D&D General "What is D&D?" The elevator pitch

[J-H]

For those of you who aren't in a sales/entrepreneur role, "elevator pitch" is a term used to describe how you would explain everything you do in 3-5 sentences. If you happen to get on an elevator with a C-level executive at a possible client or at your own company, and he asks what you're doing in the building - do you have a very short summary that explains either (a) your job and how you help the company if you work there or (b) How your service/product helps them and why they would want to buy from you.

So - in 3 to 5 sentences, how do you explain "What is D&D, and why would someone want to play it" to someone who knows basically nothing about the game?

 

[Argyle King]

Part fantasy "cowboys and indians*" and part choose your own adventure book, with collaborative storytelling and a framework of board game rules to help adjudicate conflict

*I'm aware that is a phrase which may have negative connotation, but it's also a well-known term which would help speed things up in an elevator.

I might change some of the pitch to talk about team building and imaginative problem solving if I were trying to do more corporate speak and sell it to a business as an exercise.

 

[aco175]

It's like the Lord of the Rings movies or Indiana Jones, where you control one of the heroes. Another player creates the story around the heroes and along the way you gain wealth, fame and power to defeat the evil mastermind.

 

[Quartz]

D&D is a collaborative fantasy adventure storytelling experience in which players control the actors within a structured framework of challenge resolution.

 

[Ancalagon]

"let me tell you about my character"

 

[CleverNickName]

"Have you ever stood toe to toe with a fire-breathing dragon, knowing that you alone stand between the lives of your friends and the snarling serpent before you? Have you carried your sword high into battle, along with the hopes and dreams of those in the village across the river, and vowed to slay this beast or die trying?

Well, I have."

 

[Charlaquin]

In four sentences (three of which are admittedly a bit long):

D&D is a game of emergent storytelling. One player - called the dungeon master, or DM - describes a fictional scenario, and the other players imagine themselves as characters in that scenario, and make decisions as they imagine those characters would. The game plays like a conversation, where the DM describes the environment, the players describe what their characters do, and the DM describes the results. Most of the time, the results will be obvious, but if the outcome is uncertain, you use dice as random number generators to determine what happens in an unbiased way.

This is more or less the pitch I use when someone expresses curiosity about D&D. If they seem interested, I tell them the best way to learn is to play, and (if I have the bandwidth for it) offer to run a short introductory game for them, or if they want to see an example of it being played, to check out an episode of Critical Role.

 

[Jack Daniel]

Jeff Rients: "You play Conan, I play Gandalf. We team up to fight Dracula."

 

[MarkB]

It's a game with no specific win-conditions in which you aren't competing against anyone else.

 

[jgsugden]

D&D is a storytelling game. Most of the group take the role of one hero of the story, while the last player writes the outline of the story and controls the rest of the world. They use rules to give the story structure, and use dice to give the story enough randomness to provide surprises and twists.