First Real Game

Shinyo

I'm trying to set up a small campaign with my friends at school, and for most of us it's our first real D&D experience.

Any tips?

Mr_Rose

Yes, a great many... For the sake of not repeating anyone, here are a few links:

At the time of writing, the following are all on the front page of this forum...
Plot/setting ideas.
General DM tips.
Trap design.

Shinyo

Ohh, I'm liking this.

Anything in particular I can do to ease in both myself as the DM and the players?

urbman

they have premade adventures you can do. other than that study the books at first glance they can be confusing as hell. but just keep reading them.

syndalis

Run a prefab adventure. Find one, made by Wizards, that you like, and run it. Look for a good low-level one.

Read the whole adventure cover to cover, and familiarize yourself with the material. Read it again.

Read the Players handbook. Pay special attention to the combat chapter, and the skills/feats.

Look at the links in post 2. Especially the general GM tips. They will help you out a great deal.

Before hooking up with your friends, make a few characters to familiarize yourself with the process. It's always best that somebody knows what they are doing in a group, rather than 4-5 people all trying to figure it out on their own and making mistakes.

Post any specific questions you have here, and we will help you out!

Most importantly, HAVE FUN

Legoman05

Just have fun. If you don't know what you're doing, or what the specific rule is, just find something that makes sense, and run with it.

Point and case: one of my players wanted to run, jump over an enemy guard, tumble as he hit the ground, on one of my first DM sessions.

In the intrest of time, took his jump and tumble mods and added 15 to them, because they seemed hard. He failed both, and hilarity ensued. Fun was had.

If I had spent 3 minutes digging through the PHB for the DCs, we would not have had fun, and I would have that much more sour a taste for DMing, as well as that player not liking the game that much.

And remember, it is a game. If you and your gang want to just kick in the door, kill dragons, and get lots of lewt, don't let anyone tell you you're doing it wrong.

Talonrazor

Legoman05 wrote:

Just have fun. If you don't know what you're doing, or what the specific rule is, just find something that makes sense, and run with it.

Point and case: one of my players wanted to run, jump over an enemy guard, tumble as he hit the ground, on one of my first DM sessions.

In the intrest of time, took his jump and tumble mods and added 15 to them, because they seemed hard. He failed both, and hilarity ensued. Fun was had.

If I had spent 3 minutes digging through the PHB for the DCs, we would not have had fun, and I would have that much more sour a taste for DMing, as well as that player not liking the game that much.

And remember, it is a game. If you and your gang want to just kick in the door, kill dragons, and get lots of lewt, don't let anyone tell you you're doing it wrong.

Everything his says is 100% dead on. The biggest factor of GMing is ad libbing it. Don't derail everything to look up rules or charts and tables. Check out those links and just try and be as familar with the stuff as possible.

Legoman05

Just thought I'd re-iterate a simple little trick for, well, anything.

If you don't know how to rate a number, take all the relevant PC data, and add:

5: If it's easy.
10: If it's of 'normal' difficulty.
15: If it's hard.

For instance:

The party just blew past what you had planned for them, and still want to go on. You want to make some monsters, but for some reason, don't want something out of the Monster Manual. (I do this all the time, because my players know just about every monster from there.)

So, the AC of the party's fighters is roughly 18-19. So, the creature attacks at a +9.

The party's melee attacks at roughly +4 to +8, so set it's AC at like, 20. Easy for the guys who are good at melee.

Throw on enough hit points to take max damage from the heaviest hitter:

2 times: Easy Fight.
4 Times: 'Normal' fight.
6 Times: Harder Fight.

Throw on some 'interesting' things to make him not a standard mook. For instance, give him a chain and improved trip. Or make him a grappler. Or a spell-caster that flys, so the PC caster has to dispell it before melee can do anything.

With those three or four steps, you can make a monster from scratch that, while you may not have his whole stat block, you have a basic idea of what he's going to be capable of, so you can ad-lib around it later to fill in the gaps. It'll also take you just about as long to do that as it will to look up a monster of the appropriate CR. In addition, all the players who are tired of Kobalds and Orcs will have something new to be afraid of.

Which is another thing: Make the visual description as vivid as possible. Don't be afraid to make the simple town guardsman that would otherwise be an average fight seem dangerous, by dressing him in blackened armor, and giving him lots of distinctive scars across his tight, scoweled face.

Shinyo

Awesome, thanks for the help guys

Talonrazor

Legoman05 wrote:

Just thought I'd re-iterate a simple little trick for, well, anything.

If you don't know how to rate a number, take all the relevant PC data, and add:

5: If it's easy.
10: If it's of 'normal' difficulty.
15: If it's hard.

For instance:

The party just blew past what you had planned for them, and still want to go on. You want to make some monsters, but for some reason, don't want something out of the Monster Manual. (I do this all the time, because my players know just about every monster from there.)

So, the AC of the party's fighters is roughly 18-19. So, the creature attacks at a +9.

The party's melee attacks at roughly +4 to +8, so set it's AC at like, 20. Easy for the guys who are good at melee.

Throw on enough hit points to take max damage from the heaviest hitter:

2 times: Easy Fight.
4 Times: 'Normal' fight.
6 Times: Harder Fight.

Throw on some 'interesting' things to make him not a standard mook. For instance, give him a chain and improved trip. Or make him a grappler. Or a spell-caster that flys, so the PC caster has to dispell it before melee can do anything.

With those three or four steps, you can make a monster from scratch that, while you may not have his whole stat block, you have a basic idea of what he's going to be capable of, so you can ad-lib around it later to fill in the gaps. It'll also take you just about as long to do that as it will to look up a monster of the appropriate CR. In addition, all the players who are tired of Kobalds and Orcs will have something new to be afraid of.

Which is another thing: Make the visual description as vivid as possible. Don't be afraid to make the simple town guardsman that would otherwise be an average fight seem dangerous, by dressing him in blackened armor, and giving him lots of distinctive scars across his tight, scoweled face.

This is a really, really good trick. It's perfect for throwing a variety of baddies at players when you don't want to open up the Monster Manual. I'd also recommend getting a sheet of paper to jot down general, basic rules as a quick reference sheet and getting some tabs to mark your core rulebook pages. This really helps you find a rule fast.

Another thing that will help you is to get Initivate cards made up. On these cards you record all the important info of a PC, do the same with your monsters and then arrange them in order of Initiave. Just sort through the deck to determine who goes next in a combat round.

Game Mechanics has some really good free cards you can print off. http://www.thegamemechanics.com/products/initiativecards.asp

Rankenphile

If you have access to a laptop, set up the bookmarks for www.d20srd.org in your favorites. You can find them under the Firefox Goodies section.

Shinyo

Would it be possible to play without the books? I'm kinda poor. I was thinking of just looking up the rules and whatnot, pick out some specific races and classes that the players could choose from and write my own short story arc.

Do the books really make that much of a difference?

DeepQantas

If you can make a character and help players make their characters without the books, then I suppose, yea. You can just use the d20 rules.

What you don't do, however, is just throw the d20 rules to a player and say "make a char". It'll lead to wailing and gnashing of teeth. That'd be confusing enough even with the books. The Player's Handbook has character creation rules. d20 documents don't.


I think you can still figure out how to create chars, tho. And I'm sure people here can answer questions.

Legoman05

At least get the PHB. If for no other reason than to have something to pass around when you're debating the rules about spells. It should only set you back about 30 bucks, and if you're _really_ poor, you can probably get your group to pool for one of them, that you can kind of pass around and use as you need.

The SRD has most of the information, but having at least the PHB in front of you streamlines things a bit.

Thanatos

Woohoo! My first sticky!

This seems to be coming up a lot, so let's stick it all in one thread.