Just posting as I'd like some advice regarding my first soiree into DMing.
I've recently finished a campaign (my first time playing D&D and I'm already hooked) with a group of my friends, as a player, within the adventure; Lost Mines of Phandelver. I understand that this is often the go-to campaign for new DMs (which is why the DM themselves chose it I'm sure) but I obviously don't really want to do that as I've just completed it myself as a player.
I have an idea for my own story and long term campaign, but I wanted to run a relatively short premade campaign to learn the ropes as it were.
Any help you guys could give would be greatly appreciated!
Why not create a relatively short campaign yourself to learn the ropes? Honestly, I really think that's the best way if what you "aim" for in the long run is creating your own campaigns.
I would suggest to keep it quite short, and perhaps rather go for a series of stringed adventures rather that a campaign with a big evil enemy. One of the really important differences between playing premade stuff and creating it yourself is that you create a LOT less up front. Instead you can listen to the players during or even after the play sessions, and then develop the story or world around the players. No need to create that big capital city if in the end your players decide never to go there.
And if you don't want to create "everything" yourself, steal parts and encounters from other campaigns, modules or adventures and stitch them together into your own campaign. As you probably understand I am a firm "believer" in that the most fun is to create stuff yourself, and that there's no reason with "practicing" with prewritten material. In my experience it is two quite different things, and running something prewritten well, takes just as much work as creating it yourself.
But your own advice of not starting out with a BIG epic campaign sounds really wise. Start out with some smaller adventures so you can learn the rules, what style of DM you are, what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are.
I would start with a local town for the players to meet up in. You can even use Phandalin just for the location. It already has plenty of NPCs you are familiar with, so that's less work for you. Then I'd start thinking of some good encounters for the party to deal with. Have a mixture of combat and social situations. There is a great series of articles on DDB called Encounters of the Week that you can look through to see what sounds fun to use. Nerdarchy put up a bunch of encounters called Out of the Box that might have something you'd like too. From there, just react to what your players do and talk to them about what interests them.
Hi all!
Just posting as I'd like some advice regarding my first soiree into DMing.
I've recently finished a campaign (my first time playing D&D and I'm already hooked) with a group of my friends, as a player, within the adventure; Lost Mines of Phandelver. I understand that this is often the go-to campaign for new DMs (which is why the DM themselves chose it I'm sure) but I obviously don't really want to do that as I've just completed it myself as a player.
I have an idea for my own story and long term campaign, but I wanted to run a relatively short premade campaign to learn the ropes as it were.
Any help you guys could give would be greatly appreciated!
Why not create a relatively short campaign yourself to learn the ropes? Honestly, I really think that's the best way if what you "aim" for in the long run is creating your own campaigns.
I would suggest to keep it quite short, and perhaps rather go for a series of stringed adventures rather that a campaign with a big evil enemy. One of the really important differences between playing premade stuff and creating it yourself is that you create a LOT less up front. Instead you can listen to the players during or even after the play sessions, and then develop the story or world around the players. No need to create that big capital city if in the end your players decide never to go there.
And if you don't want to create "everything" yourself, steal parts and encounters from other campaigns, modules or adventures and stitch them together into your own campaign. As you probably understand I am a firm "believer" in that the most fun is to create stuff yourself, and that there's no reason with "practicing" with prewritten material. In my experience it is two quite different things, and running something prewritten well, takes just as much work as creating it yourself.
But your own advice of not starting out with a BIG epic campaign sounds really wise. Start out with some smaller adventures so you can learn the rules, what style of DM you are, what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are.
Ludo ergo sum!
I would start with a local town for the players to meet up in. You can even use Phandalin just for the location. It already has plenty of NPCs you are familiar with, so that's less work for you. Then I'd start thinking of some good encounters for the party to deal with. Have a mixture of combat and social situations. There is a great series of articles on DDB called Encounters of the Week that you can look through to see what sounds fun to use. Nerdarchy put up a bunch of encounters called Out of the Box that might have something you'd like too. From there, just react to what your players do and talk to them about what interests them.