The Starter Set
When you open up the box you see a quality product, it's well designed and branded. There's good quality card stock and the manuals are glossy and easy to read. The Starter Set comes in a solid cardboard box like the Red Box. Wizards are honouring their past while decluttering the rules system for Fifth Edition to recapture the simple fun at the core of D&D.
Inside you will get:
A set of six blue two tone dice
The Basic Rule Book
The Lost Mine of Phandelver four part adventure
5 Pre-built characters
The dice are of a good quality but there are only 6 of them. I know that there isn't much call for the percentile d10 and you can use the d10 twice but I like to have it!
The Basic Rule Book covers all the rules you'll need to know to run combat, buy equipment, rest, travel and how to use spells. The beginning is a step by step tutorial on how D&D should sound like when you're playing it as well as a glossary of terms so everyone playing is on a level playing field.
The Lost Mine of Phandelver is a four part adventure that can take around 20 hours to complete. So for a group of 6 people that is around 11 pence per hour if you all split the cost of this box! The adventure contains a couple of Dungeons and at least one Dragon... the box doesn't lie! I've done a lot of the extra work for Dungeon Masters in the resources section.
The five pre-built characters in the box are:
A Human Fighter (Archer)
A High Elf Wizard
A Halfling Rogue
A Dwarven Cleric
A Human Fighter (Defense)
The characters have superficial choices to make for them such as how they look, their name and their gender but the mechanics are all done for you. The characters all use the standard array for the statistics so the characters will be balanced with each other so there's no 'most powerful character' (sorry powergamers!). Everything has been calculated and even your leveling up is done for you (until level 5). The only problem with this is that you will need to print off new character sheets as level four and five brings about ability and proficiency score improvements. These are all spelled out for you but it'll just be easier to write them out again.
My advice would be to run the whole adventure as it is in the box. When you reach the end use that as a point to evaluate how everyone feels about their characters and whether they want to continue on. At this point you can rebuild or create new characters and the DM can move onto another prebuilt adventure or create their own if they wish. This product is a great try before you buy scenario as buying the manuals outright can be a little daunting.
DMs - read the whole adventure and all of the rules before you start so you are prepared for what is coming up. I've added a section in Module Resources for hints, tips and props you might want. For the random encounters you can either pre-roll the enemies and have everything prepared in advance or roll them live at the table. Rolling dice automatically fills players with dread as they’ll have no idea what you’re doing! Don't worry about editing or changing the adventure on the fly, this is a guide not a railroad.
Players - read the rules and your character sheet before you start playing, this way you'll know the terms and what the DM is asking you for. Knowing your way around the character sheet is one of the best skills you will need.
All of you - have fun!
May you roll well!
