A group of friends are interested in trying out D&D for the first time, and they want me to DM for them.
I've never done this shit before, but I know that many of you are forever DMs so I come seeking your knowledge.
Hit me with your best tips and tricks, or cool shit that you saw as a player that made the experience memorable.
One thing I'm struggling with is illumination and fog and stuff. I'm thinking of representing fog by putting cotton balls on squares that are foggy or otherwise hard to see. Is this a dumb idea?
Keep tabs on how often your players forget to tell you that they brush their teeth after a meal.
If they're too lax about it over a longer period of time, roll to see which of their teeth needs to be pulled.
>>46589142
>Not making them collapse three minutes into the session because they didn't notify you each time their characters take a breath.
But seriously, I just want to have a game that \ runs smoothly, mechanically speaking, and keeps them engaged. Some of them can be very creative, so I want them to have an enjoyable first experience and hopefully have them become good players that enrich our hobby.
A good trick is to say bigger lines in front of a mirror before the game so you know how to enunciate them better and then you can see how you look as you say them.
The villain's monologue will be broodier and more tense this way, the same way the tavern keeper will look disinterested and affable more often than not.
>>46589142
How do your roll for this? 1d100, with rolls of 1 through 32 each corresponding to a specific tooth and 33 and up meaning that they lucked out and don't have to lose a tooth?
>>46589267
There's an idea. I don't really have any acting experience, but I do want the bad guy's rant about his EVIL PLANS to be entertaining.
Since I'm pretty sure that none of my players are fa/tg/uys, I'll go ahead and pitch my ideas for the first session(s).
PCs all meet up at a festival that is interrupted by not!Jihadists blowing shit up. In the ensuing chaos, the PCs meet up and hopefully some of them will try to do something about it. After blowing shit up and the main bad guy delivering a monologue ripped pretty much straight from an ISIS manifesto (apparently alluding to a holy war fought ~200 years ago, whose end the festival is supposed to celebrate), the bad guys who didn't detonate their suicide vests leave the PCs to deal with the aftermath of the attack.
One way or another, the town guard approaches the PCs and asks them to track down the bad guys, lending them a hound to follow their trail.
1/?
>>46589451
>>46589451
Hopefully, the PCs will follow the plot hook and set off to track the evildoers to their lair, with said lair being an abandoned temple that appears to have once been a gathering site for members of the religion that was supposedly wiped out in the holy war 200 years ago.
The PCs either fight, sneak, or talk their way past the guards and enter the crumbling temple. The temple will be set up to resemble your basic mujahideen hidey-cave. Bunks and living-spaces for the not!Jihadists, an armory and a little barracks area for them to practice combat, stores for various necessary supplies, and, of course, a little bomb-making factory/storehouse for the PCs to raid. At the end, the PCs arrive in an underground ampitheatre-like area where the big bad guy is giving his evil pep speech to his followers.
2/?
>>46589451
>In the ensuing chaos, the PCs meet up and hopefully some of them will try to do something about it.
NEVER ASSUME THE PLAYERS WILL DO THINGS.
ALWAYS MAKE SURE THE PLAYERS HAVE A REASON TO GO ALONG WITH THE PLOT.
A good suggestion is to make a group character creation so they can play characters off each other, never let anyone play broody loners who go "psh, nothing personnell kid" and go and kill some shopkeepers to loot in the ensuing terrorist plot.
I suggest "For your background, you can make but you want, but your characters are on reserve to the town watch, make characters who would want to sign up to that."
>>46589020
>One thing I'm struggling with is illumination and fog and stuff. I'm thinking of representing fog by putting cotton balls on squares that are foggy or otherwise hard to see. Is this a dumb idea?
That actually sounds pretty cool.
To be honest, though, a first-time session should concentrate less on special effects and more on simply keeping your heads out of your own asses.
Get one of the basic starter modules and read it all the way through. Make sure the player characters have a reason to work together and want to see the mission through rather than just spiral off into randum murder-hoboism. Don't roll dice or have the players roll dice for anything that doesn't have significant narrative consequences.
There are whole libraries of stuff you can read about DM tricks and inventive storytelling, but as long as you can manage your group and keep things moving, you'll do fine.
>>46589451
>>46589566
Given that, following up >>46589575
The easiest way to railroad folks into it, is having the main town watch place get blown up as one of the targets, so everyone who's capable of doing the detective work is dead APART from the players. They'll get the job of going on to find the bad guys.
There may be some snags; if I was a player I'd be more concerned about securing the town and setting up guards to stop more people getting in, helping the wounded and the like.
To set a fire under their tail orders from a superior often helps, but can get players antsy and wanting to buck the plot.
In order to get them properly motivated, a good choice is to make a few cheerful villagers (NOT their relatives or backstory friends, ideally) and have them visit the stalls, buying some stuff or chatting up the players.
Then blow up the NPCs while injuring the players. That'll get them in the right mood for things.
>>46589575
Yeah, that was my biggest concern with having the setting start at a big party. I figured that I could come up with a reason for pretty much everybody to be at a party. Potential options include:
>Hired on to supplement security for the festivities
>Performing onstage in the town square
>Loner types can just be drinking by themselves in the tavern when the bombs go off
>etc.
The way I'm planning on roping the adventurers into the adventure is that the town guard noticed how well they handled themselves in combat (if they actually did anything) and wants to hire them. For the PCs that actually didn't do anything when the bombs went off, I plan to have a fleeing terrorist bump into them so that the terrorist's mask falls off and the PC gets a good look at their face. In the aftermath, one of the guards will mention that the PC should go along because they can identify one of the attackers, and hopefully that will be enough to get them involved.
>>46589679
Yeah, I'm planning on the town guard being too busy trying to handle the aftermath, and that's why they're willing to hire adventurers to take care of this for them. Additionally, the captain of the guard needs to stay behind to meet with the mayor, who is away but travelling to the town for the final day of the festival and should be arriving tomorrow morning (another possible plot hook if the PCs don't feel like hunting down terrorists)
>>46589566
Now this is the part where the story comes together. All throughout the PC's investigation, the clues are going to point towards the bad guys being jihadists who are salty about losing the holy war a long time ago and, if I've done my job right, the PCs will conclude that's why the attack took place.
But it's not. The bad guys are actually members of a cult completely unrelated to the war history stuff. This cult worships a rooster-God, whom they associate with the Sun and Creation, because roosters wake the Sun up and create the day every morning.
The real reason the cult attacked the town is because they say the festival as a mockery of their chicken-God. One of the things I'm going to describe at the festival at the beginning is that one of the festival diversions is some kind of retarded three-way tug-of-war involving tying painted-up chickens into teams and having them do some kind of stupid tug-of-war thing that the townspeople take bets on. Also, of course, there will be plenty of townsfolk eating roasted chickens and stuff.
So the cultists attacked to stop the townspeople from messing with chickens. Still debating on whether to insert stealth egg puns into the bad guys speech at the start of the session while the chaos is going on.
Anyways, this all comes to light when the PCs stumble into the bad guy's speech to his followers in the ampitheatre. The bad guy's plan is to hatch a giant egg in the middle of the ampitheatre which he believes will lead to the incarnation of an avatar of their chicken God.
Turns out the egg is actually a Velociraptor egg.
>>46589766
If you're not willing to have players work together before the game, at the very minimum please tell them "have characters who would get involved in helping out".
I've seen far too many players in campaigns who will simply go "Nah, fuck fixing things, I'm going down to the pub and then try to steal the barmaid's tips" or something like that.
A few simple words to suggest characters that would help out with something like this would be good, if the players haven't already made their characters.
Other than that, things look pretty good. Just be careful about having the PCs simply attempting to drop the roof on these guys. If you're giving bombs to the PCs, and then having all the bad guys be in a building....... Well, there's an obvious solution to the obvious problem.
Nothing wrong about it if they choose to do that, but be aware of PC shortcuts, and make sure there's some stuff more to do than simply having that happen as the anticlimax.
For example, describe the building as sturdy, and so they have to plant bombs inside the structure. It takes out half the building and half the bad guys, and the rest of them are hurt, but REALLY ANGRY NOW. Or they might try to mock the egg-cult with puns and illusions of chicken attacks.
Make alternate courses of actions difficult, but rewarding. You've got a shaky start but a good setup in mind. Just make sure they get to the bad guys to begin with.
>>46589934
Depending on when the PCs interrupt the bad-guy-monologue-cum-hatching ceremony, things could play out differently. I'm hoping that the PCs will think to use some of the bombs they loot from the bomb-making room to blow up some cultists. If they wait to take action, the dino will wake up and potentially attack some of the cultists before turning on the PCs. Of course, the PCs could always break the egg before it hatches, if they so choose. If someone rolls up a ranger or for whatever reason is really good at handling animals, they could avoid having to fight the newborn raptor all together.
>>46589990
Yeah, I really want to include bombs because I think that would be fun, but as you said, there's a big chance that they'll come up for some use for the bombs that throws a wrench into my plans for future encounters.
>>46589990
One more thing: the scenario I described is my favorite idea for their first adventure, but I've got some other options planned out, some more fleshed-out than others.
For example, if they decide they want to help the cult, I've got a rough sketch for an adventure involving kidnapping the town mayor who's on his way to the festival and delivering him to the cult for them to use as a hostage. If they choose to stay behind in the town, then I've got a little adventure planned out where they discover an undetonated time bomb in the town's church, which leads them on an adventure to seek out more ticking time bombs and discover that one of the townspeople is an agent of the bad guys.
>>46589934
Oh. My. God.
>>46590206
Too silly? I really want the PCS to fight a raptor or at least prevent it from being born.
I got the whole idea from an image I had of the PCS standing in a panicked crowd amid explosions while burning, screeching chickens run amuck and feathers rain down.
OP here. I'm also considering putting in a simple puzzle involving getting past a locked door by putting four numbers in a combination lock in order based on five murals in the room. But I know that a lot of people hate puzzles with a passion so I may pass on it.
>>46589020
One thing I'd suggest is that you run a pre-made module if it's your group's first time. Lost Mines of Phandelver is a good starter module, and it comes with a bunch of advice for the DM. It's part of the DnD 5e starter set and is bundled with some other useful stuff.
Also, and I found this out the hard way, it may be best to have premade characters for the players to choose from. Leave the names and genders blank for the players to make-up, but all the mechanical stuff should be decided by you beforehand. The aforementioned Lost Mines of Phandelver comes bundled with 5 premade character sheets, each of which has reasons to get involved in the plot.
The reason for this is that chargen, or at least the secretarial aspects thereof, is complicated and boring for new players. This is compounded by the fact that it's at the start of the session and that you'll have to basically direct them to make sure they're doing everything right.
When you're either tired of or have finished the pre-made module then start again with your own stuff.
>>46590609
Honestly, I'd never really suggest running premades, ever. They're a crutch and don't allow players to go off and do their own thing. It makes GMs too reliant on having things ready made, and thus unable to roll with it when the players do non-sanctioned things.
But that's just me.
>>46590800
The one caveat is that you do need to get the players to follow the rails a bit. If it's just they manage to bypass an encounter or whatever then it's good practice for the DM, to get them to better roll with the punches. If it's more "Fuck this plot, lets be pirates" you should probably just say no.
But it is important to note that this is only for a couple of sessions, and you should make this clear to your players
>>46590609
Okay, I'll look into this. I do want to give them an original adventure for the start, but it couldn't hurt to check out the module.
>>46590897
>if it's more "Fuck this plot, lets be pirates" you should probably just say no.
You mean just say no OOC, or do you mean that you could come up with some plausible in-universe reason why becoming a pirate is either impossible or a very bad idea?
>>46589566
>plothooks
Run a hexcrawl, faggot.
Most of the work is frontloaded, and it gives your characters all sorts of agency to do their own thing
>>46591246
eh, either could work. Just make it clear that once they get the basics down a free-roaming pirate campaign (or whatever they want to do) can be arranged for next week
>>46591329
I don't think that's a such good idea for first-time players and a first-time DM. You don't want to paralyze the players by dropping them in a setting and just saying "You can do whatever you want, gl;hf" Better to show them some choices right off the bat and then let them get used to an adventure and hopefully have fun resolving whatever adventure they set out on in their own way.
Any more general advice or words of wisdom for running a game for a group of P&P RPG virgins?
>>46591484
I think railroading which destroys player engagement is worse.
I think that D&D tends to work better with levity, especially a black humor to match the lethality of their environment, than seriousness.
People have different tastes in novels, and people are bad at communicating their tastes; so trying to come up with a story to please everyone is very difficult.
So, run a few dungeon crawls to get them acquainted with the mechanics of the game. Then give them a partially filled map, point them to so some cool things and rumors of gold and glory.
If they want to build a wilderness stronghold, great.
If they want to go from dungeon to dungeon, great.
Let them do what they want.
First time I ever DMed
>d20 modern
>Players are a cop, a private detective, and a master thief
>Session starts
>Cop and detective are driving down the highway, with master thief in handcuffs in the back
>going to the precinct to find out where she hid the Golden MacGuffin, a priceless statue
>suddenly, traffic in front of them parts as people swerve off the road
>giant home-made tank rolling up the highway towards them, flanked by guys on motorcycles
That was a fun game.
As a DM, my advice to you is, look at what your characters have given you, craft a scenario based around it, and then throw them in head first. Don't bother with all meeting up in a tavern. Don't get worried about how many rations your players have or what sort of specific synergies they've got, players will keep track of that if they want to and they won't if they don't. Don't worry about the little stuff, worry about the big picture: Where's the plot going? What do the PCs have to do? Don't cut off all avenues of escape, let your PCs have the freedom to do things their own way, at their own pace, but make sure that they always know where to go for the next step of the big story you have planned. And, for that matter, always make sure to have at least one tempting side road to take, to keep them interested.
And one final word of advice: It's always more exciting to end a session right before combat starts than right after it ended.
>>46591920
>And one final word of advice: It's always more exciting to end a session right before combat starts than right after it ended.
OP here. That's an interesting view to take. Kind of like you're leaving things off on a cliffhanger.
Any tips on memorable props and stuff? Like I said earlier, I'm thinking of having cotton balls to represent squares that're obscured with smoke from the bad guys' and the PC's bombs. Likewise, I plan to place a real chicken egg on the map of the final chamber where the dino egg is ingame. Any tips on cool props and stuff like that would be appreciated.
>>46590095
Velociraptors are tiny and harmless to anything bigger than a mouse when they're born. Have it be a dragon.
>>46589198
Run primitive D&D then. Only rules are the ones you need to make up.
>https://isabout.wordpress.com/2007/10/24/primitive-dd/
tl;dr
d20 for skill rolls
3d6 in order, 6 times
Roll modifiers are attribute-10
Character names their class.
Players can take special actions depending upon the tropes of the class.
Players get a bonus to their roll equal to their level for Class actions
Instead of keeping track of HP players roll Constitution when they fail their dodge roll vs the attackers Damage roll on a hit. The more you fail by the more the severe the damage. Even if you succeed you still get a wound which gives a penalty to all rolls until recovered.
>>46592089
Papercraft is great for making structures. Check out /po/, or search the 4chan archives for Terrainlinx (maybe a bit to drop on a first time DM, but it'll give you all kinds of ideas).
Go to the hardware store, buy some 1 inch steel washers, then print out 1 inch round character pictures and glue them to the washers. These are now character tokens, and the best part is you can put anything on them, and it costs like 5 cents a piece for the whole thing. You can even put something different on the other side, if your game keeps track of things like Bloodied, or if the character has two separate modes of play like Raging/Not Raging.
Get some things that players can hold to represent items. If a player finds a wand, 7/10 times they'll write it down and forget they ever got it. 3/10 times, they'll just forget to write it down at all. But if you *give* a player a wand, say a drumstick or a chop stick or just a really nice stick you found outside and put some blue paint on, they'll remember that sucker. Same thing goes for potions, scrolls, anything that's consumable and not immediately useful to the situation.
When players stack dice, take that as a measurement of how invested they are in the game. A stack of three or less is just "My character isn't doing anything important right now, but I'm mostly paying attention". 5 or more, that's danger sign, they're more interested in stacking dice than they are in paying attention to your game.
>>46592120
Really? Shit. The reason I wanted it to be a raptor is because raptors are supposed to look like chickens and maybe have feathers and stuff.
Maybe it can be a dire raptor? The PCs are going to be pretty low level, so I don't want to throw anything at them that will curbstomp them, but because it's slated to be the final encounter of the adventure, I want it to give 'em a challenge and force them to make good use of the terrain and tools they picked up on the way there.
>>46592120
>>46590352
Thinking about it, Velociraptors were feathered in reality, so have it be a mama raptor with traditionally chicken-ish coloring who's been sitting on a babby raptor egg. The fight is with mama, and at the end the egg hatches and the druid or ranger can animal empathy it, then get rid of their wolf or hawk and make the raptor their new animal companion.
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/dinosaur.htm
The deinonychus is the animal closest in reality to what Jurassic Park depicted, for complicated taxonomic reasons, so use that statblock.
>>46592364
>You can even put something different on the other side, if your game keeps track of things like Bloodied, or if the character has two separate modes of play like Raging/Not Raging.
Now there's an idea. I like the thing about potions, too. I've got a juicer, so before the session, I might whip up some "health potions" for my players and actually hand them over to the players when their character gets them ingame. Potions should taste kind of herb-ish, right? Maybe go with a kale base and add in some other stuff to sweeten it up.
>>46592526
I meant more something like pic related, filled with something colorful. Potions are likely to hang around more than one session, so while your idea is neat, they might go un-drank by the end of the session, or might be drank just for something to drink.
>>46592584
*pic related.
Speaking of, you should make sure to keep in mind that games won't take just one session, and a good session runs at least three hours, more likely six, so this is a pretty big time investment.
>>46592447
>have it be a mama raptor with traditionally chicken-ish coloring who's been sitting on a babby raptor egg. The fight is with mama, and at the end the egg hatches and the druid or ranger can animal empathy it, then get rid of their wolf or hawk and make the raptor their new animal companion.
I like the idea of fighting the mama raptor, but it doesn't really fit with what I had in mind for the encounter, which is that the cultist things that a giant chick will emerge from the egg, but it ends up being a dino, much to his chagrin.
I did toss around the idea of letting a player with animal empathy attempt to take the baby raptor as a pet. This scenario would come about if they attack the bad guy and interrupt his speech before the dino is born. After the battle, (asssuming they haven't pre-emptively destroyed the egg), the raptor will be born and imprint on the druid or ranger if they pass a low DC check. Or I might make it automatic and make a fake roll behind the screen just to make it look like there's a chance of failure.
>>46592647
Yeah, I'm hoping that, in the end, they'll be glad they spent the better part of their Sunday trying out something new. I'm planning on this little adventure being just a one-off thing, but if they all really like it, we may end up turning it into something more.
>>46592734
>which is that the cultist things that a giant chick will emerge from the egg, but it ends up being a dino,
This is a tremendously amusing idea, but there's no way for it to really make sense as a combat encounter, because most baby dinosaurs aren't fit to kill much of anything except bugs and small rodents when they're born. Even a T-Rex needs mama to feed it until it's strong enough to start hunting on its own.
>>46592855
>fantasy
>ALWAYS making sense
nah
Another good source for minis: Mega Bloks. Their call of duty, halo, destiny, terminator, and assassin's creed lines are all customizable, swappable, interchangeable, and result in little guys about 2 inches tall that your players can really invest personality into. Only problems are the general lack of female characters, and some of the really good sets can be hard to get ahold of, but they usually even out at 3 bucks a micro-fig and come in big sets, so you get a lot of variety for about as much as regular D&D minis used to cost.
>>46592855
Mechanically, I suppose it would make more sense if the cultists were digging an adult dino out of some kind of preserving agent and it "wakes up", but you lose out on the surprise factor of a dinosaur emerging from what the players (and bad guys) think is a giant chicken egg.
Shameless bump from Pg. 10.
>>46594035
How would random cultists find a velicoraptor preserved in amber?
>>46589020
>>46592526
If you want my advice, don't go overboard on the props. Or at least, don't focus all your time on them. They tend to work better when they're unique and rare, like a tea-stained crumpled letter that you hand them as an "ancient document" which they've been searching for. Stuff like health potions or cotton on the gaming table might make it a fun night, but they're likely to get awkward if you try to force it into RP too much.
As for prep, I find that spending the first session just getting to know each other and get the characters sorted out works well. Say hi, answer any questions players may have, working out arrangements for arriving on time, see if players want their characters to know each other, etc. Also check if anyone has anything they'd like to have in their backstory, that you could possibly use or include with the first game. Just make sure everyone is aware that the first meetup is a "prep" session rather than the first gaming session.
Beyond that, try to theme dungeons and try to give fights/encounters some interesting twist rather than just numbers in a blank room. Something like "two archers on a small incline supporting two barbarians" or "lead goblin has a whistle which stands out and will call some wolves for support if it blows (will happen if at 50% HP or less)".
>>46592855
>>46594035
You know what? It's magic. It doesn't have to make sense. The cultist's great plan is to cast Greater Raise Animal, which causes the egg to hatch and the velocibabby inside to grow to maturity at accelerated rate.
>>46604437
Just make it a divine velociraptor, dire velociraptor, behemoth velociraptor, Tarrasque velociraptor, or whatever else you'd want. There are tons of reasons why a baby or an egg would be 30 feet tall, and you certainly don't need to rely on just a single set of stats simply because some third-party splatbook had stated baby velociraptors in a particular manner.
Heck, you could say that Rocs have featherless, velociraptor-like chicks when they first hatch. And use the stats for a T-Rex for Roc hatchlings in that case.
>>46604951
these are the core raptor stats, though, and raptors are tiny little things when they hatch. It would be like the entire party having to fight a tiger cub. Sure, it has teeth, but it's not exactly a climactic encounter.
>>46604990
If you say that newborn velociraptors are Huge-sized creatures with 16HD and a ravenous appetite (and it will have an appetite after hatching from an egg) then yes, the baby velociraptor is 16HD and fully capable of fighting newly hatched. A tiger cub may not look dangerous to a human ten times its size, but that cub certainly looks dangerous to a grasshopper or a small mouse.
And the PCs are frequently the small mice.
>trying to start GMing by making a PbP of Emerald City Knights adventure for M&M3e
>get a handful of characters that flatly ignore the plothooks of city being low on cape activity and of getting empowered from normals when the game starts
Whatever, I can just brush those hooks aside. The characters are cool, everything should work fine.
I've expected worse.
>another guy pipes in
>he does actually grab the plothook of getting empowered
>his character gets super intellect which he uses to lock up in the basement, pump out a shitton of drones and spy on the whole city
>he is of course a snarky super-smart and considers everybody around idiots, "but can be cute dork at times when discussing video games or anime"
O hey, here comes the worse.
> want to play d&d
> group agrees but nobody wants to dm
> I'll have to be a new dm that's never played before
>>46590897
>>46591246
OOC.
If you make it merely hard to go be pirates, they'll try harder on principle. And the trying will eat up play time even if they eventually do not become pirates.
>>46590595
what if they don't get it? Problem with any kind of puzzles is, as opposed to fights where either they get it good or not, something happens - they win or they lose and either option keeps action moving, when they just won't grasp the problem they just sit there frustrated and it halts the game. Flow is important, so in every puzzle there should be a failure option, probably triggered by time or wrong input. Of coure, players should know of this, to keep them moving.
>>46607315
Yeah, I've got an alternate path set up that involves making a balance check to bypass the door completely.
