Interview: Ginny Di on learning D&D and teaching others
During Pax U 2025, I had the opportunity to chat with Ginny Di, D&D Youtuber and cosplayer, about the struggles of learning D&D as a new player, how she uses her videos to help others climb the learning curve, and introducing her grandmother to TTRPGs! Read on, and thank you Ginny for sharing your XP with us!
What is your backstory? What kind of cool stuff do you do?
I have been doing whatever weird creative stuff strikes my fancy since I was a small child, and in the last, I guess, five or six years, D&D entered that atmosphere for me. I was a pro cosplayer for a few years full time before I found tabletop gaming, which is such a backwards way to end up as a D&D youtuber!
Hey, it’s whatever works!
It’s how it happens!
I mean, I’ve always been a fantasy nerd, I was an obsessive book reader as a child, and I hosted Dragon Riders of Pern roleplay forums in high school… stuff like that. It feels like the natural progression that I ended up here!
Your videos contain a lot of solid advice for both new and veteran TTRPG players. What has been your inspiration for this?
I was so confused when I first started playing D&D!
I watched Critical Role, and I felt like I had a grasp of how gameplay worked, but once I was actually playing, I was just overwhelmed by how many different rules there were, especially once I started DM’ing.
As a player, you can learn your one character and get there a little faster, but as a DM, you really do need to know. I’m the first to say that you don’t need to know everything to DM, but it feels like there’s a huge brunt of information to grasp in order to start running games.
Once you’re actually running, stuff just comes up so fast!
It’s like, fall damage, how do you set a DC, things that just pop up immediately, and if you have to look them all up, it slows everything down.
I found it really intimidating!
So, I started making videos to just talk about my experience playing D&D, and they were getting a really strong response.
I had a Youtube channel that no one really cared about because I was making cosplay tutorials, but once I started talking about D&D, a lot more people were also getting into D&D at the time.
The more tips and tricks that I learned to make DM’ing and playing D&D easier for myself, the more I felt like I could share these with other people who might also benefit from them.
It ended up in this niche of good content for beginners. It’s teaching content.
I’ve been told that I am good at explaining stuff in a way that people can understand, so that feels like something that I can lean into for the benefit of everybody!
When talking about all-ages gaming, I think it’s important to note that this doesn’t just mean for kids, it’s for everyone! I thought that your video where you taught your grandmother how to play D&D really showcased this. What was it like getting to share D&D with her?
It was so cool to actually bring her into that world.
I mentioned in the video, but she asks me about D&D all the time. She knows that I work with it, but she was really struggling to grasp what the game was, so she’d ask these questions that I wasn’t even sure how to answer sometimes because she was so far off on the mark from what the game is.
Clearly she had picked up more than I thought because when I asked her to explain what D&D was, she gave a pretty accurate definition of it, but I felt that the best way to show her would be to actually get her to play. It was also challenging to do because her eyesight and hearing are not great these days.
I do think that what amazed me the most about playing with her was that even though she had never played anything like that or played video games, she was so new to the concept of roleplaying games, and, despite all of that, story is so inherent to all of us as humans that she just got into it immediately.
She understood what was happening once it was a story and not a game. I found that to be very heartening. I could see that even if somebody is so far outside this space, we can still connect here.
I agree. For me, TTRPGs are kind of like a return to form of telling stories around a campfire to teach and communicate and create. It’s ingrained almost. And I could see from your video a lot of parallels between introducing the game to your grandma and when I’ve seen folks introducing games to kids. It’s a good generational bridge.
Yes. I honestly have not spent a ton of time with my grandma having deeper interaction than holiday party stuff. She spent so much of my life living on the other side of the country, so getting the chance to actually bond with her over fun creative play, it’s just neat. I’m glad we got to do that.
What is your number one piece of advice for folks who are looking to introduce new players to tabletop RPGs?
I think that the most important thing when introducing a new player, and this doesn’t need to be forever, but the first time, you really need to be a bit of a yes-man. I think that people need to know that their creative ideas are welcome, and if the first thing that they pitch is something that you say no to, that can shut them down creatively for the whole game.
Even if you just have to reframe or they say something that’s technically impossible, you find a way to weave it in and make it work because it’s really important to affirm them right off the bat that they’re doing it right. They are supposed to be creative. They are supposed to be thinking outside of the box.
If you’re ending up with players who are nervous to do that, finding ways to prompt them into it helps. Giving them a brief description of the situation and asking what they would do brings them back to the idea of not looking for which rule to apply but to think about the story.
Fantastic advice all around, and thank you for taking the time out of Pax U to chat! It was great getting to meet you!
To find out more about Ginny Di, please visit her website here:
And her Youtube channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/ginnydi
To listen to the specific video where Ginny teaches her grandma to play D&D, click here!
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