What D&D Actually Is (And Isn’t)
D&D is a collaborative storytelling experience built on top of a combat system. That ordering matters more than it sounds.
The combat system is tight. You have three kinds of dice rolls that do most of the heavy lifting: skill checks (can you do the thing?), saving throws (can you survive the thing?), and attack rolls (did you hit the thing?). Everything else in the rulebook is commentary on those three interactions. The dice notation is simple once it clicks: the number before the “d” is how many you roll, the number after is how many sides. 2d6 means two six-sided dice. 1d20 means one twenty-sided die, and you’ll be rolling that one constantly.
The character sheet looks scarier than it is. The left side is where the game lives: your six ability scores (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma), your skills, your saving throws. The right side is where your character lives: ideals, bonds, flaws. Some tables treat those as sacred text. Others never look at them and develop the same things organically through play. Neither approach is wrong. It’s just something worth sorting out before the campaign starts.
The Proficiency Bonus Thing People Get Wrong
Your proficiency bonus gets added to rolls where you have training, and it scales with your character level from +2 to +6. The part that trips people up constantly: it usually applies to attack rolls, not damage rolls. These are not the same roll. A lot of new players assume that anything that makes you better at hitting also makes you hit harder. It doesn’t. Barbarians get some exceptions because of course they do, but as a general rule, stack your attack roll modifiers separately from your damage output.
Paper vs. Digital: The Honest Answer
The honest answer is that pen and paper has genuine social advantages at low levels, and digital tools become practically necessary at high ones. A physical sheet keeps everyone at the same table in the same medium, no laptop lids creating walls between players, no one quietly checking something else while the DM is setting a scene. But when your party has two portable holes, a vehicle, a shared treasury, and a wizard with a full spellbook to track, a spreadsheet isn’t a luxury. It’s just correct.
The best middle ground is narrower than most people think: keep the character sheet physical (it’s what you touch most), and go digital for anything that expands indefinitely. Inventory, spellbooks, shared resources. The best tool we can recommend for this is the Party Tracker, designed to be exactly the tool we needed. And if you want the physical feel without the full sheet, the folded booklet format circulating on Reddit is worth printing out. It strips the character sheet down to the ten things you actually reference in a session and fits in your pocket.
One last thing on natural 20s: a critical success on a skill check is not in the rules. A 20 on an Acrobatics check is just a 20, not an automatic success. Crits belong to attack rolls. Letting a natural 20 override an impossible DC feels fun until a player tries to seduce the dragon and you’ve already set the precedent that it can work.