The hardest thing about D&D is getting started. There’s a lot to learn; character sheets and proficiency modifiers can feel as alien to newcomers as the game’s fictional languages. It’s easy to become lost and throw in your proverbial wizard’s hat before you’ve even delved your first dungeon.
D&D beginner boxes don’t always help. Despite being pitched as the ideal place to learn, they usually present players with a wall of text and baffling stats to decipher. They also put an inordinate amount of strain on whoever is ‘running’ the game – the Dungeon Master. This new D&D Starter Set, though? Well, that’s a different story. I’ve been digging through it over the last few weeks, and I think this might be the best starter set Dungeons & Dragons has ever had. It seems as though publisher Wizards of the Coast has finally cracked the code.
This doesn’t surprise me. Rather than sticking to the same formula come hell or high water like previous versions (complete with stats that may seem borderline incomprehensible to beginners), this one takes a different approach. Thanks to a drastically stripped-back design that puts only the info you need on a player mat, it feels more like the best board games than a classic tabletop RPG.
Normally, you’ve got to wade through a sea of numbers on the standard D&D character sheet. Here, things have been pared to the bare essentials; all the bonuses you need are very clearly labelled up-front. There’s no need for a newcomer to know that their elf warrior’s got a Strength score of 15, after all. The only thing they need to know is that they add a +2 to Strength rolls, like attacks.
When combined with cards for every individual item and spell that you place on that same board, play becomes a lot easier to understand. As Arman points out, it’s far more tactile as well; placing a sword card (with easy rules for how to use the item) onto your board is like equipping it. Equally, using hit point markers or power tokens in place of confusing spell slots lowers the barrier to entry by leaning on ideas a broader audience are more likely to be familiar with. After all, first-time D&D players come from all over – they may be video gamers inspired by Baldur’s Gate 3, or fantasy novel fans who want to live out their own adventure. They may have seen it played on shows like Stranger Things so are curious to try it themselves. With that in mind, the team worked with as broad an audience as possible when preparing the 2025 Starter Set.
“This was the most involved playtesting that we’ve done for a product outside of our core rule books,” Arman tells me when we discuss the project’s two-plus years of development. “We really wanted to look at people who weren’t playing D&D right now, [to] recruit all sorts of survey respondents and gamers or people who don’t game. Then we would watch them live, unpacking something and going through that exercise, and just seeing where they struggle, what they don’t struggle with, what things they kind of instinctively know or skip.”
That helped flag certain aspects long-time players like me might take for granted. Some playtesters assumed they needed to roll a dice to move, for example (which is logical, but not necessary in D&D). This resulted in little boxes of info that Arman describes as “Dungeon Master training wheels, which we haven’t had in a product in the past 10 years that I’m aware of.”
Equally, this is the first time a D&D Starter Set has included so many physical props – it’s crammed to the brim with battle maps, tokens for every single monster in the adventure, a variety of cards players can choose from as their background, cards to describe the people you meet on your quest, and even inventories to shop with. Old-school players might argue that this takes away from the appeal of D&D (theater of the mind, or your imagination), but I would argue it does a much better job of removing barriers to entry for those who’ve never played before. Spending five minutes trying to work out where your character is in relation to a goblin can feel like going over multiplication tables at school, but seeing where they are on a map right away keeps things rolling.
Old-school approach
Want something more classic? There’s also an ’80s-inspired starter set based on the Hellfire Club from Stranger Things (available from Amazon for a similar price), and it takes a much more traditional approach to D&D. However, it still features all the tokens, cards, and physical props of its sibling… just in an old-school style.
This is why the non-playable character cards – which show villagers, townsfolk, and guards controlled by the game’s Dungeon Master – only feature key details to help run them.
“We wanted it to not feel like a book just split up into a bunch of different parts,” Arman says on the challenge of giving just enough information. “We really focused on a few things: rumors, which are very actionable and kind of seen as threads between the different areas; and then we focused on two traits […] Like, Andrea has perfect posture. And part of the reason for that is we want to give new DMs [Dungeon Masters] something that, if they choose to roleplay actively, it’s really easy to imagine. ‘Oh, if I want to play a character with perfect posture, I sit up.’ […] In this set, one of the things that we really do is emphasize that the DM is a player too, and we want people to be excited about DMing. We want them to try it out. I think DMing can look scary, but it’s actually rewarding and a lot of fun.”
Despite all these changes, though, the new D&D Starter Set doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. In fact, its story – which sees the players become heroes of the frontier – reworks a 40-year-old campaign, Keep on the Borderlands.
“There’s something poetic about returning to an adventure that showed up in an introductory set,” Arman says. “One of D&D’s real strengths is its legacy, right? And it’s a tabletop RPG with 50 years of history, and with that history come all these shared experiences. Maybe someone played through the original Keep on the Borderlands, and now they have a family, and they want to share [this new version] with that family.”
For the first time, I can see that happening – and it sticking. If you’re new to the world of Dungeons & Dragons, this new starter set is most definitely a critical hit. I can’t recommend it enough.
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