The easiest way to start D&D

I've been seeing guides all over this website telling people all these great new ways to get started with D&D and they all seem pretty good. However, they have some flaws. Not everyone has the money to go out and buy 5 or so D&D books. Not everybody lives in an area that has D&D events. Some people live in the middle of nowhere and can't find anyone to play with IRL. And if you are one of the people who can do all of these things you might end up not liking the game. So I'm going to help those people out.

The Books

Don't buy the books until you are sure you actually enjoy the game and can play it with other people. Every single 3.5 book is available online FOR FREE. Just search the book name and it should pop up as a pdf. If you can't find the book go to https://dndtools.net/. This website is the revival of a website that was taken down in the past so it might be missing some parts but for the most part this has everything. If you find a group that doesn't want to do 3.5 just torrent the books, but this way is easier and less risky.

Dice

Use an online roller. Its really nice to have some physical dice, but for the purposes of this guide online dice work best.

The Group

You can't do D&D without the group. You can make the rules up and use rule of cool instead of rolling, but at the end of the day that doesn't matter unless you have people to do this with. Easy fix though, go to r/Lookingforgroup and you should find some relatively quickly.

Good Luck!

Hope this helped someone out there. Have some fun, and don't knock fighters, they're still around for a reason.