in the face. His Relentless Endurance feature can only be used once before he takes a long rest (which means sleeping for eight hours), so he puts a little box by it like this [ ] so that he can fill it in like this [X] when it's used up.<br/><br/><strong>Step Four: Class Features and Skills</strong><br/><br/>Skills form a significant chunk of your class features so we'll talk about them together. To understand skills, you must understand proficiencies. Depending on how high your level is, you have a certain proficiency bonus. At level 1, it's always +2. Anything you are proficient in, you get a +2 bonus to the die roll in addition to your relevant ability modifier. If you are not proficient in something, you must only use the ability modifier. So, McDemonstrate's Charisma is 13 (+1). Intimidation is a Charisma-based skill, so ordinarily he would roll a twenty-sided die, add 1 to the total, and that would be his result. However, because he is a half-orc, McDemonstrate is automatically proficient in Intimidate, which means he gets to add his proficiency bonus as well. This means his total Intimidate bonus is +3. For ease of reference, he writes down +3 in the Intimidate box under Charisma and checks the box to show that he is proficient in that skill.<br/><br/>An ability save works the exact same way. As a Fighter, McDemonstrate is proficient with Strength and Constitution saves. His 17 (+3) STR gives him a STR save of +5 total, and his 15 (+2) CON gives him a CON save of +4 total. His other saves are simply equal to their respective ability modifier. Saves are used as a reaction to something bad happening to try and save you from the badness. For example, Constitution saves are used to avoid ill effects from poison and disease while Wisdom saves are used to avoid being affected by most mind-altering magic and Dexterity saves are used to dodge traps and other catastrophe. Strength, Intelligence, and Charisma saves don't tend to get as much love.<br/><br/>Other things McDemonstrate gets for being a Fighter are his HP. Don't worry about hit dice right now, instead just focus on the HP at first level. For McDemonstrate, a Fighter, it's 10 plus his Constitution modifier (so, 12 total). Fighters have a bit more HP than most classes. 8 + CON is average at level 1.<br/><br/>The next thing McDemonstrate gets for being a Fighter is weapon and armor proficiencies. When you don't have a proficiency, you take some fairly nasty penalties. -4 to all attack rolls made with a weapon you don't know how to use, and I can't even remember what the penalty is for armor because the takeaway is to avoid stuff you aren't proficient in if at all possible. Since McDemonstrate is a Fighter with literally all of the weapon and armor proficiencies, he can just use whatever.<br/><br/>McDemonstrate also gets skills. Skills are groups of specific things you can be good at, and you can either be proficient in a skill or not. Each skill is associated with a certain ability, and by default you have that ability's modifier as a bonus to the skill. If you are proficient in the skill, you get your proficiency bonus. So, McDemonstrate is proficient in Intimidate and gets a +3, but all his other Charisma skills he is not proficient in, so he defaults to his Charisma modifier of +1. He gets two new skills from the Fighter list, so he's going to pick Perception, because it's the skill that lets you not get ambushed, and Athletics, because he's a jock.<br/><br/>McDemonstrate automatically gets a number of features for being a Fighter, which he writes down with his (significantly less impressive) race features in Features & Traits. Several of these are recovered after a short rest, which takes only an hour, as opposed to a long rest, which takes 8. To help keep track of the difference, McDemonstrate marks these as ( ) rather than [ ].<br/><br/><strong>Step Five: Equipment</strong><br/><br/>You<em>can</em>just take a lump sum of gold and spend it all in the equipment chapter, but you're probably better off taking the class recommended equipment picks. McDemonstrate is a heavily armed melee sort of Fighter, so he takes the chain mail, a martial weapon (specifically, a long sword) and shield, a light crossbow and twenty bolts for use at range, and an explorer's pack. How does all this nonsense work?<br/><br/>A weapon has basically three components, an associated attribute, damage dice, and damage type. The attribute for most melee weapons is Strength, which means that the attack bonus is your Strength score plus your proficiency bonus if you're proficient. You may have some additional bonuses to this if, for example, you have the Archery feature and get +2 to all ranged attacks, but McDemonstrate doesn't have anything like that (he took the Defense fighting style). What he does have is +3 STR and a +2 proficiency bonus, so his longsword is a +5 attack bonus. It deals 1d8 damage by default, but he gets to add his STR modifier (but<em>not</em>his proficiency bonus) for 1d8+3 total. The damage type is slashing. This means that creatures which resist piercing and/or bludgeoning damage will still take full damage from his weapon, but creatures which resist slashing damage will only take half damage. McDemonstrate's crossbow is a ranged weapon. Those use Dexterity, and McDemonstrate's DEX is +1, plus his proficiency means +3 to the attack roll and 1d8+1 damage, and it's piercing damage.<br/><br/>The way armor works is that it makes you harder to hit, rather than reducing damage when you are hit. That seems weird, but the idea is that your armor is basically impenetrable at its hard points, and in order to wound an armored foe you must hit the weakspots, which are smaller and smaller as the armor gets better and better. This doesn't really map well to giants and dragons with superhuman Strength scores, because this is actually a holdover from back when D&D was a set of minor rules modifications on a medieval combat war game that had very few trolls or giants at all, but here we are.<br/><br/>So, armor sets your base Armor Class (AC), which is the target number an enemy has to hit with their attack roll in order to deal their damage to you, and is divided into three types, light, medium, and heavy. Light armor allows you to add your full Dexterity modifier to your AC. Medium armor allows you to add your Dexterity modifier to a maximum of +2. Heavy armor allows you to add your modifier up to a maximum of +0 (so penalties still count). McDemonstrate's chain mail has a base AC of 16 and is heavy armor, so while normally his +1 DEX would increase that to 17, he's forced to ignore it and take the 16 instead. His shield gives him a +2, and his Defense fighting style from the Fighter class gives him an additional +1 whenever he's wearing any kind of armor, which is going to be basically all the time. 16+2+1 is a total of 19 AC, so enemies will have to get a total of 19 or higher when attacking to hit McDemonstrate. If McDemonstrate were to fight an evil clone of himself in melee, he'd have to roll a 14 on the die plus his +5 bonus to his longsword in order to hit the doppleganger. If McDemonstrate had taken the leather armor option, his base AC would only be 11. He would benefit from his DEX bonus of +1, but even so his total would be the much lower 11+2+1+1 or 15 altogether.<br/><br/>What's the difference between an adventurer's pack and a dungeoneer's pack? Adventurer's pack has camping supplies and dungeoneer's pack has climbing equipment. There's also stuff like a scholar's pack, which has parchment and ink, or a burglar's pack, which has lockpicks. What they all have in common is that they come with a bunch of food, and making sure you don't run out of food is what's important.<br/><br/><strong>Step Six: Background and Tool Proficiencies</strong><br/><br/>Backgrounds provide fairly minor mechanical bonuses, but are mostly there for flavor. Pick whichever one best suits the character you're creating. It's pretty much impossible to cripple a character by picking the wrong background. That background is going to give you some skills, some languages, some proficiencies, and one more feature for your Features & Traits section. So, what's up with tool proficiencies? Tool proficiencies are basically skills, but they aren't associated with any particular ability modifier. The example given is that a woodcutter tool proficiency might use DEX plus proficiency bonus for the modifier on a roll to carve soft wood, but STR plus proficiency when carving hard wood. McDemonstrate is, it turns out, a highwayman (a<em>sexy</em>highwayman), and has the Criminal background, which gives him proficiency with thieves' tools and one type of gaming set. He's going with dice.<br/><br/>Each background also comes with four tables of character traits. You can roll randomly on each of these tables, just pick whichever one you like best, or make up your own. They have zero mechanical impact. Related is alignment, which used to have mechanical effect but by now I'm pretty sure doesn't. I've played entire campaigns with alignments taken from the Magic: the Gathering color wheel instead of the D&D alignment grid (Example McDemonstrate is Red alignment, for example) without even telling the GM and it never came up.<br/><br/>Also, some niggling details are that your initiative bonus is equal to your DEX modifier and your passive perception is equal to 10 plus your perception score. There's a lot of extra stuff on the second page of the Myth Weavers sheet. None of it means anything. It's not in the actual D&D books. It's stuff Myth Weavers added on, and a lot of is redundant to the personality traits that are on the first trait. Don't worry about them.<br/><br/>And that is it. You have now made a D&D 5e character.