Today is a good time to be a dungeons and dragons player. Today, more than any other time in the history of our game, We have easier access to examples of how to play the game, ways to find people to play the game with, supplemental material for your game and more widespread acceptance of our hobby than at any other time.We welcome beginners into our ranks with the open arms of old friends and show them the ways of playing, we form new relationships, lifelong bonds and memories with our new families.
And with this influx of new players, we find a new generation of Dungeon masters and Gamemaster raise up their head above the parapet to share their creativity with the world with their worlds and ideas. However, there are those coming into the experience of Dungeon Mastering their first game who have no previous experience with running a game or playing the game.
To all those people, worriedly looking at the monster manual and dungeon masters guide on Amazon, I want to shake your hands, your doing something that I know that I wouldn't have the guts to do if I was in your situation. But, what this means is that these heroic individuals are going into the position of dungeon master, without someone to ask the burning questions that they want to be answered. So, I went on to some online forums and asked new DM's what questions they wanted to be answered if they could have sit down talk with an experienced DM. I got a lot of responses on this so we'll start to work through this list of questions.
Do I go Homebrew setting or run a modular adventure?
Both have their merits. With a modular adventure, everything you need to run the campaign is in front of you within the book, where the PC's could go, what adversaries they will face, where the party can and can't go, who the main bad guy is and how you can steer the party towards that adversary. It also gives your adventuring party and easy reference to which setting they are playing in. If you're running "Out of the Abyss" or any of the other published adventures by Wizards of the Coast, you can tell your players to do a little research on the sword coast so they can immerse themselves in the setting without extensive work on your part to write a setting summery for your world, not to mention actually making the world itself. The official adventures are very written, and often give advice for certain circumstances, and offer a great way for first-time Dungeon masters to cut their teeth running a game and they don't require a lot of preparation time before and after sessions.
A Home-brew campaign setting, however, does require a lot more work on your part, even if you're not creating a full world for your campaign at first, the initial process of coming up with the story for the first arch of your player's journey and the places, NPC's, possible political intrigue (if you want to include that) and villains can be a doubting prospect for some people. However, the positive aspect of a home-brew campaign is that you have ultimate power over the world that your players are playing in. You can fully unleash all of the creativity that you've been wanting to focus, in to the RPG setting that you've wanted to play in. As someone who has been running their own home-brew setting for several years now, I can tell you the satisfaction of having players running around in my world, influencing it, helping it, creating it with you and sometimes even destroying parts of it, is one of the most exhilarating experience I've ever had. If you're just starting out I would begin with a single town first and then work outwards from their, don't overreach yourself and start making every continent and the history of all the empires that have ruled it, start small and work outwards.
Both modular adventures and home-brew have their advantages and disadvantages but its ultimately, its up to you which one to go for, have a go at making a town and storyline and see what you think and try reading one of the published adventures and see if it inspires you to want to run it for your players.
Do I need the dungeon masters guide and the monster manual to start running games?
No, you do not NEED the books to run a game of DnD, these days there are so many amazing free online resources that you can use to plan your sessions. Monster stats, trap design, dungeon design and magical item stats that you can keep on a file on your computer and print out.
However, WOULD I run or plan a session without these two resources? No, unequivocally no, these two books pay for themselves ten times over not just for the plethora of monster stats, magical item information, trap design and help with dungeon design, but for the story resources that they give to you as a storyteller. Advice on player types, knowledge about gods, story design, environments, political structure and how they could help influence your story and so much more. I know for a lot of us that perhaps you don't have a lot of money, it's a big commitment to make buying the books, but hopefully, this will be a game that you'll be , hopefully, playing for the rest of your life and so by that logical the cost is tiny in comparison to how much joy and use your going to get out of them. If things are really tight you could ask your entire game group to split the cost with you, everyone paying an equal amount so that you all have one copy of the dungeon masters guide and monster manual.
How do you plan for every possible thing your player could do during your session?
I don't, and I never will, I tried once and I fail miserably because my players are five people and I am one. I can't plan for every eventuality that the five of them could come up with. If you've planned for only six different ways they could get past the guards they will find triple that number, If there isn't a way into the royal palace by any means, they're still going to find a way, no matter how much security you put in their way. So I now no longer plan situations in which there is only one solution , I put obstacles in front of them with no thought to how they might get around, through or under the problem, I just put obstacles in front of them that seem believable and applicable to the situation. Allowing a problem to solved multiple ways, then allows your players to find creative ways around problems and situations. I don't apply this to everything, you still have to kill a demon or devil on its home plane to kill it forever and a Lich will always keep coming back until you destroy the phylactery, but for things less concrete, I tend never to give only one solution that is the only way to do things.
What can I do to make keeping track of combat easier?
I keep a notebook of lined paper with numbers going from one to twenty-five starting from the bottom to the top of the page. I use this for when combat arises in the game so I can keep track of the initiative of combat. I keep a supply of blank initiative sheets
incase combat arises that I didn't expect but for set-piece battles, I draw a line down the vertical centre of the page and keep the vital stats of the enemy creatures on the right-hand side , this include AC, health, saving throw bonuses, how many attacks they have and their bonus to attack, I'll also keep a page reference number in that box so, at any point instead of having to flick to the appendix at the back, I can quickly get the page that I need. This may be a bit controversial but I also pre-roll the initiative for the creatures of my set-piece battles. This is mainly done to speed up the time it takes to set up combat so that it doesn't slow down the momentum of the table.
How do you handle it when someone is gone when you play or misses a session?
So there are a few approaches you could take for when this happens. You could continue the game with you playing that character , you've witnessed what those characters are like and you know what their personalities are , you can attempted to do what that player would do in certain situations and when it comes to combat you can choose to either run the PC yourself or you can get one of the other players to run that PC, typically I do this with a more experienced player just so the combat can run a bit quicker .
You could just say that that PC isn't their at that moment in time and has just disappeared for no explainable reason (they just bamffed out until they return) and explain to your players that its a bit to much effort to run that character as well run everything as a DM , usually your players should be ok with this but if they have any disagreement with it, get them to run the PC so you don't have to, if they feel like they really need that PC that session they will run him and its now the players reasonsbility . If your players try to take items off that character and take away from what the player has accumulated, it's your responsibility to not let that happen. It may never happen, however, I have had it happen to me, so just be aware of it.
What I do in this situation is to try and find a story reason for what that character is off doing. If the party just entered a city and now in the new session a player has to miss a week, I will send a message asking that play if they wanted to be off doing something. Either investigating something or making some money doing a job, maybe give them knowledge only they know because of the time they have spent away or a little gold for the job they have been doing. If the player can't make a session and they are in the middle of a dungeon, then a character ominously disappearing in a place of danger could lead to a rescue mission perhaps leading to a difficult choice that the party has to make between killing the bad guy and saving a friend. I would check with the player involved that that is ok , not giving away to much of the story but if they agree then it not only explains why they aren't at that session but also adds another story element to your game. Maybe even have a one to one DM player session to see if that character escapes or not, and has the possibility to meet the party lower in the dungeon.
Thanks for reading again guys, I hope this has been useful to all you new time DM's out their, if you have more question please leave them in the comments below. I'm hoping to do a video answering more questions from first time DM's over on the Cardboard Arcade youtube channel so go and check it out and watch some of my show Fantasy Folder where I discuss more problems that Dungeon master and Gamemasters face.
Thanks again guys, and until next time.
Bye!
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