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Dungeons and Dragons, called D&D for short, started many, many years ago, probably in a college dorm with four geeks huddled around a candle and a set of dice. Today, it's much, much more, and cool people play it around dining room tables.

If you want to join a game and need a character, you have a few things to consider. A D&D game is just like a football game, being played by essentially a team of players, and requires a variety of talents in order for the team to succeed. Think about what kind of character you want to be, but also find out what characters the group already has. The type of game will also dictate what talents are needed.

Being a musician, I always gravitated toward the Bard class. Also, being that the group I was in was doing mainly hack and slash adventures, I was pretty darn useless having the fewest hit points and lowest attack of the bunch. I got killed several times and I got my party members killed several times. Also, the group had a Paladin (a healer), and a Sorcerer (a spellcaster) already, so I was pretty much dead weight and it wasn't much fun.

After finding out what they already have in the group, and what characters they might want to add, find out which rules they are using. D&D updates periodically to add new classes and get people to buy new books. The rules are different enough in each version that the wrong book will mess you up more than it will help you. A 3.0 book won't bee much help in a 3.5 rules game, and 4.0 is set to release any day now.

Once you know which version they're using, get yourself a Players Handbook for that vcrsion. The book has nice, clear instructions on how to build your character using dice to determine strength, intuition, intelligence, dexterity, etc. You can also buy Character Sheets for the version of book you have so you can keep track of hit points, skills, inventory etc. Both the book and the character sheets are available at your local bookstore or your local gamer. Several programs are available to build your character on your computer and print out the chacter sheets, or you can go to http://www.pathguy.com/cg35.ht m or http://www.rpggateway.com/Reso urces/Character_Building/ for online versions.

The classes of characters are as follows:

Barbarian: a warrior who fights in a furious frenzy and usually has the most hit points. This is one of the bricks' in the game. (When a D&D group comes upon a tough item to kill or knock down, they throw a brick at it', meaning one of the tough warrior-types.)

Bard:

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