For a game that’s all about using your imagination, playing Dungeons & Dragons can get surprisingly expensive. But it doesn’t need to be this way. If you want to get into D&D without spending a dime, here’s how to do it.
Find a Free Place to Play
I used to play Dungeons & Dragons in a board game café with friends. This was great because it was an easy mid-point for most people to travel to, there were nice large tables to lay out all our stuff, and we could make a lot of noise without disturbing people.
However, it immediately added a cost to the game because we needed to rent a table for a few hours at a time. On top of that, we’d all feel obliged to buy at least one drink and the café served hot food that was always too tempting to ignore for long. Pretty quickly, each of us was paying for our share of the table on top of a couple of drinks and a bowl of chips every time we got together to play.
Getting out to a third place can make your D&D night’s feel special, but it’s an ongoing expense that you can’t afford if you’re trying to play on the cheap. Instead, find someone who’s happy to host you at their home so you can get together and play for free. Hopefully whoever it is also has a hearty supply of snacks.
If You Can’t Play Nearby, Get Online
Not long after starting my last campaign, I moved an hour away. I didn’t want to give up the game, so I’d drive an hour each way to meet up and play every time we had a session, which added $30 of fuel to the bill I’d already be paying at the board game café. Don’t do this.
If you haven’t started a game yet, find friends and games in your area to join. And if you’re already tied to a game that you need to travel to, play online instead. I prefer playing in person, but I’ve spent plenty of time playing with online tools and have still had a great time.
There are plenty of free D&D tools for this. I particularly like Roll20, which you can use to create character sheets, generate and share maps, voice, video, and text chat, and generate dice rolls. But if you want to keep it simple, you could just start a regular video chat in Google Meet, Skype, Discord, or any other free service.
Don’t Buy the Player’s Handbook
You will be tempted to buy the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, but you don’t need it. Sure, that has all the rules you need to create a character and play the game properly, but there are several reasons you may never need to pay for this $40 book.
Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Player’s Handbook
The Player’s Handbook includes all the rules, character backgrounds, monsters, items, and everything else you need to get started playing and enjoying the Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition.
Firstly, you can download the basic D&D rules for free directly from Wizards of the Coast, the publishers of D&D. If you don’t want to read through a PDF, all these rules are also available to browse for free on the D&D Beyond website.
Secondly, you don’t even need to read these basic rules to create a character, it’s easier to use a character creator instead. There are loads of free character creators online. Again, the official publishers have their own free character creator at D&D Beyond, which is where I’d recommend going.
Thirdly, someone else in your party might have already bought the Player’s Handbook. So you could borrow it from them if you really want to learn more (although the free rules give you more than enough to get started with) or you could ask them to bring it to sessions for a reference for the whole group.
And lastly, there is enough free information online that you won’t ever need to open the handbook anyway. Just Google any question you have about how to play D&D and I guarantee you’ll be able to find the answer you need without paying a penny. Anything you can’t find an answer for, you can just make up yourself—that’s part of the fun after all!
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Use Digital Dice and Makeshift Miniatures
You don’t even need to spend any money on D&D’s iconic polyhedral dice these days, you can just use your phone or online tools again. Ask Google to “roll a 20-sided die” or “roll 4d6” and you’ll get a randomly generated result for free.
If you don’t like going to Google each time, you can roll dice directly in the Roll20 chat or use apps and websites dedicated to rolling dice instead, like Roll A Die. Whatever solution you go for, you don’t need to pay for any of it.
Sometimes it’s useful to put miniature figures on a game board to indicate their location. Paying for figures that accurately represent you characters and the enemies they’re facing is fun and a little addictive, but one of the easiest ways to spend money playing D&D.
It’s totally unnecessary, though. You can just as easily use coins, dice, LEGO, or even the lint from your pocket to represent whatever you need at any one time. Any of that will look like your character if you squint hard enough.
Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set: Dragons Of Stormwreck Isle
This set includes everything you need to get started playing Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: an abridged 32-page rule book, 5 ready-to-play character sheets, a set of polyhedral dice, and an adventure booklet for the Dragons of Stormwreck Isle campaign.
Find Free Campaigns or Write Your Own
By now you should have somewhere to play, the basic rules, a character, and some dice to roll. All you need now is a campaign to play through. Creating your own campaign can be incredibly enjoyable if you want to try your hand at being a Dungeon Master, but it’s best avoided if this is your first time playing the game as it can be deceptively challenging.
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Fear not, though, you still don’t need to spend any money as there are countless free campaigns available to you online. You’ll find people sharing campaigns all over the web in forums, like this list of free campaigns from a D&D Beyond post or this small collection of free adventures from D&D Beyond itself. You can also filter for free adventures on DM’s Guild for even more options.
If none of that takes your fancy and you do want to try creating your own adventure, I’d suggest listening to plenty of D&D podcasts beforehand. This will give you a feel for the game mechanics, a sense of pacing, and give you plenty of ideas to steal for your own story. My personal favorites are The Adventure Zone or Dungeons and Daddies.
This is everything you need to start your first D&D game and you needn’t spend a penny to do so. So what are you waiting for? Get some friends together, create some characters, grab a free campaign, and try to roll your first crit!
