Tabletop roleplaying games are enjoying quite the renaissance right now, none more so than Dungeons & Dragons. We’ve already shown you , but if you’re not ready to invest in your own set of books and tabletop gaming accouterments, you still can get into the latest edition of the granddaddy of all RPGs for free.
Even though free sources are somewhat limited in scope, there are more than enough to allow you and your friends to run an ongoing campaign from level one to 20 using nothing but what’s freely (and legally!) available online.
The Rules
If you’re gonna play some D&D, the first thing you need is a copy of the rules. D&D’s publisher, Wizards of the Coast, has considerately made the Fifth Edition Basic Rules available for free in PDF format.
For all the convenience of modern digital innovations (which we’ll get to in a minute), sometimes nothing compares to the satisfaction of scratching your stats onto a paper character sheet with a number two pencil. To that end, you can find a basic printable character sheet at the end of the Basic Rules PDF. If you’re looking to get back into the game after a long absence, a paper character sheet can help you recapture the magic of manually calculating attack bonuses and spell save DCs just like it’s 1985.
The Basic Rules, however, contain only four character classes, four playable races, and a handful of spells and weapons. If you’d like to expand your options but you don’t want to pay for the privilege, you can look to the rules that Wizards has made available in its System Reference Document. The SRD is an open source compendium of select D&D intellectual property third parties can freely use to create new D&D content under Wizards’ Open Gaming License or OGL. The official version can be found on Wizards’ site in PDF format.
The SRD is very similar to the Basic Rules with a few differences. The SRD includes some things not in the Basic Rules (like the Steam Mephit monster type, for example) and vice versa. Instructions for beginning DMs are almost totally absent from the SRD, which is focused on enumerating the pieces of IP included in the OGL. The Basic Rules, being more pedagogical in nature, include things like an encounter difficulty calculator and other useful tidbits for running the game.
Luckily, there’s nothing to stop you from using both the Basic Rules and the SRD. And if a PDF isn’t interactive enough for you, there are plenty of sites that have nicely hyperlinked versions of the SRD, such as DnD5e.info, 5thSRD.org, and 5eSRD.com. Each one presents the same SRD topics in slightly different ways, and some include additional content created under the OGL. 5eSRD, for example, includes naval adventuring and hypertech gambits, which are decidedly not a part of the official SRD.
If you do get to a point where you’d like additional community-created content, you can find a wealth of information atthe Dungeon Masters Guild and DriveThruRPG. Both sites function through the Open Gaming License to give creative DMs a place to publish their homebrew adventures and supplements, which are made available to the gaming public for whatever price the content creator sets. Whether your party is starting out at level one or you've been grinding for a while already, there are free or low cost adventures and supporting materials for any tier of play just a mouse click away.
Running the Game
Once you’ve got your hands on the rules, it’s time to figure out how you’re actually going to play your games and keep track of everything.
If you’re playing on tabletop and want to take advantage of D&D’s tactical rules for miniatures, you can get a taste of that too for the cost of just a few sheets of paper. While it may be nice to use full color maps and hand-painted minis, you don’t need to go to that extreme to use D&D's combat simulation system. All you need is some one-inch graph paper (or hex paper, if that’s how you roll - or either if you draw your own lines) and a bunch of tokens, which can be anything from coins to bottle caps. With just a pencil, a ruler and a little imagination, you too can experience the joy of arguing over precise spell effect areas and diagonal movement.
If you’re running a digital game (or a mix of both), there are a number of awesome free tools available to do just that and more, plus a bunch of great resources for players and DMs alike.
D&D Beyond
To say that D&D Beyond revolutionized tabletop RPG record-keeping might be overstating things, though not by much. Digital toolkits have existed in some form or another at least since 2012 when Roll20 (see below) came into being, and third-party fillable PDF character sheets were around long before that. But when D&D Beyond emerged from beta testing in 2017, Wizards of the Coast finally dragged the 40-year-old institution fully into the digital era.
D&D Beyond grants free access to all the information in the 5e SRD to use with your characters and campaign, with the option to purchase the digital version of all the official sourcebooks and adventures as well. What’s more, the platform has continued to evolve to include more interactive features, including a full creation suite you can use to make custom magic items, monsters, and even character races and subclasses. The site is currently alpha testing an encounter builder that helps DMs design combat scenarios with just the right balance of challenge and reward. Paid subscribers can also create campaign groups for up to twelve players that they can then share any purchased content with.
Roll20
Roll20 is another site that incorporates the SRD into its rules compendium. (The full Roll20 compendium also includes a smattering of other systems including Dungeon World, Pathfinder, Starfinder, DramaSystem, and Dialect for those who want to branch out). But while D&D Beyond has largely taken over the digital D&D rules market, Roll20 remains an extremely useful resource thanks to its virtual tabletop, a feature D&D Beyond hasn't tackled yet.
Just create a free account and you can use Roll20’s robust mapping system to build custom tactical maps and populate them with icons representing player characters, monsters and NPCs. The DM has complete control of the map, including a Fog of War feature which allows for detailed control of how much of the battlefield each player can see on their individual screen. Things like dynamic light sources and Darkvision are taken into account automatically, which is much more difficult when using physical maps and minis. The players, for their part, have the ability to maneuver their own character tokens and track hit points so the rest of the party can see how they're holding up.
While some players will never give up the tactile aspect of gaming that comes from using minis and markers on a grid, Roll20 allows for gaming at a distance. So if you’re having trouble gathering enough people to get a game going in person, Roll20 allows you to play games entirely online. The site also features integrated text and video chat, as well as a digital dice roller so no one ever doubts you really did throw three crits in a row.
Dice Rollers
If you aren’t already building your game around Roll20’s toolset, you won’t want to load it up just for the virtual dice. For that, you can find a number of helpful websites that let you simulate dice rolls with a push of a button. Wizards has its own official dice rollers, which allow you to instantly tally any number of dice rolls while automatically applying any bonuses or penalties you define. If you want you can even create a dice roll that would be totally impossible in realspace. You know, for those times when only a 47-sided die will do. If you’re in the market for something fancier, sites like this one even include nifty dice rolling animations.
Other Tools & Resources
Once you have the rules in hand, you can expand your arsenal with free content on sites like Donjon, which is packed with cool random generators for things like NPC names, loot drops, and shops. Before D&D Beyond unveiled its alpha encounter builder, the best thing available on the web was Kobold Fight Club, which is still a useful tool for balancing combat difficulty against party strength. Similarly, you can use The Homebrewery to generate your own homebrew magic items, spells and more in attractive PDF formats that look just like official D&D content. And if you need clarification on anything rules related, Sage Advice, Giant in the Playground and Reddit are all great resources.
So there you have it! Everything you need to get a game of Dungeons & Dragons up and running is freely available online in both digital and pen and paper formats. So what are you waiting for? Grab a couple of friends or go to your local hobby store and start playing! If you don't think D&D is the tabletop game for you, check out our recommendations for other great TRPGs, or check out how modern games still draw from their tabletop predecessors.
Would you like to know more? Follow @FireballMcPhan on Twitter. Service guarantees citizenship.
