1. No, I knew next to nothing about the previous two games going in and didn’t have any problems. Aside from like three returning characters who show up later in the game and some tidbits related to them that’re really only relevant to the Dark Urge origin, I don’t think the games even have much crossover.

2. It does a pretty good job of explaining the mechanics, I think. Most tooltips are very comprehensive and 5e (the dnd edition the game is based on) is the most newcomer friendly edition of dnd anyway in my opinion. Couple that with the fact that they changed quite a few things mechanically between the tabletop and the game, and prior system knowledge matters even less.

3. You shouldn’t. The game is pretty big at 100+ gb though so good luck with that download.