D&D has been around since 1974, so it’s unsurprising it has some unique words and phrases that have cropped up over the last 50 years. Here are a few of the most common and most important terms:

The Dungeon Master aka the DM is the person who runs the game, arbitrates the rules, drives the narrative, cheers on your victories, delights in your suffering, and pulls all the strings. The DM is the rule-maker and rule-breaker, the judge, jury, and executioner, and always, always has the final say.

The party are the players’ characters—also called the PCs—and it can be made up of any number of characters. Most games have between 4 and 8 players at a time; with too few players, it’s difficult to hold your own against the monsters you’ll face, but too many players can mean a lot of time spent waiting around for another player to make their move. Fortunately, there are ways to speed up gameplay a little with larger groups.

Each character is a member of a specific species or heritage, such as human, elf, dwarf, or halfling. Elves in D&D tend to be around 5½  feet tall, slim, and have angular features. Dwarves tend to be around 5 feet tall, broad, and heavyset. If you’re familiar with the hobbits from The Lord of the Rings, those are halflings: around 3 feet tall with large, hairy-feet and a love of good food and good fun. There are many more heritages available, as covered in the Character Creation Guide.

Each character is also of a specific class, such as cleric, fighter, or wizard. Classes are covered more in the Character Creation Guide, but each has its own strengths and weaknesses, so picking a class is up to you and your preferred style of play.

Each character also has an alignment, which is a shorthand way of describing the way they view themselves, others, the world around them, and their place in it. You may have seen memes laid out on a 3×3 grid of things being declared “lawful good” through “chaotic evil”; this is the D&D alignment system.

At its core, D&D is about roleplay, which means putting yourself into the boots (or sandals or unshod furry feet/scaly talons/hooves) of your character. You may find your character reflects your own personality or is your complete opposite: both can be equally fun to portray! The rules and rolls of D&D are the guidelines by which the story is told, but the real fun in D&D is how everyone pulls together to actually create the story through their own contributions.

Each time we meet will be a session, and each session can involve multiple encounters or one very long sustained encounter. Some particularly large battles can even stretch across multiple sessions, though we shouldn’t have any of those starting out. Think of D&D as episodic television: each session is an episode, and anything could happen. Many D&D games are like serialized television, where each of the sessions builds on one another into an overall story called a campaign.

Much of D&D works through a series of events called encounters, which could be a fight with a horde of monsters, a careful diplomatic exchange, a stealthy exploration of an enemy stronghold, or any number of other engagements where you have to use your wits—and your character’s abilities—to navigate the challenge before you. While there’s a lot of fun to be had in D&D engaged in direct combat, you can often go through an entire session engaged solely in non-combat encounters.

Non-player characters—aka NPCs—are the people you meet who inhabit the world and who are often involved in your non-combat encounters. They may be farmers and fishermen, knights and wizards, powerful leaders of sprawling kingdoms, vicious warlords of massive armies, back-alley thieves, legendary heroes, shopkeepers with hidden secrets, entertainers with lofty ambitions, and so much more. 

When you do inevitably find yourself in a fight, D&D uses turn-based combat, which means that when the party is battling monsters or villains, each character involved—including the enemy combatants—gets their own moment to try their luck.

There are 7 common types of dice used to play the game, referred to as d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, and d%. With the exception of d% (d-percent, also called d100), each of these names refers to the number of sides a specific die has: four, six, eight, ten, twelve, or twenty. The most-important die is the d20, as it is used by all players and is used for the most kinds of rolls. The d% die is a ten-sided die with tens-place numbers on it; when combined with a regular d10, you can use the d% to roll from 0-99, just by combining tens and ones place values together.

A check is a die roll—almost always with a d20—to determine an outcome, and a critical is an extraordinary outcome to one extreme or another: a critical hit or success, or a critical miss or failure. D&D is a game of roleplaying but also a game of chance, which means low-level characters can sometimes pull off daring stunts they shouldn’t have been able to do while high-level characters can sometimes make catastrophic errors.

Some checks come with advantage or disadvantage, which is a way of tilting the hand of fate in one direction or another. In either case, if an advantage or disadvantage is present, you’ll roll two d20s instead of just one. If you have advantage, you’ll take the higher of the two values, but if you have disadvantage, you’ll have to take the lower value.