TL;DR

I’m curiuos about Dungeons & Dragons and Role-Play Gaming at large.

Curiosity does not mean I will like it, anyway, especially considering that it seems to require quite some time and I’m not sure I even have that time to invest.

So I’m looking for some smaller experience to get the taste of it and decide whether to go more in depth or not. To this regard I thought to start with a Play-by-Post site, so that I will not waste anyone else’s time either, and I found this post on Reddit about a Discord server.

Being a total newbie, this was a bit… daunting. Lot of jargon, instructions seem clear although a bit blunt and the reliance on outside tools like D&D Beyond and Avrae just add to the complexity.

Even following the instructions and sticking with some of the more beginner-friendly things is prone to roadblocks. As an example, I chose to be a dwarf (remember Urist McLumberjack?!?) and had to choose between one from the hills and one from the mountain. Then, at some time, it becomes clear that telling the game I’m a Mountaindwarf will get me nowhere:

So it seems that I can access what goes under the name of Systems Reference Document, which includes dwarves, hill dwarves but not mountain dwarves. What The… Fiction!

It then turned out that it’s possible to import additional stuff of this like (I’m not even sure what this stuff will be used for), by using the following JSON as a global variable in Avrae:

[
 {
  "name":"Mountain Dwarf",
  "counters":[],
  "cvars":{
   "race":"Mountain Dwarf",
   "speed":"25 ft.",
   "languages":"Common, Dwarvish",
   "size":"Medium",
   "creatureType":"Humanoid",
   "resist":"Poison",
   "immune":"",
   "cimmune":"",
   "vuln":"",
   "senses":"Darkvision 60 ft."
  }
 }
]

I could not find it anywhere else, so there you go.

So far I’d say that this experience is not encouraging. I’ll probably better find something less computerish to get started and have an idea, we’ll see.

Stay safe everybody!