Well, as an grown-up with grown-up friends with jobs and families and all that, my group only gets together to play maybe once a month.

My partner is our DM. She's run us a couple 1-shots and chose to run the Humblewood kickstarter for our first campaign.
My character is a big owl named Hugo Goldbeak. He's a Fighter/Battlemaster who is dumb as a post, but has decent WIS.

I kinda chose low INT high WIS out of curiosity. I found it hard to imagine what that would manifest as, so I went for it. It's fun. I play him like... he's dumb as a post, but he knows that, and can act around his dumbness and rely on his physical strength and his ability to notice things about people.


The thing that ate me was an Ash Snake (a monster specifically from Humblewood). It blasted me with fire, so I spent my action to drink a potion of fire resistance, then next round it burst melee'd me down (not even any fire damage) and snatched me up in its mouth. My team managed to heal me before it swallowed me, so I woke up in the mouth of a giant snake. No time to be emotional about it, though. As soon as the snake went down a Fire Giant shows up, and the party is no match for a giant at that point, so we had to run.

Hugo's backstory was that he is a noble who was raised and trained by the Lord and Lady's best General, basically. So he doesn't really react to the horrors of combat like a noob. He's not scarred by that kind of trauma. His main struggle is that he feels like he can't live up to his family name - them being political powerhouses and him being dumb as a post. And his arc is moving from that insecurity to becoming someone who is recognized as a hero, and who can believe in himself in that capacity. He doesn't realize, yet, how his role in the team is vital to his growth. He doesn't realize how his role in his family's affairs would convey that strength to them. He's a bit sad in that regard, but the point of the character is to come to terms with that, and grow.

Good times. I love that my DM is willing to throw combats at us that are like... if you don't realize you're outmatched and run, it'll be a TPK, and I'm not warning you about that. You need to understand this world is lethal, and not manicured for you. I love that. Colville's book sounds like I'd like it, judging by the title only.


Volo's is a great book. Lots of cool stuff in there. Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes is also good.
Xanathar's Guide and Tasha's Cauldron are both good, too, for more PC options.

3rd party books can be great. We have a huge book called Spectacular Settlements that is super helpful. It has towns and shops and all that stuff that is in a campaign, but the core materials don't really help with too much.


Brennen Lee Mulligan is a DM who hosts shows on YouTube and is def. a world-class DM.
Obv. D&D moves at a slow pace when you're playing, so I'm not assuming you have time in your schedule to watch a 4-hour video that isn't even the whole campaign arc (though it is only a total of 4 videos for the campaign, with a total runtime ~20 hours).
That said, maybe you and your step-daughter would enjoy watching it together is doses.



Matt Mercer is the DM for Critical Role, a show I've been following for years. They made the cartoon off one of the most successful kickstarter campaigns ever at the time. They asked for like $750k and ended up with over $11 million in donations to the kickstarter. It was def. an eye-opening moment for them that their popularity and success was well beyond what they'd imagined.


Best of luck gaming with randos. It can be absolute RNG for the quality of players. You can find great people, but you can also end up dealing with just about every bad-gamer stereotype horror story, too. Hope you find more of the former and less of the latter.


Sounds like a great way to bond with your step-daughter. Sitting around a table telling stories and trying to make each other laugh and/or cry with our characters and RP is so cleansing for the soul, IMO.