Watch the Matt Colville video as recommended by Xalthu, after which:
Don't homebrew any rules, monsters, or really anything for session 1. You can homebrew those things later on, but the bane of many a fresh campaign is for the DM to roll out their new stuff and for it to be completely unbalanced. (homebrew the adventure - that's fine, just populate it with stock NPCs and monsters from the MM)
Err on the side of caution when designing encounters. You can always have 4 more Goblins charge in to join the fray if it's looking like a cake-walk. You can't remove 4 goblins from the 8 goblin mob after 2 heroes go down without taking a turn. This will likely make all your starting encounters quite easy, but that's not a problem.
Read at least a couple of module books so that you know what you need to write down beforehand.
Start at level 1.
Do not give out magic items in session 1, as tempting as it feels to excite players with a magic sword right away. Hold them back.
My 2cp: Run a hot start. Get the characters into the action as soon as possible and get them to playing the game. Try not to focus on the rules of the game or the mechanics. Describe the scene, ask the *characters* what they want to do, decide what needs to be rolled (if anything) and narrate the result. It is possible to be bogged down with everone trying to learn the rules of the game before they know what they can do in the game. This is what makes D&D what it is. You don't need to know the rules to do things in game, the DM decides what rules apply to what action.
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
In my experience, my players in a homebrew world don’t really want to complete the core challenges, instead they try to test how well the world is made and how far they can go. Some tips are
Make the area of play large
Encourage players to stick to the main quest by:blackmailing them with their backstories,large treasures, or my favorite, world annihilation
I agree with Sanvael, don’t homebrew any monsters, but I custom make magic items.
Plan for and indeed; expect all your carefully laid plans to not survive contact with your players. Some of the most memorable moments of my campaigns happened because I was flexible enough to let players solve problems in ways I hadn't thought of.
In my experience, my players in a homebrew world don’t really want to complete the core challenges, instead they try to test how well the world is made and how far they can go. Some tips are
Make the area of play large
Encourage players to stick to the main quest by:blackmailing them with their backstories,large treasures, or my favorite, world annihilation
I agree with Sanvael, don’t homebrew any monsters, but I custom make magic items.
Make a lot of side quests
Thats probably everything important
I would actually refute the first two points.
For a new DM, it's far easier to start with a town, a local area (the oft suggested Matt Coville series has a video specifically about The Local Area) and pepper in some quest hooks, challenges, and things to discover. This allows the players to get their feet under them and to some adventuring, and then as the scope of their adventures widens, it can pan out the camera so to speak and grow the map as the players travel. What this does for you is gives you more focus to create interesting locations, and lets you really drill down on what makes this area interesting, without having to do that for all the places in all of the map before the game starts. Once you have the local area figured out, you can work on other areas that you think the players might go to depending on what actions the players take, while the players are still exploring the area, and you don't have to expend equal effort on areas it seems like the players aren't interested in.
On that note, for the second point: there's nothing wrong with having a "main story" in a campaign, but one thing you must have for it to work is player buy-in. And players notoriously don't buy-in to things that are pushed in front of them too heavy handedly. If you find that players aren't engaging with your main story, you don't want to try and force them to. Definitely still follow through with consequences of ignoring it, like if the undead army is marching on Townsville and the players aren't interested, don't have the army disappear, they still sack the town and if the players still don't care then your job isn't to punish them for it. Instead, your job is figure out what the players are interested in and figure out how to run with that.
Players love when they are curious about something in game, they poke it with a stick, and cool gameplay comes out. They're more likely to become invested in things they discover for themselves, and will think you're a great DM for having it all planned from the beginning (even if you didn't!). What i like to do is to have like the first 3 steps in multiple bad guys' plans figured out at the start, plant seeds that lead to those plotlines in the opening areas, and see if the players bite. It helps too if they're not all epic save- the-world bad guys and instead like, this bad guy wants to take over this portion of the map but this one wants to start a war with the Queen! Because then, when you finish a plot, maybe the other one still happened: you stopped the war but now the evil wizard is in control of the southern peninsula and maybe now the players are like "uh-oh time to go adventuring and put a stop to this!"
So I wouldn't nudge the players too hard towards the main quest or they'll likely lose interest, and I wouldn't focus on making the game area too large off the bat because then, from a player perspective, cities and regions just become names on a map with lore they can't be bothered with, rather than places they've been to and lived that felt real to them.
I prefer to start small then expand, and plant a lot of seeds and let the players steer for a bit.
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I am just starting out as DM and about to start a homebrew campaign (because i can), any advice before session 0 (abt. a week from now)?
I’ll start you with the standard suggestion of checking out Matt colville’s video series about how to be a DM.
As far as session 0, Tasha’s has some good ideas, you might want to review them as a starting point.
Watch the Matt Colville video as recommended by Xalthu, after which:
Here's the video that has been suggested. MCDM - Running the Game. I highly recommend it as well. Along with the BR -Running the Game or DMG - Running the Game, depending on what you have access to here on DDB.
My 2cp: Run a hot start. Get the characters into the action as soon as possible and get them to playing the game. Try not to focus on the rules of the game or the mechanics. Describe the scene, ask the *characters* what they want to do, decide what needs to be rolled (if anything) and narrate the result. It is possible to be bogged down with everone trying to learn the rules of the game before they know what they can do in the game. This is what makes D&D what it is. You don't need to know the rules to do things in game, the DM decides what rules apply to what action.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
In my experience, my players in a homebrew world don’t really want to complete the core challenges, instead they try to test how well the world is made and how far they can go. Some tips are
Thats probably everything important
Plan for and indeed; expect all your carefully laid plans to not survive contact with your players. Some of the most memorable moments of my campaigns happened because I was flexible enough to let players solve problems in ways I hadn't thought of.
I would actually refute the first two points.
For a new DM, it's far easier to start with a town, a local area (the oft suggested Matt Coville series has a video specifically about The Local Area) and pepper in some quest hooks, challenges, and things to discover. This allows the players to get their feet under them and to some adventuring, and then as the scope of their adventures widens, it can pan out the camera so to speak and grow the map as the players travel. What this does for you is gives you more focus to create interesting locations, and lets you really drill down on what makes this area interesting, without having to do that for all the places in all of the map before the game starts. Once you have the local area figured out, you can work on other areas that you think the players might go to depending on what actions the players take, while the players are still exploring the area, and you don't have to expend equal effort on areas it seems like the players aren't interested in.
On that note, for the second point: there's nothing wrong with having a "main story" in a campaign, but one thing you must have for it to work is player buy-in. And players notoriously don't buy-in to things that are pushed in front of them too heavy handedly. If you find that players aren't engaging with your main story, you don't want to try and force them to. Definitely still follow through with consequences of ignoring it, like if the undead army is marching on Townsville and the players aren't interested, don't have the army disappear, they still sack the town and if the players still don't care then your job isn't to punish them for it. Instead, your job is figure out what the players are interested in and figure out how to run with that.
Players love when they are curious about something in game, they poke it with a stick, and cool gameplay comes out. They're more likely to become invested in things they discover for themselves, and will think you're a great DM for having it all planned from the beginning (even if you didn't!). What i like to do is to have like the first 3 steps in multiple bad guys' plans figured out at the start, plant seeds that lead to those plotlines in the opening areas, and see if the players bite. It helps too if they're not all epic save- the-world bad guys and instead like, this bad guy wants to take over this portion of the map but this one wants to start a war with the Queen! Because then, when you finish a plot, maybe the other one still happened: you stopped the war but now the evil wizard is in control of the southern peninsula and maybe now the players are like "uh-oh time to go adventuring and put a stop to this!"
So I wouldn't nudge the players too hard towards the main quest or they'll likely lose interest, and I wouldn't focus on making the game area too large off the bat because then, from a player perspective, cities and regions just become names on a map with lore they can't be bothered with, rather than places they've been to and lived that felt real to them.
I prefer to start small then expand, and plant a lot of seeds and let the players steer for a bit.