I’ve played D&D pretty casually from time to time, but always as a player and usually just short one shots and not big campaigns.
This year I started feeling the urge to play in a big campaign, and some of my friends were showing interest. I decided why not try my hand at DMing! I went all in, I bought 6 books (DMG, PHG, Xanthars guide, tashas, MM, and MotM) a ton of paint supplies, and some tiles/maps.
And I’m glad I did! We’ve had four sessions so far and it’s going great. We are starting on the Lost Mine of Phandelver campaign, and afterwards we will be moving into homebrew, eventually reaching level 12+. I have already started changing a few things from LMoP to fit the homebrew campaign I am planning where the BBeG will be Atropus and its chosen Warlock who is trying to attract the elder evil to Toril.
I didn’t have any experience running a campaign, or even painting, but there are so many useful resources on youtube that I feel confident I’ve got a handle on things!
If anyone has any tips or pointers for a first time DM I’d love to hear them! I am always willing to learn.
If anyone wants to see more of the figures I’ve painted, heres a couple of pics https://imgur.com/a/1SMF4jr?
RPGs are about fulfillment, continuity, pacing, challenge, and balance – in that order.
- Fulfillment: Listen to what your players talk about before the session starts to get a feel for what keeps them coming back. Sometimes it’s plot. Sometimes it’s leveling up. Sometimes it’s wacky irreverent hijinks. You don’t have to be Brennan Lee Mulligan. You may not even need different voices for NPCs. Sometimes, all you need is a bag of chips and a Deck of Many Things and your players will think you’re Shakespeare.
- Continuity: Anything important gets written down, and anything written down is important. When you ask a player to write something down, it signals to them what kinds of skills and resources are relevant in the kind of game you’re running. For example, I don’t tell my players to track how many torches they have, but I do ask them to write down if they’ve learned a new song or made a new friend – and just by hearing that, you already know what kind of game I run.
- Pacing: Anything important has a deadline, and anything with a deadline is important. Without getting too specific, a lot of D&D 5E’s chronic problems get mitigated if there’s just a hint of a time crunch.
- Challenge: Set expectations and stakes for each quest. Try to communicate the anticipated rewards for success, consequences for failure, and risks along the way. This lets the players choose their own level of difficulty and stress, and gives them the agency of abandoning a quest.
- Balance: Honestly… don’t think about balance yet. Balance between classes or pillars of adventuring is something only the most experienced DMs can do without getting overwhelmed.
Hey thanks for the reply! You bring up some great points. I like that you layed them out in order, I appreciate what you have to say about balance because that is the area I have the least amount of experience in for 5E. One of my players started as a fighter but wanted to use guns so I’m letting him use the fighter/gunslinger template from critical role, we’ll see how that goes haha.
Your points about Fulfillment will be important to keep in mind when we start to branch into homebrew. I have two players who like roleplaying and figuring out the plot, one who likes combat and leveling, and the last one kind of just likes everything. Four players in total, two are brand new to D&D. I will have to make sure I don’t over do it in one area, I think.
In terms of pacing, what would be some of the chronic problems from D&D 5E? I’m relatively new to 5E, most of my experience comes from 3.5. I will still keep your advice in mind, having deadlines sounds like a good way to keep things paced nicely.
Your point about challenge reminds me about when my party accepted the quest to barter with Agatha the banshee. I played it so that the quest giver was hesitant to start them on that quest in the first place, and when pushed explained that banshees are a force of death and only confident adventurers should accept. They were all so cautious with that quest, and they even drew straws on who had to talk to the banshee because they were all scared, it was great haha.
Anyways, I appreciate the advice. Thanks!
Some of the chronic problems for 5E mitigated by pacing:
- Short rest / long rest balance. Classes which recharge spells or abilities on a long rest rather than a short rest tend to be noticeably stronger. But if you add just a little time pressure, you’ll notice your players take fewer long rests and more short rests, kind of “soft correcting” the problem.
- Martial / caster divide. Time pressure cannot fix this balance issue, but it helps. Martial characters usually do not need to stop as often as casters, so their ability to press on when others are exhausted becomes valuable again.
- Spell duration and ritual casting. Without time pressure, there’s no reason to not use ritual casting, and a 10-minute spell is usually inferior to a 1-minute spell. But if your players are moving through a dungeon at a steady clip, that 10-minute spell now easily covers two encounters instead of one, and the group may not want to stop for the ritual casting of a spell.
- The “pile-on” phenomenon. If one player with +6 to athletics tries to lift a DC18 trapdoor, there’s a 45% chance of success. But there’s nothing in 5E saying a party of 5 adventurers can’t just take turns trying the same check. 5x adventurers with +0 to athletics have a 55.63% chance of opening that same trap door. Even worse, there’s nothing saying one persistent adventurer can’t just repeatedly try an ability check until they succeed. Now, the wizard with -1 strength has a 100% chance to open the trap door (eventually). This trivializes ability checks. Trying to arbitrate why players can’t try more than once is possible, but taxing. But if instead you just give them a little time pressure, the players tend to spend their limited time doing things that are more likely to succeed first try, and they’re definitely not going to sit around and wait for the guy with -1 strength to beat the strength puzzle.
- The “point-and-click-adventure” problem. Sometimes, players get a little tunnel-vision while trying to solve an obstacle, and they do that thing where they try every object in their inventory like it’s Monkey Island. 5E is particularly vulnerable to this because the crunchy ruleset makes players think there’s a “right” answer to a problem (with published books, that’s often true), but the unstructured nature of the adventures make it unclear what that answer is. This murders dramatic tension and narrative momentum. But with a little time pressure, players will respond to time-consuming distractions by saying, “Gee, there’s got to be a better way,” and they’ll inevitably gravitate towards more intuitive solutions that make sense in the context of the adventure.
I am addicted to bullet points, lol.
There are other chronic problems with 5E that aren’t solved by good pacing – the social and exploration pillars are bizarrely underdeveloped with no gameplay loops and this leaves combat with an over-emphasized role, wilderness survival and overworld travel are such a chore that everybody skips them, stealth mechanics are self-contradictory, crafting explicitly boils down to “the DM makes something up,” some magic items are ridiculously powerful/useless for their rarity, the random loot drops are extremely random, the random encounters in the published adventure books are almost exclusively deathmatches, they never should have gotten rid of “out of combat turns,” the list goes on.
I would generally categorize these as balance problems (balance between pillars of adventuring is a kind of balance). And I’ll repeat that you shouldn’t trouble yourself with solving them. If you’re used to 3.5, then all you really need to do is follow your instincts for how a D&D session should feel, and don’t think to hard about anything I just told you.
Thank you for the explanation! I can see now how added time pressure can help resolve or mitigate some of these issues. I appreciate your last two points especially.
Your advice has given me some new perspective, I think simply being aware of these issues is a big help. Like you say I won’t trouble myself with solving them, but being aware of them will help me create better scenarios for my party and the campaign. Thanks again!