Someone on a Dungeons and Dragons Facebook group I follow was looking for someone to teach him how to play D&D. He wanted to play but didn’t know any groups. That’s not unusual. With Critical Role and other actual play streams, there are a lot of new people in the hobby who weren’t introduced by an established group.

The thing that stuck out to me was that the person claimed to have spent $250 and had not yet played the game!

It wasn’t like that in the olden days…

I grew up in a blue collar family. My dad worked in factories. My mom worked in restaurants and as a receiving clerk at a distribution center.

I was never hungry or cold but didn’t have a lot of disposable income for amusements. Most of our entertainment was “do it yourself” and low cost.

I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons with friends when I was 12. We had one set of books among us and shared dice. Our character sheets were 4×6 index cards or a sheet of notebook paper. I got a player’s handbook spending some money I was gifted for my birthday. I would pick up Dragon magazine from time to time. I had a color mismatched set of dice that I bought from a discount bin at the counter of the B.Dalton book store.

I didn’t have much of a D&D collection until I was in my late teens and had a job. Even then, I bought the core books and a few of the DMing aids TSR put out in the 2nd Edition era.

In my senior year of high school I played a lot with guys I worked with at a restaurant. Most of them had less money than I did. We shared player’s handbooks. We used photocopies of photocopied character sheets or made our own. Our table was a sheet of plywood on some saw horses, or a beat up thrift store kitchen table, or sometimes no table at all.

Dungeons & Dragons is a big money brand now

D&D is a “lifestyle brand.” There’s a cookbook, t-shirts (I own a few), a Hand of Vecna sculpture was just announced by Wizkids for $130, jewelry, gaming tables, and on and on. I don’t begrudge anyone the income. The gods know I’d love to make my living selling games and stories.

What I don’t like is that the culture around 5E makes it seem like you can’t play unless you drop a lot of cash on a D&D Beyond subscription, a Roll20 subscription, a bespoke dice set, handmade dice bag on Etsy, and a custom miniature for your character at HeroForge.

I’m not saying you should not spend money on the hobby. I’m saying that gamers with limited resources may feel like they are not welcome and I don’t like that.

You can have the time of your life playing Dungeons & Dragons without spending a lot of money.

If you are a player, a PHB and some dice is all you need.

Maybe your friends will share their dice with you. A second hand copy is good enough. If you want to be the Dungeon Master, you need a copy of the DMG and the Monster Manual. The 5E DMG leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to teaching you how to build adventures, campaigns and setting.

Fortunately, the internet has an incredible amount of resources for game mastering advice. Check out my recommendations page for some links. Do a search online and you will find more than enough videos, blog posts, message boards, and groups to educate yourself.

As a Dungeon Master, you become a better DM by creating your own material.

Here’s a secret. Most of the published adventures and campaigns are not worth your money. Many of them are bad. Your hard earned gold pieces are much better spent on a box of pencils, some graph paper and a binder. Watch a few actual plays, read some blogs and do it yourself. Creating adventures and campaign settings is an enjoyable and inexpensive hobby all on its own. There’s plenty of material on this blog to get you started.

There is so much cheap and free stuff online that you don’t have to buy anything once you own the core books. You could run adventures for years and never have to spend a copper.

If you want terrain, there are a several YouTube channels dedicated to teaching you how to make terrain out of cardboard painted up with inexpensive acrylics from a craft store. There are free character sheets, dungeon maps, campaign settings, paper miniatures, and monsters in such abundance that you will never have to buy anything from anyone to have a great time.

Old School Renaissance retro-clones are an unbeatable value

If you know a group of people who would like to play old school Basic, Original, or Advanced Dungeons and Dragons but you don’t have any of those books, you are in luck.

There are free PDF’s of all the major clones of those games. PDFs of the published versions are inexpensive on DriveThruRPG. If you want a hard copy, you can get them for very reasonable prices and most of them are an entire game in one book. For less than dinner and a movie, you can have a complete game, dice and everything you need.

The Old School Renaissance blogs are a treasure trove of gaming experience, advice, adventures, monsters, campaign settings, rule variants and entire games. Not only that, there is a whole community of people who love to help others learn this style of play. Many run games online or in your local area and are very welcoming to open minded people who want try something different.

Dungeon terrain, miniature, battle mats, sparkly dice, the newest expansion book…those are all cool. I have spent a fair amount of money on some of that stuff.

You don’t have to do that to get started.

You don’t have to do that, ever, if you don’t have the money or don’t want to.

Here is a great post from Dungeons & Possums with suggestions and links to everything you need to start playing OSR games for FREE!