Game Review: Dungeons & Dragons Essentials: Rules Compendium

Dungeons & Dragons is the granddaddy of tabletop fantasy roleplaying games. As the most popular rule set for running RPG adventures, it has a massive player base but can look a little frightening to new players who are trying to get into the game for the first time. Wizards of the Coast has addressed the game’s steep learning curve with their new line of Dungeons & Dragons Essentials, books and accessories designed specifically to bring players into the game armed with all the knowledge and goodies they’ll need to start slaying kobolds right away. The core book at the center of the new line is Dungeons & Dragons Essentials: Rules Compendium. It released at the end of September, and here’s a look at how it can get you up to speed.

Prior to the D&D Essentials line, reading up on the world and rules of Dungeons & Dragons involved poring through several big and weighty hardcovers. The Essentials line distills the information from those hardcovers into smaller and more manageable paperbacks that feel a lot less daunting to new players. The Rules Compendium is the core release, targeted at both players and Dungeon Masters. It functions well as both a book to read from cover to cover and as a reference manual. This book assumes no knowledge at the beginning and deftly baby steps players into the fantasy roleplaying genre before gradually introducing them to the specific ways and means of D&D.

After an introductory chapter about how roleplaying works in general, there’s a chapter succinctly titled “The Basics.” This 36 page section lives up to its placement among the essentials, as it clearly describes everything from basic game mechanics to gaming etiquette to even a survey of the world of Dungeons & Dragons. This is a lot of great information, organized in an easily digestible format with large type, organized sections, and informative sidebars. After reading the first chapter, anyone should have a good grasp on the rules and world of D&D, even without having ever rolled a single die.

This first full chapter gets players ready for the rest of the book, which just goes more in depth with the topics covered in The Basics. Subsequent chapters provide similarly clear and organized information about a full range of topics that are pertinent to any level player or DM. The list of chapters and their topics throughout the rest of the book follows:

• Adventurers and Monsters – All about creature stats, character creation, and leveling up
• Understanding Powers – A primer on powers, their uses, magic, and concepts like area of effect
• Skills – More details about skills and how they apply to common and uncommon skill checks
• Exploration and the Environment – Information about playing the portions of the game that happen between encounters and combat
• Combat – The biggest section of the book, with loads of information about how to handle different types of combat encounters and rules for fighting
• Equipment – Details about currency, inventory, weapons, and artifacts, as well as how characters transport them in the game

The book concludes with three appendices, a glossary, and an index. The appendices address Dungeon Master and adventure specific topics such as building a combat encounter, rewarding players, and adventuring in different types of terrain. The glossary and index both are thorough and make searching the book an easy task.

If you’re new to Dungeons & Dragons and want to go a little more in depth with learning the rules than the recently released red box will take you, you can’t do better than this Rules Compendium. It truly is essential reading for anybody venturing into their first game sessions and even for longtime players who need a handy reference for basic rules.