The first thing the players do is to generate their character. Each character is identified by six basic attributes: Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma. These attributes initially lie in the range of 3 to 18, determined by rolling five, normal, six-sided dice and adding the best three. Players do this six times to generate their six attributes. The player then chooses which value to associate with which attribute. This decision is based on the class of character the player wants to play. The characters can be fighters, thieves, magic-users or clerics (spell casting holy men,) or a combination of them. Magic-users need high intelligence to cast spells, whilst for fighter strength dexterity and constitution are important, the other classes have other prime attributes associated with them. The player can also choose a race for the character. What races are valid is entirely dependent upon where the characters start in the world, the Player's Handbook details humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, half-elves, and halflings.

Each player then fleshes out the character, by creating a character background and choosing the skills that the character knows. The character is kitted out with weapons, spells armour, tools, and all the usual paraphernalia appropriate to their character class, for going out into a world full of monsters, and the elements.

When all this has been done the DM will provide each character with a basic knowledge of the world, based on each character's background. And then, the first adventure can unfold. The individual players will meet up with the other player characters, and also characters created and played by the DM (known as NPC's for non-player characters.)

The rest is all about playing the characters, and rolling dice to determine the outcome of the actions: hitting a monster, and if successful, the amount of damage done; removing a needle trap from a rusty lock; or trying to decipher some crabby script written on brittle parchment (that will crumble to dust if another roll of the dice is too low.)