DMing my first session of D&D 5e tomorrow night
Some brief backstory that is super common, I'm sure. I played 5e with some friends before the pandemic and that broke the group up, of course. Then our DM moved away so we've been without D&D since 2019 or so. I was recently nominated to be our DM because none of us knows how to do it and they all thought I'd be a good fit. Which is great because I love world-building, playing characters, and writing stories.
But I'm nervous because I was barely competent at playing the game to begin with (aside from getting into character), let alone DMing it. The whole group was, really. Because of the pandemic we're effectively all starting over as new players. So I've got a forgiving group to DM, that's for sure.
To help me out, I bought the Essentials Kit and am building our first couple of sessions around that, albeit it pretty heavily modified. I kept the setting and one quest, but already created a custom quest with a mini-dungeon for them. Also managed to inject my favorite played character as the central giver of quests and backstory within the game. Sir Lord Craymond Zephyrson Ponce IV, former heir to Ponce fortune and originator of the Ponce-y Scheme. Think foghorn leghorn meets 1800s railroad tycoon meets Trump. Not a nice man at all.
Honestly I started modifying the pre-built way quicker than I expected. My original plan was to play it by the book for the first couple of nights, but ideas kept popping in my head and I just ran with it. Then I started creating a windmill out of popsicle sticks and tiny rocks. I think DMing might be a gateway drug to greater creativity expressed through arts and crafts!
Our first session is tomorrow night and I've been feverishly writing complicated notes in OneNote. I've got a notebook for each session. Then a section for The main outline, quests, NPCs, locations, encounters. Then pages for each individual item under that category. Then I'm using the nifty "Link to Paragraph" tool to let me quickly jump between pages. Here's a screenshot to show what I've put together -- https://imgur.com/a/yA6IYUJ I think eventually, after a few sessions, the notes will be more condensed, giving way to more improvisational storytelling. Between chatGPT and old fashioned generator sites that can crank out NPCs, dungeons, encounters, etc. I think it'll be a lot easier if I can work toward just having a simple outline for a given session and let the tooling and my imagination do the rest on the fly.
Anyway, any general advice for a new DM?
Sounds like you've done a lot of prep work already, which will go a long way! Nice work.
A few tips:
If you and your players don't know a rule, make the decision on the spot and look it up later. Game flow is important. Frequent stops to get the rules right often kills momentum. It's all made up anyway, so unless your PCs are adamant that everything is to be played exactly by the book, make a snap decision and keep playing! You can always make a note and read the rules after session to see what the "proper" ruling should have been. And that's a more organic way to learn the nuanced rules.
Avoid the DM vs. players phenomenon. And remind the players that they are not playing against you. Rather, they are interacting with the world, NPCs, and each other. I've played many social deduction and euro games with my DnD group. They are used to competing against me. We had to unlearn that when I started DMing. Remember, you are a god in that world. You have all the power. They can't beat you.
Consider the rule of fun. PCs like to do cool stuff. Set them up to do cool stuff. Constantly stifling or hindering them sucks.
But! Adversity, scarcity, and near death experiences add to the adventure and fosters memorable moments. Balance is key! In one campaign, a few of the players lost all of their items in a shipwreck. It sucked for them for sure....so I had to introduce plot hooks that allowed them to build back up in cool ways. It's a tough balance, but necessary to good story telling.
You are there to have fun too. You are part of the experience. Yes, you will work harder than your PCs, but you are not their servant nor are you a customer service rep. If you are not having fun, then that needs to be a discussion with the group.
I love all of these. Thank you! My hope is that us having played together as players and being a long-standing group of friends going back 10+ years at this point means we won't run into the DM v players issue. But I'll definitely keep an eye out for it in case it pops up.
You have to learn the art of the schrodinger's asset. That NPC you prepared? It's not in this city, or that inn, or that store - it'll specifically be the first NPC that the party meets. That's how you can create the illusion of a world with seemingly intricate depth while still retaining your sanity. This is not railroading.
Honestly, the biggest thing is to not overdo it. DM burnout is very real. You have the most burden in the game and it's not even close. A DM that's burned out is no good for the DM or the players.
Secondly, it depends on the group, but I think the internet has oversold the "rule of cool" and all that. The ruleset exists for a reason. The players should feel like they're accomplishing something themselves, and the more you twist the rules for their benefit or their detriment, the less it feels like their actions have meaning. I wouldn't get too caught up on getting the rules exactly right every time, but you should try your best none-the-less. Deviating can cause balance issues quickly.
And finally, do milestone leveling. XP leveling is fun for no one. At best it's just extra paperwork, at worst it creates toxic dynamics. There should never be level differences between PCs. When PCs die and new characters come in, make sure they're at roughly the same power level as the rest of the party (some DMs like to "penalize" deaths, which is bad imo).
edit:
Another thing specific to 5e is to make sure you have combat encounters. It's unfortunate, but 5e is a system where like half of the classes get nothing outside of combat mechanics, and the other half gets both combat mechanics AND insane out of combat mechanics (the infamous caster-martial divide). So while not everything should devolve into combat, it's good to make sure sessions have combats, because some classes seriously need them to shine.
FWIW, I think this is fine for a one-shot, but for a long campaign I like to draw this out and let these points evolve. The PCs didn’t run into Califret the Bard, even though he was in the same town? Fine. Two adventures later they walk into a tavern and hear Califret singing a song about their exploits. They missed running into Lord Muckamuck and so he didn’t ask them to get the macguffin while they were raiding the Temple of Kai-Mok? Three adventures later, they hear about a party of adventurers who cleared out the temple for Lord Muckamuck and just took a job out from under the party’s noses. It’s a fairly cheap way of making the world feel like it’s moving even when the players aren’t looking.
That's why I love using Dungeon World style fronts. I don't use all the noodly tags and impulses, but tracking what the BBEG and other factions are doing while the party is doing something else really makes a difference to me.
As in like they defeat a major boss, that's a level up. Or they wrap up a storyline, that's a level up. etc. ? I like that. I think less numbers in general is good, but how do you avoid level ups becoming kind of arbitrary or random? And how to you keep a consistent rate of progression without leveling folks up too quickly?
It's up to you when the party levels up. That can be when they defeat a boss... or not.
https://dnddispatch.com/milestone-xp-dnd-5e-leveling-systems/
It is arbitrary in the end. But I'd note that it's always arbitrary. As the DM, you control how much XP the players gain, so you control how much they level up, in the end. This just strips away a layer of abstraction. The DM always controls level ups. This just prevents players from having to think about XP, having to track XP, or worrying about things like kill steals.
Even if you do XP I think you should do party XP. Interparty power disparity sounds neat but in practice is just not fun for anyone.
I didn't even realize non-party-XP existed as a mechanic! Our old DM used that, so I just assumed that was the way it was. But I guess nothing in the game is truly set it stone and all sorts of varieties of rules exist. But creating a situation where players can steal kills, and therefore XP and rewards, from each other seems like a great way to cause all sorts of issues within a group. There's a reason MMOs have largely moved away from players tagging mobs and getting all xp/loot, even if others contributed to the fight.
I think I'm going to talk xp vs miletstone over with the group tomorrow. I was already planning on giving them a level up at the end of tomorrow's session just so we could all go through the level up process together as a group since we're all still re-learning things. So whichever route we decide to go shouldn't create issues for tomorrow.
After doing XP Leveling for years, and then switching to Milestone Leveling for years, my party is now switching entirely back to XP Leveling for the foreseeable future.
Our group consistently got frustrated with milestone leveling, since it was never clear what should "count" as a milestone, or what should happen if we don't do anything "milestone" worthy for a long number of fun sessions that nonetheless durdled on before suddenly doing three or four milestones rapidly once we had built up power and connections. The lack of clarity in when the party would level led to constant "do we level up?" followed by "Well, we levelled up only two sessions ago" or "we haven't leveled up in five sessions" before we ultimately left both DM and Players feeling like we were negotiating on arbitrary lines instead of settling on something that truly felt good for any of us.
All 3 of the DMs in my group have moved on to using the pathfinder 2 XP awards system for all of our games, with some modifications.
You get XP for all achievements, including minor RP moments that were fun for the group. The main modification is, obviously, that converting 5e to a 1000 XP system and deciding how much XP to award per enemy takes some homebrew work.
"milestones" are more frequent, and give out smaller but more consistent amounts of XP.
I also give 10XP per hour played. That way, in the scenario where the group meets up for 3 hours just to do some shopping and then end early, the group still makes 30XP of progress towards leveling up. No session ever feels like a waste.
Now, whenever we sit down to play, our group can look at our character sheets and know roughly when we're likely to Level up; if we're at 800 XP and about to fight a big boss fight? A level up is imminent. We leveled up last session and only have 200 XP? Unlikely to level up but we're going to make tangible progress.
The thing is, once you move to party XP, you basically are just doing milestone leveling.
This is basically the same thing. You're picking when the party levels up, just indirectly.
I don't know of anyone outside the OSE community that doesn't do party XP (Individual XP stopped being a thing in 3.5 and pathfinder 1 at the latest, since all classes progress at the same XP rate), and I don't think that it's at all the same as Milestone leveling. XP is transparent to players; they understand the rules, they know roughly what a minor/moderate/major accomplishment is and can read the descriptions of what they are the same as you can.
The modification I'm referring to in the quoted segment is that 5e CR is a clusterfuck and it's hard to decide of an enemy is a PL+1 or a PL+2 threat based on their CR, so you have to gauge that more loosely based on the actual difficulty of the enemy independently of its numerical "challenge rating".
I’m almost in the same boat as you, since I had my first game of DnD in general and also the first game as a DM last Friday.
While I’m not in the position to give advanced tips and tips stemming from experience, I can give you some humble insight into what I took away from
my first DM session:
Be gentle with your players. All of my players were new too. Only one had played a game of DnD and only two sessions a few years back. Guide them a little more in the beginning, give them concrete quests instead of just hinting at stuff. You can always do the hinting on the side (which I did), but my players for example didn’t really pick up on it in the first session since there was already so much new stuff to learn.
Take some time in the beginning for everyone to get questions out, especially about their character sheets. This helped us to have a smoother gameplay later.
Fudge some numbers if necessary. I would’ve crit my players two times in the first game alone, one would’ve almost been an instant death. I can’t imagine anything more demotivating so I sometimes just rerolled or straight up lied lol
Improvise the shit out of it. I had prewritten some dialogue or thought of it beforehand and when one of my players spoke to the NPC, out of nervousness I answered with complete nonsense because I gave away information that wasn’t even asked. After that I just stuck with the concept in a whole but improvised all dialogue after that.
Shut up. I was so nervous in the beginning, I wanted to constantly drive the plot forward but the game really got running once the players got comfortable with each other and I let them discuss if a door is locked or not for half an hour.
But all in all, you’re gonna have a blast. Ever since Saturday morning I’m yearning for our next round and even though the thought of being a DM was absolutely terrifying for me in the beginning, now I’m so glad I took up that uh cloak, because it was extremely fun and rewarding too, since my players thankfully had a lot of fun :)
I think this is OK for the first session, especially with new players (the infamous Goblin encounter from Phandelver), but as an experienced DM I would heavily discourage doing it in general. I think it really takes away from the accomplishments of the players. I tend to do all the dice rolls in public to further this.
Yep, I agree.
For what it's worth, this is a topic of extensive debate on almost every DND forum. How people feel about dice fudging tends to come down to where they sit on the axes of "we create the story" vs "the story emerges from gameplay/the dice" and, to a lesser extent, "glorious heroes" vs "brutal realism".
I agree, I definitely don’t want to keep fudging numbers in the future because I want my players to have a somewhat authentic experience. If a monster crits, they know this encounter is dangerous, if they crit and insta-kill the monster I’ve been working on, well good for them. But for the first session I definitely found it was the right decision to keep the fun going
Great point. Personally, I use set damage for all enemies, and I don't let my monsters crit until level 3, so the PCs don't die to one bad roll on their first session. (I learned this from experience when 2 PCs died before their first long rest in my very first game).
Have a great time and don't stress about the small things, you seem to have done a ton of prep which will absolutely work to your favour.
Is this the Essentials Kit with Dragon of Icespire Peak? If so it's a great adventure! The first few quests are a bit odd, the first level quests where your PCs could end up fighting a manticore or the ochre jelly's that can one shot your players in the Dwarven shrine aren't really beginner friendly.
You really need to push the Manticore encounter as a social one rather than a combat one or make the Manticore weaker (I gave it half HP, no multiattack, and no flight framing it as the manticore being weak and hungry after being pushed from his home by Cryovain) and you need to make sure the party are aware of how slow ochre jellies are so that they're aware they can kite them.
If you enjoy the adventure I'd suggest expanding it with the two or three additional adventures that'll take your players all the way up to level 14!
If you haven't already I'd suggest Bob World Builders series on the Dragon of Icespire Peak, he has some great videos on tightening the adventure up.
Yeah Essentials Kit is the Dragon of Icespire. The first quest I'm doing is the one with the Manticore, but I'm hoping to gently lead them toward reasoning with it, rather than engaging with it. I've got some dialogue clues and some added story bits that might nudge them that way. Although one of my players has a history of creating characters that like to just jump into fights without thinking it through, so I'm planning for that scenario as well.
I'll definitely be nerfing the battle as needed though if they go that route. Multiattack in particular definitely looked a little overpowered for a first quest. I haven't seen their character sheets yet, so I think once I know how much HP I have to play with, I'll be able to form a plan a little better. Either way there will definitely be some nerfing involved.
And I did actually come across Bob World Builder's video on it! That's why I opted for the manticore quest first. I'm definitely going to be referencing his stuff going forward.
Alternatively, signal the danger and provide ways for the party to carefully avoid it. It's potentially something they could return to.
The best advice I can give for a new DM is: don't forget to have fun!
It's easy to get lost in the technicalities of the rules and trying to get rulings "correct" in the moment, but at the core of it all, unless you're the kind of group that's very into the nitty-gritty game mechanics (and it sounds to me like you're more the roleplaying type of folks that 5e is better suited for than, say, 3.5 or Pathfinder 1e) the system is just there to support the storytelling. If you need to look something up because you have no idea how to handle something, that's fine, but it's also just as fine to say "here's how we'll run it now, and I'll look it up for the next time you want to <insert ridiculous thing here>" then make a note for yourself.
Despite the title, you don't need to be a Master when you start out. Just do your best, have a good idea of where the quest is going, and if you're going to improvise something on the fly make sure you take a note so that you remember, because your party will definitely manage to come back to town 10 sessions down the road to ask <random villager you named> how their family is doing and what they've been up to in the intervening time.
Creating your own stuff is a lot of the fun of DMing - but especially since you're just starting out, I'd really recommend running things by the book at first. It offloads a lot of the mental strain, which leaves you free to focus on - and thus improve - other parts of the game.
I ran an entirely homebrewed campaign for about 2 years before we did our first premade adventure. Obviously the first one was successful, but I still wish I'd done the premade adventure first. It exposed a lot of gaps in what I was doing, and our subsequent campaigns have been so much better for it.
Shut Up and Sit Down has some great guidance for would-be GMs here, that I have incorporated into my own games.
TL;DW - 1) You should be making your NPCs closer to The Undertaker than to Walter White. Complexity and nuance is hard enough without having to improvise it, so give your NPCs a thing and just run with it; and 2) Try to avoid over-plotting your adventures, and instead develop scenarios and sandboxes for your players to mess about within.
The latter is the hardest thing I've had to do as a GM, as it takes a lot of prep up front and nerves of steel on the night when you're having to improvise on the fly. But it was well worth it, and my sessions go over a lot better now. However! As a newbie GM, I wouldn't worry too much about this until you have a bit of experience with running games as a whole.
If you need to railroad a little bit to stay on track, then absolutely do that. If you need to lift ideas wholecloth from TV, movies, books, or whatever in order to flesh out a scenario, do it. Even if your players cotton on, you will still get ideas of how things change and differ from the "source" material. If you need a few minutes to figure out how to progress the session, it's absolutely fine to pause, take a break, and have a think.
I've always liked the way The Alexandrian phrases it - prep situations, not plots.
Love the example of the undertaker vs Walter white. I've found that you can get a sufficient amount of nuance by making the situation complicated instead of the motivations complicated. As a brief example, you can get deep intrigue play by having four politicians who are all opposed for very simple reasons. And it's much easier to do that than to come up with one politician who has four competing reasons for doing something.
Watching actual play shows has made me a better DM. Dim20, Critical Role, all great examples of how to empower players while also creating a challenge for them.
Welcome to the hobby!
There's a lot of great advice already, but I just wanted to chime in with some of the things I've learned to support you and encourage you
You're a player too, and your fun is important. if l If your players cross a line and do something you aren't comfortable with, don't be afraid to say so. When I first started, one of my players made a lot of inappropriate jokes, and I was so worried about saying "no" that another player left the game. Also, if you don't enjoy maps or props, don't feel pressured to do that (it sounds like you like that part though, so more power to you). As GMs, we want our players to have fun, but not to the extent that we dead game night.
Know your group and help them have fun. Every table is different, so what works for one group may not work for yours. Your responsibility is to your players, not to enforce the WotC gospel. (but rules exist for a reason and should generally be followed, more on that in a later bullet).
Don't be afraid to try other systems. This isn't going to be a rant about Hasbro or WotC. What I mean is that sometimes a different game will be a better fit for your group. 5e has the burden of trying to do a little bit of everything, rather than excel at a specific focus. Do your players like collaboratively telling a story? Try Mouse Guard or Dungeon World where they are rewarded exp for making dramatic decisions. Do your players like complex mechanical builds and more tactics? Try Pathfinder or Lancer. Do your players want something chill? Take a break with Golden Sky Stories or Ryuutama. Don't feel like you have to reinvent the wheel and force your vision onto the DnD chassis.
Be on the same team as the players. Don't be adversarial with your players. Sure, you run the bad guys, but cheer when they succeed and mourn when they fail. Never feel like you are competing against them or that you need to beat them.
Specific DnD 5e advice
If you don't know, and your players don't know, make a ruling, tell your players you'll look it up later, and move on. if you stop the game to look up every rule, it kills the momentum. Just be honest with your players that you'll look it up for next time.
Think twice before making a house rule. I'm not saying you can't make a house rule, but consider why the rule exists before ditching it. WotC isn't infallible, but they aren't stupid, either. Many GMs heavily modify the game or allow crazy homebrew builds and then wonder why the game is broken. Learn the rules, so you know when and how to break them.
Be careful with the Rule of Cool. definitely be a fan of your players and be on their team, but don't let every one of their schemes succeed. I have one player who is so creative that he's always asking if he can do some thing or another. I love his energy, but he can't get free advantage or inspiration every time he describes a clever way he makes an attack. If you're too liberal with it, players will start to take advantage and manipulate you to get bonuses that the game isn't designed to support.
Good luck!
I am convinced Ryuutama would make an amazing fantasy exploration game about cartography. Pretty much all the ingredients are there. I just have no idea where I will find players.
Yeah, exploration would be a great use for that system.
That's a perk of being a forever-GM: I get to pick the game. I'm blessed with an awesome group that's willing to try new things and enjoys each other more than a certain rule set.
In fact my bi-weekly group is just shopping for new systems right now. We had taken a break, and when I talked about getting back together, I was honest about trying several games before settling on one. We get a bunch of different experiences, and there's no pressure to be an expert on the rules since we aren't committed to it long term. We have fun and talk about what we like and don't like about the game. When we find a winner, I plan to play a moderate length campaign of 5-10 adventure. Then maybe we'll try something whe else.
It is said that a GM's plans make the best fallback. Looks like you are running a pretty solid module. But if the players get creative and surprise you, you can let unwittingly them do some of the work.
Considering the time, you might've already played! How did it go?
Nah it's tonight. I'll post an update thread here tonight or tomorrow once I've got my first session as DM under my belt.
But yes, I am definitely going into it expecting my group to pull us off of the rails I've carefully constructed. Given the availability of tools to quickly generate encounters and NPCs I think I should be pretty adept at improvising. But we will see!
I just sent this to my DM as a potential tool to help with encounters, perhaps it can be helpful to you as well?
https://improvedinitiative.app/