I went looking online for the three core rulebooks that are required to play the game of Dungeons & Dragons. The Player’s Handbook, The Dungeon Master’s Guide, and the Monster Manual. Amazon shows the Dungeons and Dragons Core Rulebook Gift Set, 4th Edition containing all three core rulebooks for just over sixty six dollars.
Now sixty six dollars is not a whole lot of money really. But it was enough for me to take a step back and ask myself, “Are you really going to play this game all that much? It’s almost the same price of a video game!”
Some time passed with me looking off and on at the rulebooks on the Amazon website. Then one day I took brake from work and headed over to the local book store here in Juneau to see what they had in the way of Dungeons & Dragons. It was not long after that, I found myself staring down at a bin of multi colored dice, dice bags, playing cards for games like Magic The Gathering. I finally came across the Dungeons & Dragons section. The D&D section was on a book shelf on the bottom rack, near the back of the store. It was clear from the way the book shelf was arranged that they normally have more Dungeons & Dragons books available. But as it stood they did not have one rulebook that I could find. The upside to this in my thinking, was that Juneau was home to more Dungeons & Dragons players then I was currently aware of. This opened the possibility of a local community of information that I might be able to tap into.
As I stood up to got ready to leave the D&D section of the book store my eyes caught site of a blue box. I bent back down to pick it up and found it to be the “Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition RPG Starter Set“. My eyes widened as I read that the starter set contained “Everything you need to start playing now!”.
- Over 50 full-color character and monster tokens
- 3 sheets of double sided D&D Dungeon Tiles
- 16-page 4th Edition Quick-Start Rules
- 64-Page Dungeon Master’s Book
- 6 dice
To say the least I was stoked to find this! And for seventeen bucks I picked it up. I figured if the starter set could help me get a grip on how the game is played, then I would for sure know if investing nearly seventy bucks into the three core rulebooks would be worth it for me or not.