Could you elaborate on the kind of game DnD is? Like, what is it ideally supposed to be played as?
Dungeons & Dragons is half-a-dozen different games in a trenchcoat, with relatively little continuity between editions beyond some shared terminology and the presence of a twenty-sided die, so it's tough to make sweeping statements which apply to all versions of the game.
Broadly speaking, however, Dungeons & Dragons in most of its iterations is a genre emulation piece aimed at sword and sorcery fantasy, a specific subgenre of fantasy fiction which had its heyday in American popular culture from roughly the 1930s through the 1980s (and somewhat later elsewhere); Dungeons & Dragons in particular focuses on the 1960s and 1970s strands of sword and sorcery media.
Sometimes described as the creative descendant of Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian, sword and sorcery revolves around mercenary heroes getting into and out of trouble largely for personal gain, spending most of their time skulking about, breaking and entering, and stabbing people in the back, punctuated by elaborately staged set-piece battles which frequently end with half the party dead. Common features include asshole wizards, whimsically cursed magic items, armour which shows a lot more buttock than is strictly practical, and talkative monsters willing to engage the protagonists in long-winded debates about incredibly stupid shit. It's here that the narrative device of the dungeon crawl – often erroneously characterised as an original invention of tabletop RPGs by folks unversed in the genre – is codified in its modern form.
You don't really see a lot of sword and sorcery fantasy these days, which can be a source of confusion for newcomers to the game, though a surprising amount of modern YA media draws heavy inspiration from the genre. Cartoons like Adventure Time or She-Ra and the Princesses of Power have a lot of sword and sorcery DNA in them.
(D&D is sometimes mistaken for emulating Lord of the Rings style epic fantasy, since that's the only genre of fantasy fiction most casual readers are familiar with, but in practice high fantasy tends to clash badly with a lot of the game's baked-in assumptions.)
Concurrently, Dungeons & Dragons is a game about resource management. Most traditional tabletop RPGs are "challenge games" in the sense that they frame each scenario as a series of set-piece obstacles to be overcome; in D&D, the challenge is one of figuring out how to travel from point A to point B while expending as few resources as possible in the process. If you're coming from a video game background, it has much in common with survival horror games, albeit generally without the overriding fatalism of that genre. This resource management focus is both a legacy of D&D's origins as a fantasy roleplaying add-on for a popular wargame, and a reflection of the specific genre of fantasy it's emulating; sword and sorcery has a lot of tropes in common with survival horror if you know where to look.
(This is something a lot of contemporary groups struggle with; they either mistake the resource management elements for pointless bookkeeping and thoughtlessly discard them, or consciously decide to ignore them because it's not relevant to the kind of story they want their game to tell, then wonder why the system keeps messily falling apart on them!)
