My reaction to this, based solely on my D&D experience fom back in the 80’s: Wait a minute: PC’s can teleport?
And, to a place the DM doesn’t know about? But then how do the players know about it? How do they even know it exists? In fact, doesn’t it exist if and only if the DM says it does?
I have played D&D that was very open-ended, where the DM had some ideas in mind but basically made up a lot of stuff on the fly. The players said, “We do this,” and the DM had to respond, “Okay, this happens.” And it’s probably easier to do this in “real life” than on a computer, where all the possibilities have to be thought of and programmed in ahead of time.
But I think it’s a lot more typical to have things pre-planned and mapped out ahead of time. The DM would be prepared with a fairly complete description of the area the players were going to visit—either a store-bought “module” or something similar of his own creation. I don’t know if you’ve seen such pre-planned adventures, but if you want to see what they look like, there are some that can be downloaded here.
Long time DM here (since back in the 70’s pamphlet days)…
Traditionally, the scope of the OP’s adventure setting (city & dungeon & clashing societal factions) would be considered more of an expert/advanced GM and player session, not one that first time game players would be expected to do.
While learning the ropes of the game, you’d usually be plopped down in a somewhat restrictive dungeon or castle setting (often buying an introductory module) and mostly just be concerned with looting a dungeon or lair. “Some orcs have been spotted around some old ruins, where legends say an evil, but wealthy, necromancer once lived.” It sounds limited, but some have the best times our groups have had have been low level storm-the-keep monster romps. And during those, we gradually grew into an intimate knowledge of the flow and rules of the game.
Wilderness and town settings were recommended to be held off until your group, especially the DM, have grown in skill and confidence. My first custom campaign worlds were clumsy affairs with many a dud, but I got better and now know the craft enough that I enjoy DM-ing freewheeling spontaneous characters for the variety and originality that they can bring to the adventure.
The irony is that town adventures are generally much more friendly to low-level characters. First-levels starting off on a dungeon crawl are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Fascinating. I always assumed because of the computer games (BG1, IWD, PS:T, ToEE, etc.) that the default was starting in towns so that you have a base for equipment, quests, friendly NPCs, etc. Easier for players, I suppose, but I guess DMs have it easier when things are in a dungeon…
Keep in mind, too, that a DM is basically god - if you’re setting people up for a campaign you can just give them any essentials they need and don’t have, either by declaring “you have this in your backpack” or arranging for the PC’s to find a stash or kill/loot a monster with the required item(s).
The funnest part of the last campaign I played in was the DM’s on the fly making up of names. “Ronzoid”, for one, seems to distill the essence of sci-fi cheesiness and banality into one package.
But even Ronzoid doesn’t compare to the name that he gave on the fly to a village: Yom Kippur. A second after he burst out with it he added “you know, if it wasn’t also the name of a Jewish holiday it’d be a good D+D name.” Which I had to agree that it would.
The kicker: Both Yom Kippur and Ronzoid were integral to the plot.
The provisioning, etc. is assumed to have taken place in a town, but that’s often not part of the adventure per se; it’s background, like the characters’ training/education in their various classes.
Not to hijack this too much, but I’ve been interested in DMing for a bit, and I’m wondering if y’all have any advice as to where to start. I played (and DMed {poorly}) back in middle school, and I like to think I’m a little more sophisticated now, but if I was going to run an adventure for grown-ups, the standards would be higher, too. I would have thought that wilderness would be as easy as a dungeon - there’s less need for it to be tightly orchestrated, since it’s not all the same enemies and all. Of course, I could see problems integrating it into a story, too… anyways, what say you all? What’s a good beginner-level kind of adventure to run?
It’s for people who also don’t have much recent experience? I’d say that a dungeon crawl would be good because of the boundaries, not in spite of them. Add in some relatively rich atmosphere and character(s) both in and out of the dungeon to distinguish it from your average middle school adventure.
If its for an existing gaming group, it depends on what they’re into, plot, carnage, characters, dungeon, city, wilderness, etc., as long as you enjoy creating what they want to play!
It also pays to know what they’re probably going to play in advance. A dungeon crawl with a caster-heavy group usually moves from fun to infuriating really fast if you’re on a level 1 adventure, and a diplomacy/delivery/legal/town oriented mission may be more appropriate until the mages aren’t reduced to hiding behind a rock after two encounters (this worry is reduced with 4th ed).
Another part of DMing is to remember that due to the inherent randomness of D&D handwaving and doing Deus ex Machinas aren’t frowned upon in all cases. For example, in one game I was in a level 1 part encountered some kobolds. We were using a critical miss table (the kind that gives you a 4% chance of chopping your head off after you roll your natural 1), take a guess how many 1s the PCs got that battle…
Yeah… the mystical town watch (the nearest town was days away) came and valiantly rescued, escorted, and raised us.
Well, the first trick is to sit down with your players and talk to them. This cannot be overstated. Set your limits “I don’t feel up to doing a big overarching plot with politics and intrigue, but I think I could handle a series of loosely connected episodic adventures” or “I’ve got a couple of ideas for dungeons I’d like to try out.” or whatever you feel comfortable with. Then get feedback and determine what people are interested in. Do they just want to play a “kick in the door” game (Where they romp through a dungeon where realism is tertiary to fun and slaughter, kicking in doors and defeating the monsters on the other side for loot and XP) - that’s generally a nice easy one to run with. Do they want to really -roleplay-? Do they want to have characters with detailed backgrounds who are realistically motivated and won’t just dash off on an adventure because they need more XP? Do they want to explore the wilds of the wilderness or keep close to town and have intrigue involving courts, assassins and hired thugs? Once your players understand what you are willing to attempt and you understand what your players would like, odds are that you’ll be able to come down somewhere in the middle and everyone will enjoy themselves for having correctly set expectations (including “bear with me, this is my first time playing this game in 14 years”).
Also, if you’re interested in sortof trying to get back into Roleplaying/GameMastering without perhaps wanting to wrestle with the avalanche of rules that is D&D, I might point you towards the Mouse Guard RPG. It’s a nice setting with a really cool and easy to learn rules set, structured very well for beginners. And it recently beat out AD&D 4E for the Best RPG of the Year award at Origins, so… maybe give it a glance. There’s a very in depth review here if you’re on the fence.
And that opportunity WILL arise. Players WILL go off the rails, so it’s best to leave at elast a few details vague…and be ready to fill those details as needed. A town that I had created for one campaign had about a dozen buildings that I actualyl had descriptions for…the rest were blank outlines. I had a list of generic building descriptions, and depending on what the players did I’d “plug and play” my descriptions into the map…esentially building the town as the game went on.
The thing is, even with a completely prewritten module, you’ll have to be ready to improve at least a little bit. Nothing pisses off players more than being lead around by the nose.
Rich Burlew has writen a good series of articles here
http://www.giantitp.com/articles/XbsQgS9YYu9g3HZBAGE.html
One of my favorite DM’s ever started us off in a town, then simply asked us what our characters wanted to do…and he MEANT it. We would up starting our own little street corner performance troop…and the DM rolled with it. Good times.
Actually, it’s the ‘determining-what-I-can-handle’ part that I was hoping for advice on. i have a bad habit of getting into projects that are a little too sophisticated for a beginner, and with something communal like an RPG, that’s a bad thing. I guess I was hoping more for fairly generic advice - wildernesses being hard to keep control of is a great example of what I’m looking for. Basically, any pitfalls I should be aware of that might not occur to me, as a new DM?
I think I can sort of work out the details on my own, but a vague idea of where I’m aiming would be helpful. To give a better idea of where I’m at, I have a few friends/acquaintances who’ve played before, but aren’t really a solid group. So, knowledge of the system, but not of each other or me.
As for rules, I’m a total system-junkie, so between 2nd and 3rd editions way back when, and Neverwinter Nights, I think I can get a grip on D&D reasonably quick.
The best advice I can give is to pretend like you’re just sharing crazy stories over drinks or tea or whatever. Since you’re a first time DM you get a LOT of leeway unless you screw up to epic proportions (and that takes some doing with the breed who play D&D ime). If you really start getting into trouble you don’t have to play it cool all the time, your job isn’t at stake. Again, since you’re new it’s fine to just say “okay, guys, slow down, I can’t deal with what you’re doing right now when I’m still learning.” And let them help you a little, same as if you were just playing football for the first time with some friends and didn’t quite understand what was going on a second ago, no one is going to freak out if you call a time out to ask for clarification.
Even in the wilderness there’s plenty of [del]arbitrary rails[/del] plot twists you can use. Remember The Village and the wall… and something about the 1800s? (I never actually saw that movie I just know a little about it), perhaps it turns out you’ve been captured by Illithids and the “jungle” is surrounded by a giant magic dome. It’s an adventurer zoo! But all the players know until you want to reveal that part is that there’s a mysterious magical barrier holding them in, they can’t go any farther that way. Arbitrary and cheesy? Sure. But it could make for a good plot twist.
I guess what I’m getting at is that while you can allow your players tons of freedom, if you’re not entirely prepared it’s all to easy to introduce something, anything, that can keep them on at least a “bigger picture” set of rails until you get more comfortable with their free-roaming habits, and you can gradually remove those “layers of inhibition” (or “DM training wheels” whatever you want to call them) as you get more and more able to adapt to their crazy schemes.
I would start with a module. You can buy or download them. It saves you a lot of figuring out monster stats and NPCs. It should have a map as well, which also helps. Make sure you are really, really familiar with it, and how the story is put together. Then put the module aside, and start talking to your players. Your aim is to get their characters involved in the story you now have. (An easy way is to have someone offer them money to investigate/ retrieve/ defeat/ etc whatever it is.)
I’d argue that the stuff the module gives you is the -easy- part, since no amount of documentation is going to help you with the sorts of issues runcible seems concerned with.
Coming up with stats for monsters and some maps and the basics of a plotline is easy. Coping with your players when they do something that’s “not in the plan” is the hard part, and the module doesn’t assist you there.
Yes, I’ve had some memorable ones that eventually led to a “house rule” that critical rolls are all done behind a DM screen to filter out any immersion-breaking results. There were too many rules-lawyering arguments that resulted. We typically used a table from one of the Dragon magazines, modified with extra colorful results (a “gore patch” to you kids today). Two silly examples…
One of our high level fighters let out a battle cry and charged out in front of the party at a group of monsters. On his first swing attempt, he fumbled his battle axe and decapitated himself, despite being clad in full plate armor. Arguing over the plausibility nearly killed a whole adventure session.
In a sci-fi campaign, our heroes were executing the nemesis space pirate captain who was tied and bound to a chair. Our player raised his laser rifle to the temple of the pirate and pulled the trigger:
Player: rolls a 01
GM: …woah, your gun jammed, you see a curl of smoke rise from the fused cartridge.
Player: What? Give me another rifle. rolls a 01
GM: …ooh. Critical miss, your blast misses, only curling some hairs on the pirate’s brow, and leaves a hole in the starship computer consoles.
Player: Missed? With the gun right against his temple?
GM: um…yeah. Your sneeze probably factored into it.
Player: Horseshit. A get a frickin’ gun tripod, strap it securely to the bulkhead, lined up so it can’t possibly miss, and I use a string around the trigger so any bodily ticks don’t disrupt the shot.
GM: The pirate lord smirks at your antics, but ok. You’re set up.
Player: rolls a 01 Oh god…
GM: (ed. These are the moments that GM’s live for…) Right as you’re pulling the trigger, the console, damaged from your previous misfire, explodes in a shower of sparks and the deck lurches as the lights go out, leaving you in blackness. As the alarms blare, and the emergency lights flicker on a few seconds later, you see before you an empty chair with the restraints hanging loose and cut. Your nemesis, it seems, has once again escaped…
