I've been wanting to DM for my group, taking over for my regular DM every now and then, but the one other game I tried to DM crashed and burned.
For this new try, I was thinking of starting with my players waking up in a jail cell or a cage or something.
Could I get some tips on making a compelling story? Maybe some ideas? I'd also like some tips on how to be a good DM in general.
I've even heard of people making an outline for the beginning, and winging it from there. I'd love some help with this beginning stage, and maybe some help with secondary storylines.
Should I do maps and minis?
The other game I tried to DM was PbP, so IRL DND is a whole new concept to me.
While I am a big fan of tropes and cliches I think the old "you wake up dazed and confused in a jail cell with no memory of how you got there" can be a bit overwhelming especially if you are new. I mean at the very least you need to come up with a reason why they are there. You need to know the how they got there, what happened, who was involved, you know all of those 'W's we learned in elementary school. Secondly, you need to figure out some ways they could escape, because it will be a crap adventure if they are just stuck in the jail cell all session. So this means you need to answer some questions like do they have anything on them, what do they have, and why do they have it. That is just the beginning. If it were me I would just start them off in a tavern...much easier.
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As for me, I choose to believe that an extinct thunder lizard is running a game of Dungeons & Dragons via Twitter!
What I would do, is have them all wake up in the same cell, but maybe separate them. If it's a noble prison, with privacy and stuff, separate the boy and girl characters, if the prison is run down (i.e. orcs) them there is no care in gender privacy. Like Auberginian said, make a story that got them there, even if you don't share it with the party right away. When they escape, they could see some papers that explain their purpose for being imprisoned. But, in order to push the game along, there must be a plot twist. You can't just say they were locked up in a professional prison for a legit cause, and they escaped. They will have nothing to do. Maybe have the professional prison be attempting to lock them up for another mischievous deed. And of course, if you put them imprisoned with orcs, that's obvious. The orcs are planning on raiding a town!
All in all, treat their imprisonment as the prison would. You don't have to tell them why they're there at first, but at least hint at it. Add a plot twist with the prison to push the game along. AND MOST IMPORTANTLY... HAVE FUN. Remember, what you say goes. If the characters are abusing the use of a cantrip, tell them they feel tired of using it so much. Also remember that if you accidentally put the players against things stronger than them, lower the enemy rolls, have more crit fails for fun. ALSO, HAVE FUN!!!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I love roleplaying, message me so we can set something up.
I talk everything D&D, message me for questions, chat, arguements, or roleplay!
You may want to consider an adventure like The Hangover. WotC put it out a while back for free and it is modeled after the independent comic series "The Rat Queens." In the adventure, the party basically returns from some unnamed adventure, blows their money getting black-out drunk (as adventurers sometimes do), then wake up in the middle of the forest in a mess with a broken wagon, some dude tied to a tree, a bunch of halflings in a locked chest, and wearing clothes they don't remember. The goal of the adventure is basically to play out the movie The Hangover, where the party traces back their steps and runs into all the people and things that they wronged or troubled during their drunken revelry in order to figure out what the heck happened.
Basically, you just start out assuming the party are friends that do a minor adventure, then jam them together in a crazy booze fueled bender and have them try to work out what happened and bond as a better team from there.
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"The mongoose blew out its candle and was asleep in bed before the room went dark." —Llanowar fable
Could I get some tips on making a compelling story? Maybe some ideas? I'd also like some tips on how to be a good DM in general.
I've even heard of people making an outline for the beginning, and winging it from there. I'd love some help with this beginning stage, and maybe some help with secondary storylines.
This is a lot to cover, but I'll try to give you some quick tips:
A good story comes with 3 parts: incident > climax > resolution.
Incident: What causes the players to get involved (Why are they in the cells?)
Climax: The point in the story where everything comes together and needs to be dealt with (Found all the pieces of the puzzle and fight the bad guy)
Resolution: What happens after the players win/lose (They all get their reward, to be continued?)
Compelling is a subjective term, but we can play with it to some degree. A compelling story generally involves some sort of conflict: Save the family from the fire, find the lost treasure, don't die while trying to escape. The conflict should involve serious personal repercussions: if the players don't find the mcguffin the crops fail and the town starves for the winter vs if the players don't find the mcguffin the town will be over-run by the raiders who killed one of the player's family. Physical, emotional, and moral conflicts are very good tools for compelling stories. Think of all the crime drama shows out there, each one has told the same story about the guy who was wrongfully jailed for murder, each puts on a different shade of compelling.
How you write your adventure is going to be a process that grows with you as a DM. I started by writing down every little detail I could think of, every contingency to the players' reactions, every name, town, and mountain range. That kind of detail made it very easy to keep the game flowing since I didn't have to try to come up with stuff on the fly. As I got more games and such under my belt, I started doing less work. I am to the point now I run an entire session off of 3-5 bullet points and some hastily scribbled notes. Write as much as you feel you need, then remember that a lot of it may be missed or never used. You can't anticipate everything the players will do, so write for what you think you'll need and get ready to improv the rest. You can fill in the blanks after every session to keep the flow of the game and look like everything was meant to be.
Lastly, being a good DM, in my opinion, is tied to this line: "I'm the DM, I don't know anything". You are the world, you are the creatures, you are the story, you are everything, but you are not the players. You have the story written out, you have the time line of events and how they should play out, and that is your schedule. Once you add the players you know nothing else, the world changes every time a player says "I do something". As long as you keep that time line of events moving in time with the players, and because of the players, you'll make them feel like the world is breathing. The rest of it is simply learning how you and your players communicate, the way you say something vs how they hear it and the other way around. As you get more comfortable wearing the mantle of DM, the story will almost tell itself and you just have to explain how the world responds to what the players do.
I've been wanting to DM for my group, taking over for my regular DM every now and then, but the one other game I tried to DM crashed and burned.
For this new try, I was thinking of starting with my players waking up in a jail cell or a cage or something.
Could I get some tips on making a compelling story? Maybe some ideas? I'd also like some tips on how to be a good DM in general.
I've even heard of people making an outline for the beginning, and winging it from there. I'd love some help with this beginning stage, and maybe some help with secondary storylines.
Should I do maps and minis?
The other game I tried to DM was PbP, so IRL DND is a whole new concept to me.
Hi... You might consider Lost Mine of Phandelver... That's a great adventure as a GM to get into. It was my first and it helped a lot.
teak
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A little bit of nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men... - Willy Wonka
I know the "waking up in prison" trope is pretty common in DnD, but I'd encourage you to see if the players are o.k. with it before going that route. I've never been comfortable with that convention because it feels like it takes away too much player agency. I can see the same problem with "The Hangover": What if my character doesn't drink? How could they have ended up that way? Now, if I knew that was the plan, I could create a character where that did fit, and would probably enjoy the adventure, depending on my mood and preferences.
There should be a reason that the characters are in jail. I personally would have a hard time running a session only being in jail. Players hate being without their toys and not having full freedom of choice. The first thing they will try is to get out. As a start point think of a few hooks that get the characters out of jail.
Will a noble come to them with a proposal? Do her a favor in exchange for freedom?
Will the characters encounter somebody in another cell that has a way out?
Are the characters accused of something they did not do? Killed a beloved town hero? Will those followers try to break into the jail to perform their own form of justice and inadvertently free the characters?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
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I've been wanting to DM for my group, taking over for my regular DM every now and then, but the one other game I tried to DM crashed and burned.
For this new try, I was thinking of starting with my players waking up in a jail cell or a cage or something.
Could I get some tips on making a compelling story? Maybe some ideas? I'd also like some tips on how to be a good DM in general.
I've even heard of people making an outline for the beginning, and winging it from there. I'd love some help with this beginning stage, and maybe some help with secondary storylines.
Should I do maps and minis?
The other game I tried to DM was PbP, so IRL DND is a whole new concept to me.
While I am a big fan of tropes and cliches I think the old "you wake up dazed and confused in a jail cell with no memory of how you got there" can be a bit overwhelming especially if you are new. I mean at the very least you need to come up with a reason why they are there. You need to know the how they got there, what happened, who was involved, you know all of those 'W's we learned in elementary school. Secondly, you need to figure out some ways they could escape, because it will be a crap adventure if they are just stuck in the jail cell all session. So this means you need to answer some questions like do they have anything on them, what do they have, and why do they have it. That is just the beginning. If it were me I would just start them off in a tavern...much easier.
As for me, I choose to believe that an extinct thunder lizard is running a game of Dungeons & Dragons via Twitter!
What I would do, is have them all wake up in the same cell, but maybe separate them. If it's a noble prison, with privacy and stuff, separate the boy and girl characters, if the prison is run down (i.e. orcs) them there is no care in gender privacy. Like Auberginian said, make a story that got them there, even if you don't share it with the party right away. When they escape, they could see some papers that explain their purpose for being imprisoned. But, in order to push the game along, there must be a plot twist. You can't just say they were locked up in a professional prison for a legit cause, and they escaped. They will have nothing to do. Maybe have the professional prison be attempting to lock them up for another mischievous deed. And of course, if you put them imprisoned with orcs, that's obvious. The orcs are planning on raiding a town!
All in all, treat their imprisonment as the prison would. You don't have to tell them why they're there at first, but at least hint at it. Add a plot twist with the prison to push the game along. AND MOST IMPORTANTLY... HAVE FUN. Remember, what you say goes. If the characters are abusing the use of a cantrip, tell them they feel tired of using it so much. Also remember that if you accidentally put the players against things stronger than them, lower the enemy rolls, have more crit fails for fun. ALSO, HAVE FUN!!!
I love roleplaying, message me so we can set something up.
I talk everything D&D, message me for questions, chat, arguements, or roleplay!
You may want to consider an adventure like The Hangover. WotC put it out a while back for free and it is modeled after the independent comic series "The Rat Queens." In the adventure, the party basically returns from some unnamed adventure, blows their money getting black-out drunk (as adventurers sometimes do), then wake up in the middle of the forest in a mess with a broken wagon, some dude tied to a tree, a bunch of halflings in a locked chest, and wearing clothes they don't remember. The goal of the adventure is basically to play out the movie The Hangover, where the party traces back their steps and runs into all the people and things that they wronged or troubled during their drunken revelry in order to figure out what the heck happened.
Basically, you just start out assuming the party are friends that do a minor adventure, then jam them together in a crazy booze fueled bender and have them try to work out what happened and bond as a better team from there.
A good story comes with 3 parts: incident > climax > resolution.
Compelling is a subjective term, but we can play with it to some degree. A compelling story generally involves some sort of conflict: Save the family from the fire, find the lost treasure, don't die while trying to escape. The conflict should involve serious personal repercussions: if the players don't find the mcguffin the crops fail and the town starves for the winter vs if the players don't find the mcguffin the town will be over-run by the raiders who killed one of the player's family. Physical, emotional, and moral conflicts are very good tools for compelling stories. Think of all the crime drama shows out there, each one has told the same story about the guy who was wrongfully jailed for murder, each puts on a different shade of compelling.
How you write your adventure is going to be a process that grows with you as a DM. I started by writing down every little detail I could think of, every contingency to the players' reactions, every name, town, and mountain range. That kind of detail made it very easy to keep the game flowing since I didn't have to try to come up with stuff on the fly. As I got more games and such under my belt, I started doing less work. I am to the point now I run an entire session off of 3-5 bullet points and some hastily scribbled notes. Write as much as you feel you need, then remember that a lot of it may be missed or never used. You can't anticipate everything the players will do, so write for what you think you'll need and get ready to improv the rest. You can fill in the blanks after every session to keep the flow of the game and look like everything was meant to be.
Lastly, being a good DM, in my opinion, is tied to this line: "I'm the DM, I don't know anything". You are the world, you are the creatures, you are the story, you are everything, but you are not the players. You have the story written out, you have the time line of events and how they should play out, and that is your schedule. Once you add the players you know nothing else, the world changes every time a player says "I do something". As long as you keep that time line of events moving in time with the players, and because of the players, you'll make them feel like the world is breathing. The rest of it is simply learning how you and your players communicate, the way you say something vs how they hear it and the other way around. As you get more comfortable wearing the mantle of DM, the story will almost tell itself and you just have to explain how the world responds to what the players do.
A little bit of nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men...
- Willy Wonka
I know the "waking up in prison" trope is pretty common in DnD, but I'd encourage you to see if the players are o.k. with it before going that route. I've never been comfortable with that convention because it feels like it takes away too much player agency. I can see the same problem with "The Hangover": What if my character doesn't drink? How could they have ended up that way? Now, if I knew that was the plan, I could create a character where that did fit, and would probably enjoy the adventure, depending on my mood and preferences.
Trying to Decide if DDB is for you? A few helpful threads: A Buyer's Guide to DDB; What I/We Bought and Why; How some DMs use DDB; A Newer Thread on Using DDB to Play
Helpful threads on other topics: Homebrew FAQ by IamSposta; Accessing Content by ConalTheGreat;
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There should be a reason that the characters are in jail. I personally would have a hard time running a session only being in jail. Players hate being without their toys and not having full freedom of choice. The first thing they will try is to get out. As a start point think of a few hooks that get the characters out of jail.
Will a noble come to them with a proposal? Do her a favor in exchange for freedom?
Will the characters encounter somebody in another cell that has a way out?
Are the characters accused of something they did not do? Killed a beloved town hero? Will those followers try to break into the jail to perform their own form of justice and inadvertently free the characters?
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale