Dungeons & Dragons: How to Be More D&D: Face Your Dragons, Be More Adventurous, and Live Your Best Geeky Life

by Kat Kruger

Tackle life with advantage with this officially licensed guide to life inspired by the world of Dungeons & Dragons! 

This playful, inspirational book invites fantasy lovers and fans of Dungeons & Dragons to celebrate and incorporate different elements of this iconic tabletop game in their lives and help them live their best, geekiest life. Written by Kat Kruger, the Dungeon Master of the popular Dungeons & Dragons actual play podcast d20 Dames, you'll learn how to take the skills, knowledge, and sense of adventure from your D&D campaign to help you better understand everything from how you interact with the world around you to facing the random events that life sometimes throws at you. 

With advice from classic player classes—like the Fighter, Warlock, Bard, Monk, or Ranger—and ways to take your experiences as a player (or a Dungeon Master) and use them in your day-to-day life, How to Be More D&D also features interactive elements like "Building Your Character" and "Dungeon Master State of Mind," quizzes like "What is Your D&D Class," and paired with rich, full-color art from the world of Dungeons & Dragons. Whether it is building your real world "character," discovering your ideal class and strengths, harnessing the three pillars of play for everyday use, or using roleplaying techniques to your advantage, How to Be More D&D explores how to enjoy the campaign known as life and is a perfect gift for any tabletop gamer or D&D fan.

Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, their respective logos, and the dragon ampersand, are registered trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC. ©2022 Wizards of the Coast. All rights reserved.
 

Genres: Dungeons and Dragons, Nonfiction, Self Help

196 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 23, 2022

About the author

Kat Kruger is a best-selling freelance game designer at her owner-operated company, Steampunk Unicorn Studio. Her previous projects include: HeroQuest, Betrayal at Baldur's Gate, and various D&D adventures. In the TTRPG sphere she has most notably contributed to the inaugural Uncaged Anthology and Eyes Unclouded. She is also the Dungeon Master on the family-friendly, actual-play podcast d20 Dames. When she's not writing or editing games, she's raising a geeky toddler with her partner and their dachshund in Seattle.

Reviews

[/Fitbrah/ · Rating 1 out of 5]

This would be a somewhat amusing book if it didn't take itself so seriously. The writer is so lacking in personality it made me actually depressed but this is just par for the course for any book that wizards of the coast has released in the last 10 years. Everything has the sour stench of design by committee.

Do you guys remember fun? I remember fun.

[Jonathan Lam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was a fun read that! It's certainly not the best psychology book out there but there were a few topics that brought a smile to my face. Overall, a great attempt to gamify and make one's life more creative!

[Me · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's not very often that I find such a very fun book. I think the author does a really interesting cool and creative job about how the ethos and play and spirit of dungeons & dragons really does apply to real life. I'm very happy I read this book.

[Viral · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started playing Dungeons and Dragons when I was in 8th grade. At the time, I was a very nerdy and shy little child, and I didn't have many friends. The few friends I did have started a DnD campaign, and I joined in, especially since I loved fantasy as a genre. It quickly became an important part of my life and the DnD campaigns I played throughout middle school and high school made up some of the best memories of my adolescence.

This book is what I wish I could have read during that time in my life, a book that would have encouraged me to apply the logics and ideas of DnD to my own personal life while I was struggling to fit in and feel confident. While a short and quick read, it's still an enjoyable book for anyone who wants to think about how to live a more fulfilling and engaged life. But's especially a useful book to anyone who, like me, finds it much easier to roleplay a confident hero than it is to be one in real life.

[Braeden Pope · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never expected a life help book to be combined with and compared to a tabletop roleplaying game, but here it is! For any fan of dungeons and dragons, this book is full of awesome references to the world famous tabletop roleplaying game that will bring the reader in. Kat Kruger relates many parts of the game to aspects of real life, spanning the gap between the fantasy world and reality. Although the ideas in the book aren’t necessarily new ones, comparing them to D&D can help those who struggle to better understand what they can do, and who they can be. As a major fan of D&D (and a dungeon master of 8 years), this book helped me better reflect on who I am, and who I want to be.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a cute self-improvement book meant for D&D fans. I don’t think there was anything groundbreaking here, but it was fun and refreshing to see helpful techniques and advice framed as D&D concepts. The personal character sheet in the back of the book could make for an interesting self-examination exercise as well. My favorite part were the “Dear Tasha” advice column excerpts, those were fantastic.

[Neil · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book suffers from being thematic and selling based on a hobby and trying to turn that into something else (a self help/advice book). On the surface it’s a translatable and fun idea but in practice it’s overly general, quirky and not going to be useful to most. It’s a neat gift to the D&D enthusiast and the art is fun. I think for the hardcore roleplayer filling out a character sheet on yourself could be a blast. Not for me, but maybe for some people.

[Ryver the grumpy raindancer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed most of this book, I agree with the fact that I am a wizard/warlock (I mostly play warlocks in dnd anyway :)) In the dungeon master chapter I found that it it explained the problems really well but not the solutions for the problems in some parts. like yes, I know I need to raise my charisma, but how???

[Joaquin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was given this book as a gift without them knowing it was a sort of self-help type book. They just knew I enjoy D&D and purchased it for me. It was a fun read. Just a nice book to wipe my fantasy brain clean with another activity I enjoy doing.

Since I’m still fairly new to D&D it helped break down the classes in the game in ways that made more sense to me.

[Carla · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved reading this book and plan to incorporate quite a lot of it into my journaling routine - especially the goal tracker as going through a dungeon (she explains it way cooler).

From how I understood it, this book is about shifting how you see things. It reminds me of two quotes:

"If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." - Wayne Dyer

"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails." - William Arthur Ward, "To Risk"

The author did an amazing job showing ways that this way of seeing can become a practical activity too, all while keeping it fun and making you feel like a real adventurer!

[Samuel Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've always thought, "Hey, life is like an RPG!", so I was excited to pick up this tome which seemed to echo that idea.

Ends up feeling pretty aimless, wandering, and subjective to the author's perspective.

Cool character sheets, but largely a miss.

[Rodrigo Galindo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Awful