D&D Essentials Kit (Dungeons & Dragons Intro Adventure Set)

ESSENTIALS KIT vs STARTER SETSHORT REVIEW: if you can only buy one set and are new to the game then buy the Starter Set. It explains the rules in a condensed version and easy to read manual--you will be up and running quicker than Essentials Kit. The rules and setup in the Essentials Kit has more steps and might get new players bogged down with too many details. After playing the Starter Set you wil have a feel for the flow and mechanics of the game and can then go deeper into the rules with the Essentials Kit.After playing the Starter Set and you want to move on, choose the Essentials Kit next before buying the hardcover Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide which have way too much information for new players. The Essentials Kit will build on the Starter Set by introducing magic-using races/classes and character customization.LONG REVIEW AND COMPARISON: ESSENTIALS KIT vs STARTER SET:In the Essentials Kit you get a 64-page squarebound rulebook and 64-page Adventure book. The Starter Set has a 32-page staplebound rulebook and 64-page staplebound Adventure book. I'm not going to talk about the Adventure books to avoid spoilers. But both are recommended and both should be played.The Rulebook differences are significant: in this case shorter (Starter Set) is better.The Essentials Kit has 6 blank character sheets. Players will use the Rulebook to help create their own custom character. The Starter Set has 5 pre-made characters which is NOT bad and for first time players it might be better to start this way. It forces you to play different races and classes of characters, it shows you what type of background story you might want create for future characters, it gives you an idea of how a character sheet is put together and where everything goes, and most importantly it gets you up and running quickly so you can learn how the game plays out. On your second adventure you can take the extra time to create your own character knowing what you liked or didn't like based on your first character. You can easily download and print blank character sheets online. I personally think the Starter Set's idea to use pre-generated characters is best for first time play.DICE: There are 11 dice total in the Essentials Kit but there are duplicates; there are only 7 different types. The Essentials includes a percentage die not in the Starter Set which has 6 different dice total. You only need the 6 types of die so both sets are equal to me.For the Starter Set that's all you get: Rulebook, Adventure book, pre-filled character sheets and dice. It's priced less than the Essentials Kit here on Amazon.Additional material in the Essentials Kit includes extra cards that come 9 to a sheet and you need will need to separate them. None of these are necessary to play. You could write down the information on the cards on paper, but the cards are a nice convenience and can help move the game along. The different cards are:9 Initiative cards: these are just cards with a number on them, #1-9.3 Combat cards: these are cheat sheets of combat rules.24 Magic Item cards.9 Quest cards: a description of a mini-quest players might take during the bigger Adventure Book.9 Sidekick cards: your extra character when running a 2-player game.14 Condition cards: when characters suffer from a certain condition this card reminds them of the symptoms.1 Magic Charm card.Some of the cards are helpful to have and the Starter Set could be improved to include them as well.Other items in the Essentials Kit: a thin paper Dungeon Master's folding screen. It has a picture on one side and rules/tables on the other. This is very helpful for the Dungeon Master only--it has no use for players. A color map of the world. Maps are fun! And a thin cardboard box to store your dice (not fun).Both the Essentials Kit and Starter Set are good steps towards introducing new players to the game. I think they are both useful. Starter Set should be first. And the Essentials Kit should come second. After that you can play a few more adventures with the information you currently have. Or if you want to dive into the hardcover books then that's the next step.I highly recommend the Starter Set and Essentials Kit. Both are worthwhile purchases. I suggest the Starter Set first then Essentials Kit.

El Essentials Kit de Dungeons & Dragons es una excelente puerta de entrada para quienes quieren iniciarse en este fantástico juego de rol. Viene con todo lo necesario para empezar a jugar de inmediato: una aventura completa ("Dragon of Icespire Peak"), un manual con reglas simplificadas, dados, hojas de personaje, cartas de referencia y un mapa a color.

fun for beginners

Best gift to get for a person leaning and wanting to play D&D. Best in value and fun for those kids

Quick version:PROS - More to work with than the Starter Kit; a DM screen, cards to represent magic items, the ability to play D&D as a two-player game (one player with a "sidekick" NPC and one DM), full dice set - to include four D6s for stat rolling and two D20s for rolling with advantage/disadvantage, instead of one of each, a foldout map, a rulebook that walks players through character creation instead of using stock characters, a campaign for levels 1-6, and a code for (imo better!) electronic follow-on material for levels 7-12. Frequently sells for very cheap on Amazon.CONS - The 1-6 adventure struggles more than it should to create a sense of urgency or draw players into its plot, may be challenging (at a few specific points) for a new DM, and will probably kill a character or two for a new party. The DM screen is somewhat flimsy. 7-12 content is digital-only and can only be redeemed via D&D Beyond.EDIT - Now that I've taken a full party all the way through Dragon of Icespire Peak as written, I reiterate my complaint that the balance is "all over the place." Some enemies ate up most of a session without ever genuinely threatening the party (this type of thing causes the phones to come out, or digital players to alt+tab), while others (Wererats before magic or silver weapons?) would have killed them had they not been lucky or willing to run.EDIT 2 - the party has just completed the follow-up included digitally. It coulda used a bit more oomph to the dungeon crawls, in my opinion - the dungeon maps were often small and contained maybe one trap, one puzzle, and one or two secret doors leading to a treasure chest. The simplicity works very well for an inexperienced DM with an inexperienced party, which is exactly what you'd want from a product like this, but we'd been playing for a year by the time we hit the final two quests; they're not rookies who don't make Investigation checks anymore, and the end of an adventure should present a real challenge, you know? There's also some DM embellishment required to add overall narrative weight or opportunities for strategic combat, and you might want to expand some of the shop inventories to give them a reason to be excited about late-game gold rewards. Excellent variety among quests, from exploration, to dungeon crawling, to naval combat, to investigating a haunting, to full-scale pitched battles, but only a few individual quests were particularly strong on their own.I initially picked up this kit because, like some others, I was lured in by the idea of getting a DM screen, some dice, and a way to introduce new players to the game for about the price of the official DM screen product, thanks to the deep discount Amazon is offering. Unfortunately, the included DM screen is not of the same quality as the one that's sold separately, but it does contain a wealth of useful reference information while doing its primary job of hiding your notes and dice rolls. While I was disappointed by the size/sturdiness of the screen, I was very pleasantly surprised with the inclusion of a large fold-out map of the Sword Coast and the central town of the included adventure, as well as the magic item reference cards. The cards are handy props that prevent your players from having to write down all the details of everything in their inventory, since it's not exactly proper to tell a new player with no sourcebooks to reference the Dungeon Master's Guide to see what their loot does. The box also includes blank character sheets on decent quality paper and a full set of translucent red dice, no complaint with either of those. Perhaps the main reason to buy this product over the Starter Kit, though, is the version of the basic rules it includes.The Starter Kit is arguably for a group of people who want to sit down and start playing *immediately* - it provides four pre-generated characters to hand out to players, so that they can jump right into the action as soon as the last member of the group sits down at the table. The Essentials Kit, by contrast, walks new players through the process of creating a new character. They don't get quite as many options as the Player's Handbook offers, nor do they have much to work with past Level 6, but they get to go through what is arguably one of the most important parts of the D&D experience - creating characters who are truly their own. The restricted set of options is, of course, partly Wizards saying "you still have to buy the Player's Handbook eventually," but it also helps prevent newbies from experiencing information overload.On to the adventure itself. It uses a "quest board" mechanic pulled straight from your average video game RPG, which, while not exactly innovative, provides freedom of choice, rather than railroading your party, and also provides new players the comfort of familiarity. The main problem, as you'll notice while reading through the material, is that quests provided by the Townmaster never, at any point, directly send the party to go kill the titular Dragon of Icespire Peak, or even reveal its location (though the adventure title should give that away). In fact, the "Ending the Adventure" section talks about concluding with the defeat of the dragon OR the completion of everything on the quest board. Allowing the players the freedom to completely skip the Big Bad is good in the sense that you shouldn't force your party to go down a given path, but the quests themselves aren't particularly exciting. (They do have some nice surprises on the fun/silly side of things, but any group that isn't made up of hardcore roleplayers will often create the comic relief on their own.) A few quests drop breadcrumbs for the player to follow to a different location, which might in turn reward them with exceptionally valuable treasure, a pointer toward the dragon, or hints at the follow-on adventures (Storm Lord's Wrath, Sleeping Dragon's Wake, and Divine Contention) included digitally, but the players might not take the bait. In fact, you can't always blame the players for this, as level progression is tied solely to completion of quests ON THE BOARD (though they don't know that), and sometimes the information comes from suspicious in-game sources.Speaking of the character progression, that deserves a deeper look. The adventure uses what is known as "milestone progression," meaning characters level up when they meet specific criteria, rather than through the original method of gaining XP for kills. This is perfectly fine on the surface, as it discourages the "murder hobo" playstyle where scenarios that lead to combat are actually ideal (as the only means of gaining strength), and allows the resolution of problems through more creative or diplomatic means. WotC's published adventures have leaned away from XP-based progression because of this. However, the dragon's lair serving as the "final dungeon" of sorts is balanced for a 6th-level party, according to the book, and the only way to reach 6th level is to complete nearly every quest on the board - the party might find the lair well before they accomplish this, at which point continuing to help assorted townsfolk can ruin the sense of urgency. In fact, for an adventure ostensibly about "a dragon is threatening the local town not only directly, but via displaced orcs willing to fight to the death," the story can feel like quite the slow burn - of the initial three quests, one provides little of real value other than some fun roleplaying potential, another primarily drags the party into forced combat, and the third is just an excuse to find a place to buy health potions - which the party might miss altogether if they did the other two quests first, prompting the appearance of three follow-up options.That third quest also throws a Challenge Rating 3 enemy at the potentially Level 1 party - they can negotiate out of the fight, but if they don't realize that (maybe because this is an adventure for new players and new DMs), their very first combat could be a "Deadly" (both in actual balancing terminology and literally) encounter. Which brings me to my final complaint, something I've only noticed now that I'm running the adventure as written for the first time. The balancing of this introductory adventure is honestly all over the place. The DM *must* be able to adapt on the fly, or an inexperienced party (or single player + sidekick) will almost definitely die the first time they get unlucky. Dying in your first combat because you split the party and charged blindly into a dark cave teaches you a lesson. But dying at the start of your first quest because you tried to help an NPC while you were still learning the ropes? Does anyone learn anything? Even the meanest DMs typically want to feel like they outwitted the players in a total party kill situation, not like they just deleted them. D&D Beyond's recent article on "best adventures for a new DM" included Lost Mine of Phandelver (from the Starter Kit) but not Dragon of Icespire Peak (included here), despite the fact that the Essentials Kit's redeemable codes are a way to sell people on the website's own products. That probably says enough.There's some more good though. The dungeon maps are generally well done; you can clearly indicate the locations of objects and significant features to your players as the book describes them, and each location has a variety of named NPCs with assigned quirks. The previously mentioned cards include combat order, condition reminders, and sidekick cards in addition to the magic items. The sidekick cards are a neat idea, and essentially serve as miniature/abridged character sheets for NPCs that can round out an undersized party. Finally, the box comes with a discount code for the Player's Handbook on D&D Beyond (if you're genuinely a new player, you'll probably want that book in some form or another eventually), and, more interestingly, a code to redeem three follow-up adventures on the same website. (For experienced DMs with a collection of Roll20 source material, that might not be as much of a perk.) These followup adventures, at least in my opinion, are a bit more creative in their gameplay mechanics, environments, overarching plot, and challenges, and take the party all the way through Level 12, meaning if you're willing to use digital references, this product contains most of what you need (the DM probably should pick up the Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual) to run a full-length campaign! (As someone who's played a decent number of times, it's pretty rare to keep a party alive AND a player group together/motivated long enough to hit Level 20 without the campaign going off the rails, if you can pull that off, you're a special DM, but ending at leveling up to 13 is fine.)Despite all my criticisms of "Dragon of Icespire Peak," the Essentials Kit as a complete product for a new player is worth the $15-20 I frequently see it for on Amazon, and the beauty of D&D is that, if you're buying it intending to try your hand as a Dungeon Master, you can simply improvise your way through anything that doesn't work for you! This is a passable introductory product, but it could have been so much more.