Hi baby DM here, and I mean baby DM—little backstory. I've wanted to play since I was super little and never could find a group to play with. About 6 months ago. We started a family game. I have been a player in this game, and honestly, it's been a struggle. I love the game, and the group is having a great time. My struggle comes from wanting to do everything. lol. We're currently running the starter module because 3 of 6 players have never played before. My DM recently suggested that I'm struggling so much because I'm not a player I'm a DM.
D&D has become my hyper fixation, and I've written out roughly 50 pages of lore for my character. I have the core books plus Tasha's and Xanther's, plus a couple of modules. And since I play a noble gnome bard wizard, I've written my own spellbook. It's no spell craft situation, but a fancy notebook I wrote out my spells in and all their details with the page numbers to find the info if the description is crazy long. Until this weekend, we were doing everything old school. My DM wants to play in the next game, and we're currently halfway through his campaign. I'm running the next game. I've got a lot of ideas, but no idea how to bring them to life, and my DM has never crafted his own homebrew.
How do I craft my own homebrew? Is there any guide source? Good YouTue how to's? I know the smart thing to do would be to run something someone else has written, but what fun would that be? Any advice or tips on how to do this would be amazing.
Some of the books you mentioned have tips on crafting your own worlds, spells, monsters, and magic items (the DMG, tasha's and xanathar's are all a big help.) Also, the easiest solution a lot of the time is to just tweak stat blocks and spells for your needs rather than make something entirely homemade.
My tips as someone with a similar background would be to make sure you let your players have agency. Your job is not to plan out the plot and the sequence that events will happen in, but instead to plan out what is happening in the world and how it reacts to player choices.
Clearly, writing is not a problem for you if you have 50 pages of lore for one character, so my advice would be to just vomit stuff on to a google doc and then edit it into something that works.
I normally advise against new DMs running total homebrew for their first time because there’s a lot more to running a game than having a story and a prewritten campaign, especially one of the starter sets, teaches you about pacing and encounter balance. As Bacon says it’s also important to give the players agency, you’re running a game for them and not writing a novel, and realising that you might have very little actual control can be a hard lesson to learn if you’re running a homebrew campaign as your first time because it’s very easy to think you need to be writing the next Lord of the Rings and that’s just not the case.
Having said all that if you want to run a homebrew campaign go for it, it’s your table and you might pull it off fantastically. If you’re looking for something to teach the new DM Guide is actually really well written and user friendly (not something you can say about the 2014 one) or try YouTube for plenty of advice on how to construct a session or full campaign. A channel named Mystic Arts is very good for DMing videos
I would also suggest running a published adventure for your first time. It will allow you to focus on the game play aspects and leave the story part to whoever wrote the adventure.
I sounds like you are very eager to get to doing the story part, which I can sympathize with. But DM'ing the first time can be overwhelming. The storytelling is only part of it, there's also the game play part, which is less fun, but no less important. So, using a story someone else wrote will really help you first understand the game play parts. When to call for a roll, where to set the DC, adjucating strange edge-case rules interactions. Get one of those under your belt, and then on the next one, you can focus more on the story, once you better understand how it interacts with the game rules.
And it doesn't have to be an either/or type situation. There are plenty of cases of people who start off with a published adventure, get to the end, and then just evolve it into a homebrew, continuing on with those same characters.
Also, Matt Colville has a great video series called Running the Game you might check out.
I was advised to run a module for my first time in the GM seat, and it was good advice. Now, I did still tweak things, add some stuff based on the player's interests, and I did some things to tweak the story to cover up some plot holes, but overall having structure to fall back on was very helpful.
The answer is definitely mod, but I’ve tried reading one of the published adventure books (Candlekeep Mysteries) and had difficulty. I’m honestly preparing a homebrew oneshot for my first session as a DM.
Like the others said, don’t treat a oneshot like a novel. In your spare time when you aren’t going over rules try putting yourself in your player’s shoes and try to think of different ways they could go about this… knowing full well that you can’t predict all of them!
Thank you to everyone who has read or replied so far!
I do need to clear up my 50 pages of lore, which isn't a hard story. I've got like a 9-paragraph backstory for my Gnome. Most of the rest is about the place my gnome comes from, and I had fun fleshing out the lore of the region. It's a lot of descriptions of different major locations within the whispering woods. Breakdown of monsters that can be found in the area. Description of their gods and what daily life in the whispering woods looks like across the different groups that call the area their home. Explaining the general topography and weather of the area. It's not a firm story in any sense of the word, and I've come up with the broad strokes, quick description my gnome gives whenever someone asks where they're from.
I know this isn't a hand-holding situation. It's more give them the agency to pick a direction and go. It's just my job to have something ready to go to deal with whatever direction they want to adventure in. I want to present encounters that work for what the group wants to do. Of course, I want to have a big bad that is the end goal for the group, but I want to create really enjoyable encounters and avoid lulls, so it's a fun adventure before the big bad. I want to present compelling enough side quest options that they aren't laser-focused on getting to the end game. My Original post didn't do a job of explaining things. I got lost in the sauce. But I will say I've now read CH 1 of the 2024 DM manual and it' given me a ton of useful info.
1) Don't get too attached to your lore, chances are at least one player at your table will just want to run around fighting monsters. Very few players want to discover or hear about 50 pages of lore. Most are satisfied with a 60-90 minute overview of the setting & premise of a long-term campaign, or a 20-30 minute overview for a short campaign, or 1-5 minutes for a one-shot.
2) Don't get too attached to your story, almost certainly the players will do something you don't expect. I was playing with the same group for 2.5 years before becoming their DM and they still did stuff I did not expect from the moment they started creating their characters.
3) Run LOTS and LOTS of one-shots with combat before designing your own combat encounters for a campaign. Designing combats that are: fun, diverse, tense, and don't lead to a TPK is by far the hardest skill a DM needs. In a one-shot a TPK or gets cheesed by the players is a totally fine ending, not so much for session 3 of a campaign that is meant to last for 6-8 months.
I highly recommend researching a well-designed module to use for level 1-5, and once your players reach level 5 you can consider shifting them to your HB world / story.
1) Don't get too attached to your lore, chances are at least one player at your table will just want to run around fighting monsters. Very few players want to discover or hear about 50 pages of lore. Most are satisfied with a 60-90 minute overview of the setting & premise of a long-term campaign, or a 20-30 minute overview for a short campaign, or 1-5 minutes for a one-shot.
Very good advice. Lore and world building should only be for your own enjoyment. Don't expect the players to remember it or even really engage with it. There will sometimes be one or two who really get into it, but many players are satisfied with knowing who the BBEG is, and how they should stop it.
Also, with world building, its best to start small. They're in a town, you have a general idea of the area around the town, maybe of some nearby big cities. The further you get from where they are, the less detail. It can give you freedom to add things you need on the spot, instead of being boxed in to specific scenarios. And it helps with not spending your time building parts of the world that won't matter to the story.
Tell the Story that you are most comfortable with, weather it is a Module or a homebrew. The plot is yours and the rest of the story is the players. Have fun and be careful if you homebrew because after a year or so you the plot may evolve into something that doesn't resemble your original idea. That may even be half the fun. I know it was for me LOL
Don't get too attached to your lore, chances are at least one player at your table will just want to run around fighting monsters. Very few players want to discover or hear about 50 pages of lore.
This. This. This.
DM'ing isn't writing a novel. Even if you come up with some sort of amazing lore, or some kind of amazing story, your players might completely ignore it, or address it in a compeltely unexpected way. And if your lore requires certain outcomes, it will start feeling rail-roady to the players.
Whatever lore you come up with, your players shouldn't have to read it to play the game. The best way for players to discover campaign lore is during play. They run into an NPC trying to do evil-thing, maybe they monologue a bit, and the NPC drive to do evil-thing becomes clear to players and they decide to pursue things further.
But lore is much more for the DM to pencil out the overall campaign direction, not for the players to read.
Some players will love discovering the campaign lore in game. But others will just be interested in combat. And other players just watn to hang out with the other players and have some pizza. And others are happy to establish a bastion in town and build a reputation, completly independent of campaign lore.
Lore is extremely important to the DM to make the overall arc of the campaign make sense, but quite a few players will simply shrug it off cause its not why tey're playing. You'll need to be able to provide somethign that engages those players as well.
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Hi baby DM here, and I mean baby DM—little backstory. I've wanted to play since I was super little and never could find a group to play with. About 6 months ago. We started a family game. I have been a player in this game, and honestly, it's been a struggle. I love the game, and the group is having a great time. My struggle comes from wanting to do everything. lol. We're currently running the starter module because 3 of 6 players have never played before. My DM recently suggested that I'm struggling so much because I'm not a player I'm a DM.
D&D has become my hyper fixation, and I've written out roughly 50 pages of lore for my character. I have the core books plus Tasha's and Xanther's, plus a couple of modules. And since I play a noble gnome bard wizard, I've written my own spellbook. It's no spell craft situation, but a fancy notebook I wrote out my spells in and all their details with the page numbers to find the info if the description is crazy long. Until this weekend, we were doing everything old school. My DM wants to play in the next game, and we're currently halfway through his campaign. I'm running the next game. I've got a lot of ideas, but no idea how to bring them to life, and my DM has never crafted his own homebrew.
How do I craft my own homebrew? Is there any guide source? Good YouTue how to's? I know the smart thing to do would be to run something someone else has written, but what fun would that be? Any advice or tips on how to do this would be amazing.
Thank you for reading!
Some of the books you mentioned have tips on crafting your own worlds, spells, monsters, and magic items (the DMG, tasha's and xanathar's are all a big help.) Also, the easiest solution a lot of the time is to just tweak stat blocks and spells for your needs rather than make something entirely homemade.
My tips as someone with a similar background would be to make sure you let your players have agency. Your job is not to plan out the plot and the sequence that events will happen in, but instead to plan out what is happening in the world and how it reacts to player choices.
Clearly, writing is not a problem for you if you have 50 pages of lore for one character, so my advice would be to just vomit stuff on to a google doc and then edit it into something that works.
I normally advise against new DMs running total homebrew for their first time because there’s a lot more to running a game than having a story and a prewritten campaign, especially one of the starter sets, teaches you about pacing and encounter balance. As Bacon says it’s also important to give the players agency, you’re running a game for them and not writing a novel, and realising that you might have very little actual control can be a hard lesson to learn if you’re running a homebrew campaign as your first time because it’s very easy to think you need to be writing the next Lord of the Rings and that’s just not the case.
Having said all that if you want to run a homebrew campaign go for it, it’s your table and you might pull it off fantastically. If you’re looking for something to teach the new DM Guide is actually really well written and user friendly (not something you can say about the 2014 one) or try YouTube for plenty of advice on how to construct a session or full campaign. A channel named Mystic Arts is very good for DMing videos
I would also suggest running a published adventure for your first time. It will allow you to focus on the game play aspects and leave the story part to whoever wrote the adventure.
I sounds like you are very eager to get to doing the story part, which I can sympathize with. But DM'ing the first time can be overwhelming. The storytelling is only part of it, there's also the game play part, which is less fun, but no less important. So, using a story someone else wrote will really help you first understand the game play parts. When to call for a roll, where to set the DC, adjucating strange edge-case rules interactions. Get one of those under your belt, and then on the next one, you can focus more on the story, once you better understand how it interacts with the game rules.
And it doesn't have to be an either/or type situation. There are plenty of cases of people who start off with a published adventure, get to the end, and then just evolve it into a homebrew, continuing on with those same characters.
Also, Matt Colville has a great video series called Running the Game you might check out.
I was advised to run a module for my first time in the GM seat, and it was good advice. Now, I did still tweak things, add some stuff based on the player's interests, and I did some things to tweak the story to cover up some plot holes, but overall having structure to fall back on was very helpful.
The answer is definitely mod, but I’ve tried reading one of the published adventure books (Candlekeep Mysteries) and had difficulty. I’m honestly preparing a homebrew oneshot for my first session as a DM.
Like the others said, don’t treat a oneshot like a novel. In your spare time when you aren’t going over rules try putting yourself in your player’s shoes and try to think of different ways they could go about this… knowing full well that you can’t predict all of them!
Thank you to everyone who has read or replied so far!
I do need to clear up my 50 pages of lore, which isn't a hard story. I've got like a 9-paragraph backstory for my Gnome. Most of the rest is about the place my gnome comes from, and I had fun fleshing out the lore of the region. It's a lot of descriptions of different major locations within the whispering woods. Breakdown of monsters that can be found in the area. Description of their gods and what daily life in the whispering woods looks like across the different groups that call the area their home. Explaining the general topography and weather of the area. It's not a firm story in any sense of the word, and I've come up with the broad strokes, quick description my gnome gives whenever someone asks where they're from.
I know this isn't a hand-holding situation. It's more give them the agency to pick a direction and go. It's just my job to have something ready to go to deal with whatever direction they want to adventure in. I want to present encounters that work for what the group wants to do. Of course, I want to have a big bad that is the end goal for the group, but I want to create really enjoyable encounters and avoid lulls, so it's a fun adventure before the big bad. I want to present compelling enough side quest options that they aren't laser-focused on getting to the end game. My Original post didn't do a job of explaining things. I got lost in the sauce. But I will say I've now read CH 1 of the 2024 DM manual and it' given me a ton of useful info.
Some quick general DM advice:
1) Don't get too attached to your lore, chances are at least one player at your table will just want to run around fighting monsters. Very few players want to discover or hear about 50 pages of lore. Most are satisfied with a 60-90 minute overview of the setting & premise of a long-term campaign, or a 20-30 minute overview for a short campaign, or 1-5 minutes for a one-shot.
2) Don't get too attached to your story, almost certainly the players will do something you don't expect. I was playing with the same group for 2.5 years before becoming their DM and they still did stuff I did not expect from the moment they started creating their characters.
3) Run LOTS and LOTS of one-shots with combat before designing your own combat encounters for a campaign. Designing combats that are: fun, diverse, tense, and don't lead to a TPK is by far the hardest skill a DM needs. In a one-shot a TPK or gets cheesed by the players is a totally fine ending, not so much for session 3 of a campaign that is meant to last for 6-8 months.
I highly recommend researching a well-designed module to use for level 1-5, and once your players reach level 5 you can consider shifting them to your HB world / story.
Very good advice. Lore and world building should only be for your own enjoyment. Don't expect the players to remember it or even really engage with it. There will sometimes be one or two who really get into it, but many players are satisfied with knowing who the BBEG is, and how they should stop it.
Also, with world building, its best to start small. They're in a town, you have a general idea of the area around the town, maybe of some nearby big cities. The further you get from where they are, the less detail. It can give you freedom to add things you need on the spot, instead of being boxed in to specific scenarios. And it helps with not spending your time building parts of the world that won't matter to the story.
That said, if it's fun for you, go for it.
Tell the Story that you are most comfortable with, weather it is a Module or a homebrew. The plot is yours and the rest of the story is the players. Have fun and be careful if you homebrew because after a year or so you the plot may evolve into something that doesn't resemble your original idea. That may even be half the fun. I know it was for me LOL
This. This. This.
DM'ing isn't writing a novel. Even if you come up with some sort of amazing lore, or some kind of amazing story, your players might completely ignore it, or address it in a compeltely unexpected way. And if your lore requires certain outcomes, it will start feeling rail-roady to the players.
Whatever lore you come up with, your players shouldn't have to read it to play the game. The best way for players to discover campaign lore is during play. They run into an NPC trying to do evil-thing, maybe they monologue a bit, and the NPC drive to do evil-thing becomes clear to players and they decide to pursue things further.
But lore is much more for the DM to pencil out the overall campaign direction, not for the players to read.
Some players will love discovering the campaign lore in game. But others will just be interested in combat. And other players just watn to hang out with the other players and have some pizza. And others are happy to establish a bastion in town and build a reputation, completly independent of campaign lore.
Lore is extremely important to the DM to make the overall arc of the campaign make sense, but quite a few players will simply shrug it off cause its not why tey're playing. You'll need to be able to provide somethign that engages those players as well.