How to start writing a campaign?

[JobsforFun]

I am still relatively new to DnD 5e (my first edition of dnd). I know most if not all of the basic rules that DnD has to offer but I am interested in writing my own campaign but I have no idea how to start or how to even write a campaign. I know that i'll need the DM Guide and the Monster Manual but what are some other tips when it comes to dming? Luckily I play with 6 people and they're all friends of mine so I am not too worried about my first time dming being a '****' show.

What would be some interesting house rules that I could implement? I saw on a DnD YT channel that I enjoy that run rolling attack rolls and getting a natural 20 you'd get "exploding dice". For example: When attacking with a longsword it does 1d8 but on a critical hit it does 2d8 but when you role the extra dice and you roll the maximum on the die you can re-roll it again and again until you roll something other than what is the maximum on the dice. Would that be OP?

Another one of my friends is starting a campaign and he has a rule natural one
Roll a d6
1-2: Nothing happens
3-4: Attack an ally
5-6: Attack yourself

If anyone can offer some help and advice that would be great.

[MrFahrenheit]

I am still relatively new to DnD 5e (my first edition of dnd). I know most if not all of the basic rules that DnD has to offer but I am interested in writing my own campaign but I have no idea how to start or how to even write a campaign. I know that i'll need the DM Guide and the Monster Manual but what are some other tips when it comes to dming? Luckily I play with 6 people and they're all friends of mine so I am not too worried about my first time dming being a '****' show.

What would be some interesting house rules that I could implement? I saw on a DnD YT channel that I enjoy that run rolling attack rolls and getting a natural 20 you'd get "exploding dice". For example: When attacking with a longsword it does 1d8 but on a critical hit it does 2d8 but when you role the extra dice and you roll the maximum on the die you can re-roll it again and again until you roll something other than what is the maximum on the dice. Would that be OP?

Another one of my friends is starting a campaign and he has a rule natural one
Roll a d6
1-2: Nothing happens
3-4: Attack an ally
5-6: Attack yourself

If anyone can offer some help and advice that would be great.

Good house rule: ban vumans, but allow standard humans the option of swapping out any number of their ability +1s for a skill proficiency.

Bad house rule: the d6 shindig on a nat 1. This punishes players unnecessarily, and even more so as they get higher in level, as they roll more often and thusly have greater odds of rolling a 1. Something like the d6 house rule would directly contradict the idea of a character becoming more masterful as s/he gains experience.

As for the exploding dice idea...it's not bad, but it does duplicate a late game sorcerer feature, though the die in that case can only explode once.

[MrFahrenheit]

General DM tips?

Fun is more important than anything else. You'll have sessions that are necessarily more social, stealthy, academic or combat focused. After you've had at least one of each, note what your players were most into, and try to make more sessions geared that way.

Get to know your players' characters. In fact, hold onto their character sheets for them. Beyond giving you a greater understanding of the PC capabilities, doing so also avoids the trap of an absent player's character missing a session. Give the sheet to one of your more experienced players, and let them double up so no one loses out on XP.

Make sure everyone has a backup character rolled up. Especially as the game progresses, character death can otherwise stop a table cold as you'd have to devote attention to the creation of the new PC. If that's handled behind the scenes, though, then there's nothing to worry about.

[BDRook]

What are some other tips when it comes to dming?.

Just a few tips I've found to help newer DMs:

1)Have a general idea of what you want to have happen, but don't be afraid when the players completely mess it up. Sometimes you just have to roll with the punches.

2) Don't be confrontational with your players, you're all here to have a good time and people have a number of ways of going about that. If they end up killing your favorite NPC don't be butthurt about it.

3)Don't be afraid to punish them for stupid character actions, like splitting the party and going off alone in the middle of the woods. If they kill your favorite NPC in the middle of town, it stands to reason the guards would come and arrest them.

4) Be descriptive, both in describing the world around them and the people they meet, and the combat. Add a little flair when describing how enemies are attacking them, and what happens when the players kill them in return.

[Specter]

Some tips:

1) when planning, don't fall for writing everything in detail. "If the party reaches this point, they see..." nope. Try this. "- here: mountains, bottom -》treasure, top -》 dragon (mm page x)". That way you don't exhaust yourself so much, and can come up with details on the fly.

2) Sometimes, thinking about the ending is better than the beginning.

3) If you detail the npc's and organizations first, you can have a better idea of how to structure the adventure and the combats later.

Good luck.

[Grod_The_Giant]

First, figure out how improvisational you're comfortable with being. I tend to make a lot of character, setting, and sometimes plot details up on the fly, even to the point of contradicting the notes I forgot to look at; on the other hand, I can't make encounters up on the fly easily. A set of my notes would be a lot of prompts and lists of names interspersed with more detailed notes about fights.

In general, though, I suggest stressing situations over solutions. Create a detailed problem, then leave it open-ended-- that way you're not biased towards a particular method of resolution.



Don't worry about "balance" at all; the kind of minor "I do 4.6 more DPR than you!" crap that usually gets brought up in such contexts doesn't mean anything at the table. The exploding dice rule looks fun; the critical fumbles... I, personally despise them with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, but some people enjoy. Ask your group.

[Talamare]

Good house rule: ban vumans, but allow standard humans the option of swapping out any number of their ability +1s for a skill proficiency.

or you know... Don't

vHumans are basically equal to other strong races such as Elf, Dwarf, and Half Orc
Especially since 80% of Feats are really garbage

[JobsforFun]

Good house rule: ban vumans, but allow standard humans the option of swapping out any number of their ability +1s for a skill proficiency.

Bad house rule: the d6 shindig on a nat 1. This punishes players unnecessarily, and even more so as they get higher in level, as they roll more often and thusly have greater odds of rolling a 1. Something like the d6 house rule would directly contradict the idea of a character becoming more masterful as s/he gains experience.

As for the exploding dice idea...it's not bad, but it does duplicate a late game sorcerer feature, though the die in that case can only explode once.

I personally have the mind set of if it is in the DnD Book its fine otherwise run it by me first. I don't like when DM's go ban happy.

[Nicodiemus]

Everybody GMs differently, and every person at your table has a different idea of what fun is. With the development of console RPGs, people's expectations of tabletop have elevated. The days of linear dungeon crawls are sadly mostly behind us. Try to think like a WoW developer (or ESO if you prefer): develop an overarching story arc with at least a nebulous idea of what the BBEG will be, but also spend time with more singular, sandboxy plots so if your players get sidetracked they have something fun to do. Then you can always drop hints into the side plots about what needs to be done for the main question line. Adaptability is key.

[Specter]

In general, though, I suggest stressing situations over solutions. Create a detailed problem, then leave it open-ended-- that way you're not biased towards a particular method of resolution.

That's good advice.

As for critical failures, I make the player a d10; 3 is a mild consequence, 2 is average and 1 is hell. But that doesn't have much to do with writing.

[randyofpirate]

Don't worry about houserules until you find something you specifically want to change. You are better off as a new DM running the game as printed in its purest form so that you can come up with your own opinions on what houserules work best for your group.

As far as starting a campaign, I use a top down, step by step approach.

1. Pick your setting. Either make one up or use a published one like forgotten realms.

2. Narrow your setting down to an area of appropriate size for your campaign.

3. Come up with your campaign BBEG or major event. i.e. evil wizard, earthquake, dragon, war, tyrant, invading army, lich, etc.

4. figure out how that event or bad guy affects your campaign setting. EXAMPLE: A white dragon moves into the mountains above a city. The weather begins to turn unseasonably cold and the farmers start to have a hard time supplying food. drakes and kobolds are raiding the surrounding settlements. A cult has moved into the city that worship the dragon. the guards are overwhelmed by the thought of the dragon to worry about what is happening in the slums.

5. Now pick one of those and chase it down the rabbit hole until it meets with your PC's. EXAMPLE: the guards are ignoring the slums. Food is scarce. A mysterious crime lord has set up shop controlling the flow of food into the slums. He forces merchants to pay taxes to him to sell their goods and robs any shipments that don't pay him tribute. A local barkeep is stressed because he doesn't have the money to pay the tax he owes this week and is visibly distraught because the hooligan tax collectors should be there any minute. The PC's start the game in his bar.

You now have the setting(CITY), the BBEG(dragon), first adventure arc(SLUM CRIME STORY), first mini BBEG(CRIME BOSS), first friendly NPC(BARKEEP), and first encounter(TAX COLLECTORS IN BAR). that is all you need to start the campaign. Everything else will be determined by what your players do. Never try to get a detailed plan more than a session ahead of your players, and NEVER come up with the solution to the problem you present the players. They will almost always find a different solution.

[Finieous]

I can tell you how I started my first campaign. Granted, it was 1980, but I think it still works.

Town and a dungeon.

Make a town and detail a few important NPCs. Give the PCs roots or attachments in the town, and to each other. Maybe they're all veterans of a battle defending the town -- I still use this one. It creates attachments to the town and to each other all at once, and it explains why they have class level(s). However different their backgrounds and personalities, they have this in common: they are brothers (and sisters) in arms.

Now create a dungeon or purchase a dungeon module and place it near by. Plant hooks in the town to the dungeon. If you want to get fancy, sprinkle in hooks to some other adventure situations or locations in the area. IMHO, there's no better way to learn how to play D&D than a dungeon crawl.

Expand out from there. Plant some more hooks in your town, but also take direction from your players on where they want to go and what they want to do. Even if you're not great at improvising, if you're getting direction from the players in advance, you only need to stay one session ahead of them with your prep.

Alternatives: Just purchase and download Keep on the Borderlands to see how it's done. Since part of that is my nostalgia talking, the 5e Starter Set is also solid for a more contemporary take on Town and a Dungeon.

[Grod_The_Giant]

More advice; this is how I did the last big campaign I ran:


Work out a central issue ("the Dragon of the East is waking, and causing more storms to lash the land")
Create a couple major factions and work out how they're responding to that. ("King Mar is granting more power to standout individuals in hopes of getting heroes; the Dirge Empire is trying to expand into regions that aren't as badly affected by the storms; the Dragon of the West is directing his followers to gather whatever power they can")
Figure out how those decisions trickle down to the general public. ("X-men style reactions to the Imbued; everyone's getting ready for war and racism against the Dirge; the dragon-worshipping Korinthians are kidnapping people")
Create a dramatic situation that brings as many of those elements into play as you can and drop the players right into it. Plan for them to follow any one of multiple threads leading in different directions. ("They see Korinthians kidnapping Imbued [including one player] from a market, claiming they're Dirge agents")


From there, I try to write session-to-session, or at most arc-to-arc. Generally I'll plan a few scenarios leading up to a big decision point and leave that open. The players hit the climax of the adventure, decide what to do, and then I have a week or three to figure out what happens next.

[Sigreid]

My advice:

1. decide with your group whether you want to do a sand box or story campaign. Sand box is you creating the world and having things happen in it and them choosing when and what to make themselves a part of. Story is they know from the start that you have a focus plot that they will ultimately drive and resolve, for better or worse. Neither of these is 100% pure of the other as with a sandbox you should have an idea how the forces of the world are going to play out if the party doesn't interfere, and with Story you have the goals, strategy and resources of the BBEG defined, but you have to let the party address it in their own way to include completely unexpected ways that may make you change the BBEG's strategy.

2. Create the starting town for the campaign. I suggest for your first campaign starting in a small village of around 80 people. Map out the village and name all of the people. You don't really need stats for them, but you need to know the job, race, rough age and personality of the first people the party is likely to come into contact with. You don't have to put personality to all of them as you can give some of the more ancillary characters personalities as the party meets them and just take notes of what you've done. Do decide who is in charge of the village and whether they are a real official or just the one everyone looks to when times are bleak.

3. Decide on the names and rough size of the nearest towns or cities. You don't have to do more than that right at the start, but being able to tell the party what they are called and whether it's a fishing village or a major city will help eliminate the feeling that they're in a village in a void.

4. Figure out the time of year for the first session. I find a spring festival is a nice place to start.

5. Threaten the village. This should be a small group bandits, kobolds, goblins or some other low level enemy bent of victimizing the town. Will our heroes rise to the challenge!?!

6. As they vanquish their first foes they discover clues that lead them into a wider world of adventure.

[JAL_1138]

First, figure out how improvisational you're comfortable with being. I tend to make a lot of character, setting, and sometimes plot details up on the fly, even to the point of contradicting the notes I forgot to look at; on the other hand, I can't make encounters up on the fly easily. A set of my notes would be a lot of prompts and lists of names interspersed with more detailed notes about fights.

In general, though, I suggest stressing situations over solutions. Create a detailed problem, then leave it open-ended-- that way you're not biased towards a particular method of resolution.

I'm the same way--putting together encounters is a ton of work for me and I can't do it on the fly worth a darn, but I can wing the rest reasonably decently.

What I did to help out with that was get a lot of the Adventurers' League modules (back when they were free; it's more expensive now) and organize a bunch of level-appropriate encounters into something giving a rough idea of situation type (outdoor, dungeon, town, etc) and enemy type (guards, cultists, humanoid monsters, beasts, etc.) so that I have a big tabbed folder of them to yoink from in a pinch. I reskin them heavily when needed (e.g., I might use the statblocks for an orog encounter or a bandit encounter or something, but describe them to the players as hobgoblins, if the current situation calls for hobgoblins and I don't have any hobgoblin fights ready).

The League modules are mostly designed to be one-shots or episodic, so they're easy to drop in nearly whole (tweaked appropriately) for when the players catch me completely off guard. I actually had a campaign spin out of that exact thing once--a filler session when they left town for a while to visit the farms on the outskirts I hadn't prepped anything for gave me a whole new BBEC (big bad evil cult) and a completely new direction for the campaign, because the players latched onto the events in it to such a degree it made more sense to roll with it than try to get the train back on the rails of my original intent.

I also agree wholeheartedly with situations vs solutions. I'd extend it to creating scenarios over plots, too. Rather than crafting a story with a defined progression, figure out what your antagonists want and how they're going to try to get it. Then adjudicate what happens based on player actions and adjust antagonists' plans and methods accordingly, instead of ever assuming the players will do anything specific. The important thing is that the antagonists will move if the players don't intervene, and try new things if the players disrupt their original plans--they don't rest on their laurels and wait for the players to show up (in the broad sense--in a given session, it often makes more sense for players to arrive just as the green slime hits the spinning blade trap.) If doing this, it often pays not to plan more than a few sessions ahead, rather than writing the entire campaign before finding players.

For anything you really, really want the players to find/figure out, try to use something like three different clues or ways to get it, minimum, and never put it behind a single skill check (even if everyone's rolling--they'll all manage to fail, and the adventure will stall out, in defiance of probability math).

An alternative approach to the couple-of-sessions-at-time planning method I also like using is to steal more than just encounters from published modules, and use them as a resource for maps, encounters, NPCs, scenario hooks, and suchlike, without following the module plotline too closely--using the module as a basis for your own twists on it. Chris Perkins (one of the module writers for WotC) did this a fair bit in Dice Camera Action when running Curse of Strahd--the version he ran for the Waffle Crew is considerably different than the published module.

For that matter, starting with a short module like Lost Mine of Phandelver and just running it straight-up, and then building an adventure based on the outcome of it afterward, is another good way to kick a long-running campaign off.

EDIT: I strongly recommend against critical fumble rules, especially in 5e where classes like the Fighter rely almost entirely on making a bunch of d20 rolls per round. As such characters level up, they become more likely to fumble per round than they were at lower levels. If your fumble rules can result in death, it becomes nearly a statistical certainty that the Fighter will eventually cut their own head off in a fit of sudden derpitude--meanwhile the spellcaster who mostly uses the type of cantrips and spells that require enemies to save instead of requiring the caster to make an attack roll can remain perfectly safe from it.

[Beleriphon]

or you know... Don't

vHumans are basically equal to other strong races such as Elf, Dwarf, and Half Orc
Especially since 80% of Feats are really garbage

They aren't garbage per se, but they don't have as much impact on the game as people like to think they do outside of highly specific circumstances. Nobody is going to complain when that v.human bard picks up Actor at first level, because that makes a great deal of sense. Even the more powerful option aren't that bad. Heavy Armour Master on a fighter or paladin at first level isn't really a big deal, since benefits are always handy, but aren't anywhere near as noticeable at higher levels.

As for campaign check my signature for my campaign setting I've being working on for years. Its not a deep as a published setting, but the basics are there as far as what I think would be fun, it has a few NPCs already formatted, along with enough info to get a player going and understanding what the game would be about. That and I wanted to get enough idea down that I could use them as hooks to see what players might want to get up to just from the types of characters they pick.

[Vogonjeltz]

I am still relatively new to DnD 5e (my first edition of dnd). I know most if not all of the basic rules that DnD has to offer but I am interested in writing my own campaign but I have no idea how to start or how to even write a campaign. I know that i'll need the DM Guide and the Monster Manual but what are some other tips when it comes to dming? Luckily I play with 6 people and they're all friends of mine so I am not too worried about my first time dming being a '****' show.

What would be some interesting house rules that I could implement? I saw on a DnD YT channel that I enjoy that run rolling attack rolls and getting a natural 20 you'd get "exploding dice". For example: When attacking with a longsword it does 1d8 but on a critical hit it does 2d8 but when you role the extra dice and you roll the maximum on the die you can re-roll it again and again until you roll something other than what is the maximum on the dice. Would that be OP?

Another one of my friends is starting a campaign and he has a rule natural one
Roll a d6
1-2: Nothing happens
3-4: Attack an ally
5-6: Attack yourself

If anyone can offer some help and advice that would be great.

Advice:

1) Don't even think about (deliberately) making up house rules until after you're comfortable just playing the game.

2) Come up with hook first (a hook is the motivating scenario of the campaign) and build possible events from there. Some possibilities:
a) The rise to power of a Gang, Cult, or other group (Shapechangers, the Undead, an Orcish Horde is being assembled, whatever), in doing so they naturally cause problems that the Adventurers have to deal with, culminating in a whiz-bang fight with the leadership and an attempt to end the threat once and for all. (Until the next one shows up, of course).

b) The antagonist wants to achieve a goal and the PCs become aware of this when one of his actions happens to/in front of them.
i.e. St.John Smith plans to seek immortality as a lich, but in crafting his vile philactery requires the hearts of 23 persons of good. Smith plans to take a victim each tenday. As an Enchanter, he is able to enchant the chosen victims into accompanying him to his unholy sanctuary deep in the Maldive Woods whereupon he enacts the ritual sacrifice at midnight, and then carts their remains to the local graveyard to bury them under cover of darkness. Unbeknownst to Smith, his activities have drawn the attention of a small pack of ravening undead Ghouls who have taken up residence and wait for Smith to leave before unearthing the fresh body for feasting. Our players are drawn into the scenario when a local dignitary (Noble, Clergy, Mayor) puts in a request for someone to investigate disturbances in the local graveyard.

c) They get word of the discovery of a Lost City of Wherediditgo and the promise of untold riches. Caravans leaving daily, don't miss out!


And to answer your specific question, no it's not exactly overpowered to have (theoretically) endless critical hits, but is it fun? No it's probably not fun at all to watch someone roll a bunch of dice over and over on the slim chance it happens. Or worse, to have a character die outright from the same. Repeat: Not fun.

Same thing goes for rolls of 1 on attacks being more than just missing, that's not fun, it's irritating.


More advice; this is how I did the last big campaign I ran:

This is all great advice.

[LaserFace]

I am still relatively new to DnD 5e (my first edition of dnd). I know most if not all of the basic rules that DnD has to offer but I am interested in writing my own campaign but I have no idea how to start or how to even write a campaign. I know that i'll need the DM Guide and the Monster Manual but what are some other tips when it comes to dming? Luckily I play with 6 people and they're all friends of mine so I am not too worried about my first time dming being a '****' show.

What would be some interesting house rules that I could implement? I saw on a DnD YT channel that I enjoy that run rolling attack rolls and getting a natural 20 you'd get "exploding dice". For example: When attacking with a longsword it does 1d8 but on a critical hit it does 2d8 but when you role the extra dice and you roll the maximum on the die you can re-roll it again and again until you roll something other than what is the maximum on the dice. Would that be OP?

Another one of my friends is starting a campaign and he has a rule natural one
Roll a d6
1-2: Nothing happens
3-4: Attack an ally
5-6: Attack yourself

If anyone can offer some help and advice that would be great.

Don't worry about House Rules immediately. Those are things you and your group discuss and decide up as the game goes on, which you use because everyone at the table likes the idea.

Everything about DMing is start small and build up. Don't write 300 pages of lore for the City of Glorious Backstories at the get-go. Don't write down any information that isn't relevant to the party's experience.

Start off with a scene in your head to set the tone of the campaign. A place or an event, whatever you think is cool. Then just focus on building the world to make sense around that event.

So, for example, let's say I want the game to begin with a Festival. Why a Festival? Who cares, it's a thing. Where is the Festival? A town. What's the town called? Who's there? Who isn't there? Why do people like the Festival? Does it mark a special date? What happened? ... you can see how things kind of explode from there.

Ideally I somehow connect this Festival to actual Adventuring at some point. Maybe the Festival won't happen this year for some reason. Maybe it does happen, but monsters attack. Whatever.

Try to set yourself up with something that kicks off the game with promise of monsters, treasure, exploration, intrigue, whatever your players enjoy. During play, give them hints at ideas floating in your head through local stories and rumors, observe how they react and let that guide your next step.

Then just take it one step at a time, prepare no more than 1 session ahead. Ask your players what they enjoyed about each session and what they look forward to. Use all the information you have at your disposal, given as feedback or observed in game. You can't go wrong if you stay focused on player experience, and allow them to meaningfully direct and react to in-game action.

[Sabeta]

As others have said, learn what your players respond to. It's okay to have an "open world" setting, but you're going to realize that your players constantly respond to one thing over others, and that you can use that to guide both player freedom and railroad the adventure without them even feeling like it. For example my players all wrote "Good" on their Character Sheet except one. I decided to test this, and constantly gave them three choices between simple quests. They were basic things, for example "Fight the Monster", "Help a merchant get rich", or "I heard there's a hidden power weapon over here.". Every single time they went with quest options that seemed like it could lead to people being in danger over making money or gaining power.

So I could easily railroad my players by simply saying "There's an evil princess torturing a beautiful monster who needs to be saved", and I wouldn't even need to make maps or dialogue for the other quest options I provide because I already know what they're going to do. (I do anyway, just in case, and then find a way to reuse that content later). Of course, your players will eventually realize that some of their choices aren't really choices. Make sure to keep them inticed with actual decisions. Here's an example from my most recent session which went way better than I had intended (I expected this part of the session to take about an hour. It ended up being the entire session)

Player A: Always does what Society thinks is Good. (LG)
Player B: Always does what he thinks will lead to Good, even if it means dabbling slightly into Evil (CG to LN)
Player C: Always does what she thinks is Good, but mostly goes with the flow (NG)
Player D: Does whatever can get him money or power (CE to LE)

Now introduce a scenario where
Player A would think something is Wrong
Player B would think something is Wrong, but has a potentially Good payoff
Player C wouldn't know how to react
Player D would think something is Wrong, but stands to gain quite a lot of money and/or henchmen out of it.

What ended up happening? Player D and A were directly opposed on what should be done. Player D manages to convince B that this is a good idea, and after a bit of arm twisting Player C went along with it. Even though the scenario could be considered Evil, it was in a morally grey area that Player A didn't feel comfortable with. He ultimately decides to trust his companions and goes along with Player D's wishes. What was the scenario? Escorting Merchants of high suspicion to an antagonistic, but currently peaceful group with a very high reward. Player D just wanted the money, and convinced player B that the Merchants would make valuable allies on the inside for whenever they needed to overthrow the group. Player C went along with it, and while Player A disagreed strongly he eventually came around.

That ended up taking an entire session of the players JUST roleplaying, and they're still talking about if they made the right decision or not. (Chances are this will work out in their favor, but with consequences that makes the group realize simply going with the flow is a bad idea)

TLDR: Start off with a variety of simple quests such as kill the monster, find the treasure, or talk tot he wizard. When you understand what they like start giving them more of what they like. Add in other things for variety (ie: social players may enjoy the occasional combat encounter). As you learn their interests start building up a plot that works with their interests. There's no point running a megadungeon if everyone wants to spend all day talking. The reverse is true if your players just want to kill things and get phat loot.

But really, don't be afraid. A lot of this comes with experience. My first session was miserable for everyone involved. The players felt railroaded and while they enjoyed my worldbuilding they felt like they weren't in control of anything. I was extremely unprepared and I really didn't let my players do what I want because I simply didn't consider their wants when I wrote the opening chapter. It took way too long to get set up, so the session ended up dragging for way to long because i just wanted to get the story started and they were tired of waiting on the wizard to pick spells. However, over time we all got better. I still have a lot to learn (My NPCs are all boring, for example. Most don't have voices and several have adlibbed names because I just didn't think about it), and my players are still getting used to their characters, but all-in-all the games have become undeniably fun for everyone. Or at least, they say so when I ask for critique.

Oops, my TLDR was nearly as long as the post itself T.T

[Sir cryosin]

Don't worry about the campaign just come up with a few quests and a town. Also don't be afraid to steal things. You like from movies, books, shows, games. I'm a new DM and I'm experimenting with different house rules and things that I might find cool. But I'm finding out too many house rules muck up your encounters. My advice as a fellow newer DM. Just come up with a town and NPCs in town and have a few quests they can have around the town.

[Sabeta]

Also don't be afraid to steal things. You like from movies, books, shows, games.

Quoted for truth. The more obscure the better, imo, but true nonetheless. Example, my campaigns pantheon is lifted straight from DBZ. Why? Because nobody paid attention to the DBZ Cosmology until the Buu Saga, and even then most fans glossed over it. It's surprisingly obscure knowledge that their Gods are just a race of aliens born from a tree in a world without strife, and that their status as a god is mostly self-appointed.

[MinotaurWarrior]

I am still relatively new to DnD 5e (my first edition of dnd). I know most if not all of the basic rules that DnD has to offer but I am interested in writing my own campaign but I have no idea how to start or how to even write a campaign. I know that i'll need the DM Guide and the Monster Manual but what are some other tips when it comes to dming? Luckily I play with 6 people and they're all friends of mine so I am not too worried about my first time dming being a '****' show.

1) Figure out what's fun to you about DMing
2) Figure out what fun things your PCs are built to do

Center the campaign around those things.

E.g. If what you like about DMing is being "The Master of Worlds" and thinking about groups and characters in the setting, then you'll have more fun if rival factions are a part of the game. If your PCs all took proficiency in stealth, you want lots of sneaky encounters. Together, this sounds to me a lot like the Commona Tong / Thieves Guild / Dark Brotherhood plotline from Morrowind, which was a lot of fun to me, so I'd riff off that.

If what you like about DMing is being "The Master of Rules" and your PCs are mostly spellcasters, then maybe what you want is a heavily magical world where a lot of encounters will be based around resolving either obscure spell combos, or homebrew magical challenges. 'Malus the Dark Wizard has lain a dread curse upon Villia. You've got to use this homebrew system to lift it'

[JobsforFun]

Quoted for truth. The more obscure the better, imo, but true nonetheless. Example, my campaigns pantheon is lifted straight from DBZ. Why? Because nobody paid attention to the DBZ Cosmology until the Buu Saga, and even then most fans glossed over it. It's surprisingly obscure knowledge that their Gods are just a race of aliens born from a tree in a world without strife, and that their status as a god is mostly self-appointed.

A lot of my friends take inspiration from games and other things.
In a campaign with LoL aspects in i
In a campaign with Dark Souls 3 aspects
and In a camping where our dm incorporates aspects from anime and other things.

[JobsforFun]

1) Figure out what's fun to you about DMing
2) Figure out what fun things your PCs are built to do

Center the campaign around those things.

E.g. If what you like about DMing is being "The Master of Worlds" and thinking about groups and characters in the setting, then you'll have more fun if rival factions are a part of the game. If your PCs all took proficiency in stealth, you want lots of sneaky encounters. Together, this sounds to me a lot like the Commona Tong / Thieves Guild / Dark Brotherhood plotline from Morrowind, which was a lot of fun to me, so I'd riff off that.

If what you like about DMing is being "The Master of Rules" and your PCs are mostly spellcasters, then maybe what you want is a heavily magical world where a lot of encounters will be based around resolving either obscure spell combos, or homebrew magical challenges. 'Malus the Dark Wizard has lain a dread curse upon Villia. You've got to use this homebrew system to lift it'

I'd say the most fun thing is that I get to write a story that my friends can go through but being able to control the world is fun to ;)

[JobsforFun]

Thanks to everyone for the advice, I had an idea of how I could start the campaign

Players start out in a town and a festival is happening but the festival is attacked assuming that they are able to kill whatever attacks the festival they'll get a letter from the king asking them to join a dinner in their honor thanking them for finally getting rid of the trouble makers that the area was having to deal with. But a assassins guild hears about them getting the invitation and kid naps them in order to persuade them to killing the king.

I was thinking of having the king be secretly evil but not sure what he could be doing behind the scenes. Maybe he is involved in some kind of bigger plot to the campaign? But that is not taking into consideration the players don't kill the king and instead warn him of the plot.

[MrStabby]

My way (by which i mean the way it will be next time after learning my latest lessons) is to work through some details - both top down and bottom up.

1) Pick a campaign aesthetic. Easiest way is to mimic players expectations of ancient earth cultures - oriental themed, meso-american themed, Arabian, Assyrian or steampunk or art-deco. I wish i were a better artist so i could illustrate some parts of the setting. It isn't the biggest part of the campaign but for a few descriptive scene setting sentences you help your campaign to stand out from the crowd and to help set expectations. It is also a good time to decide things like high/low magic setting and what races/classes exist in the campaign world.

2) Next I set the main antagonists. A quick thought to the character, powers, resources and ambitions of the main factions in the world. This is useful for when the PCs drive the plot off it's expected course. It also sets up the rivalries, the resources being competed over and naturally establishes strategic locations.

3) Here I generate some cool locations and encounters. I think of aspects of the different world factions that are cool or interesting or some NPCs or fights that I think would be fun to have. Some places that reveal deeper world history or whatever.

4) I work out what has changed to tip the balance of the world. It could be something like a new, more ambitious king in on a throne and looking to expand, a plague or a famine or whatever. Then sketch a (very vague and high level) plan for how the key players in thew world will react and generate some starting ways in which the PCs can influence events.

5) I work out what the climax is going to be - probably a big fight. This lets me work backwards by knowing what level characters should be at, what equipment/allies they might need, what information they need to have discovered and so on.

5) I flesh out a few parts - working in the cool encounters, adjusting the plot so the follow naturally and creating ties between characters in the world and different locations. There is no detailed planning here. Just some notes on possible avenues. The exact structure will evolve depending on the PCs so no sense in plotting it out in fine detail.

6) Do a detailed plan of the starting location and all the potential sources of information/plot hooks. This is more detailed than needed as I find it a good exercise to get a more intuitive understanding of the world myself.

7) Come up with a more exciting setting, scrap all the work and repeat from the start


The latest addition for me was the first step. I got too carried away by all the later stages and exciting characters and my worlds were a little incoherent. The PCs wandered around a lot and every region had a different style.

[Oramac]

I am still relatively new to DnD 5e (my first edition of dnd). I know most if not all of the basic rules that DnD has to offer but I am interested in writing my own campaign but I have no idea how to start or how to even write a campaign. I know that i'll need the DM Guide and the Monster Manual but what are some other tips when it comes to dming? Luckily I play with 6 people and they're all friends of mine so I am not too worried about my first time dming being a '****' show.

As a fairly new DM myself, I will VERY STRONGLY recommend NOT running a homebrew campaign as your first campaign.

I made that mistake for my first campaign, and it lasted two sessions before we moved on to something else. Do yourself a favor and pick up one of the published books and run that, at least until you get a better feel for being behind the screen.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying you can't run a homebrew first, just that it adds a lot of extra work and potential stress to an already busy job you have as a DM.

[MrStabby]

As a fairly new DM myself, I will VERY STRONGLY recommend NOT running a homebrew campaign as your first campaign.

I made that mistake for my first campaign, and it lasted two sessions before we moved on to something else. Do yourself a favor and pick up one of the published books and run that, at least until you get a better feel for being behind the screen.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying you can't run a homebrew first, just that it adds a lot of extra work and potential stress to an already busy job you have as a DM.

I am not saying this is wrong - it may be true generally but I did run my first campaign as a homebrew affair and it worked out well.

I faced the problem of having players that were more experienced than myself and who knew the other settings pretty well. I didn't want to contradict their established rules as I added my own content but I also wanted to take away the metagame knowledge about the setting that these players have. I also wanted to add a lot of things like homebrew spells which can work nicely where there is a culture that practices them.

That said, it was hard and I made a lot of mistakes. I think I would have made many of them anyway but you quickly pick up and move on.

So I suppose it comes down to what you want as DM. You want to tell a story. Is it any story or is it your story (by which I mean the player's story but in your setting).

Some of this will come down to the players as well. A creative group will try and find ways to solve problems that a module writer will not have thought of - quickly the pre-made aspect can disappear anyway.

[Hrugner]

General DMing advice: Make sure the players understand the world, feel free to use cliches and references to other things if your players have difficulty figuring things like this out on their own. Try not to house rule things, but don't get bogged down in rule specifics when it's not necessary. Make sure your rulings are consistent enough to ensure player expectations measure up with their experience. If a player requests a mechanical change, lean toward rejecting it; if they request a narrative change, lean toward accepting it. For example, if a player wants a falchion as their weapon put one together that is comparable to other similar weapons; if they request a falchion that does 2d4 damage, then lean away from it. This isn't a balance thing as much as one of keeping the players away from the rules and back in the game. Also, try not to let your players split up much, and if they do, try to fast forward a bit till they're back together.

Campaign writing: Make your world, be thorough enough that you could tell a short story in the world, but don't get bogged down in details like economy, ancient history, politics, and so on. Fill those things in only if you need them for the story you're telling, and don't expect players to remember all of it. Create a few scenes that are compelling. Give them a good intro, a climax, and get an idea of the player's and character's sense of what victory will be like. After that, design a few encounters. When working on these scenes and encounters, keep it general. Things like "terrain should be important to this encounter" and "a bunch of weak things and one boss guy" work better than planning out the exact amount of opponents and the exact map, players notoriously evade planned encounters so be prepared to move the encounter. Design your encounters around the enemies being on the weaker end of what you think the PCs can handle, but give them tactical options that improve their chances if needed. This lets you modify encounters on the fly without requiring a heroic NPC to save the PCs or needing to pull a second wave out of your bum on the fly.

[MinotaurWarrior]

As a fairly new DM myself, I will VERY STRONGLY recommend NOT running a homebrew campaign as your first campaign.

I made that mistake for my first campaign, and it lasted two sessions before we moved on to something else. Do yourself a favor and pick up one of the published books and run that, at least until you get a better feel for being behind the screen.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying you can't run a homebrew first, just that it adds a lot of extra work and potential stress to an already busy job you have as a DM.

The problem with this advice, imo, is that it ignores the question of what makes DMing fun for him.

Running a published adventure first can be a great idea for a lot of people. If you're DMing because you like providing fun for others, because you enjoy acting different characters, because you like to know all the secrets, because you enjoy skirmishing with multiple units et cetera, then published adventures are great.

But if the fun lies elsewhere for you, then a published adventure might be boring and demotivating. I know it is for me.

[Oramac]

But if the fun lies elsewhere for you, then a published adventure might be boring and demotivating. I know it is for me.

True enough. A little background on where I'm coming from: I'm writing a book and have an entire world built for the book. I enjoy world-building as much as anyone, and telling a story is great.

But piling the world building on top of the other responsibilities of being a DM was really stressful for me. Perhaps because my players are very much in the power-gamer camp and like to come up with some really bonkers ideas.

In any case, you're right. Do what's fun for you.

[Sabeta]

I completely disagree. When building my current campaign I quickly realized that a few of my ideas just wouldn't work in Faerun, and the more I tried to make it work the more things broke. I ended up just writing an entire homebrewed setting because in the end it was easier than trying to warp any of the existing Wizards ones to fit mine. I also think many people greatly exaggerate the difficulties of DMing.

I'm far from perfect, but I can hammer out several sessions worth of content on a Saturday afternoon. 3 hours for a town map, 1 hour to populate it with character names and professions, as well as very basic personality traits. ie: "Stoic Butcher named Stagg", "Charismatic Tailor named Elana". An hour per map that the players have a reason to visit (Every quest destination location gets a map) as well as another hour for various road maps that can be used for random encounters. About an hour for designing each combat encounter, and then 30 minutes decided the loot for each of those, and then about 4 hours writing up all of the dialogue I can reasonably expect to need on hand.

Total time taken is around 10 hours (Don't bother adding my numbers, I can multitask. ie: designing combat encounters as I'm drawing a map. Filling in NPCs as I draw a town, etc.) which seems completely reasonable for something I like doing. What's better, is that the more I do this the quicker I can make sidequests. The first session was extremely rail roaded because I failed to plan properly. Now however I have my players seriously doubting if they made the right choice last session, and want to hurry up and finish with the current main plot so they can check up on a subplot and figure out how things turned out.

http://imgur.com/SjIBNCp.png
To be honest though, perhaps the reason I find this easy is that I simply enjoy doing it. I absolutely loved drawing that town map because it was fun imagining all of these little characters and how they connected. My players were even surprised when they reported to one of the guilds and the usual "quest giver" wasn't there. I've given everyone a schedule, and it was the weekend and she had the day off.

TLDR: TC should definitely do whichever is more fun for him, and since it seems he's already chosen to a homebrewed campaign I'm probably talking to the wind right now.

[Sigreid]

That's a nice map Sabeta. What, if any, tools do you use to draw it?

[Sabeta]

A Grunge Brush, Photoshop, and lots of layers. Brush Presets was basically just an ink blot with lots of scattering and color/angle jitter. For layers I created a tonal layer to separate shades if the same color (compare trees to grass) and then used the brush on a shadows layer and a highlight layer. I followed some tutorials online, I believe the website was Fantastic Maps. I'm not a great artist so relying on brushes and layering tricks to fake good quality is perfect for me.

Unfortunately it will soon be time to draw up a cave and a castle map. The brush presets that I'm currently using are only good for an outdoors effect. If I want to draw caves and castles I'll need to learn new tricks. My PCs are nearly level 3, so it's about time they had a true dungeon crawl instead of sidequest nonsense. Still, knowing how to handle these brushes I can produce a workable make like this in 30 minutes, so once I learn caves and castles I can use them more often for a stronger variety.

http://i.imgur.com/g8MNuQb.jpg

Also, I play on Roll20, so these maps are scaled for use on their grids. You're welcome to use 'em if you want. Just don't try to make money off it. I'm sure this tree map can fit into plenty of scenarios.

[Sigreid]

Well, I think you have a good eye for map layout. I hope your players appreciate it. :smallbiggrin:

I've played around with roll20 a little bit, and unfortunately I find it tedious. But then I'm a low prep DM running sandbox style. So all I really do is make a few general notes for myself about what is going on in the world and then wing it based on my PC's decisions.

[Sabeta]

Thanks for the compliments, and honestly my players would probably be just as happy with stick drawings and a good explanation. I do the detailed maps mostly as a labor of love, and they seem to enjoy them to a certain degree but rarely comment on them. (I do get the occasional "Oh nice water" or "I like the lighting here", which is nice) Anyway, everyone is going to have their own DMing style. What works for one person may not work for another. I think the most universal truth is that everyone is there to have fun, and the easiest way to be a good DM is to figure out what your players want to do and let them have at it.

[snowman87]

First, expect your players to do the unexpected. They will go about resolving situations that you never could have dreamed. They will catch you off guard and be prepared to alter your premade plans accordingly. Just try to think how the bad guys would practically react to events. A narrative should unfold fluidly, change course when it is obstructed. Always focus on the ultimate endgame. In spite of what your PCs do, how do the villains try to accomplish their goals? Plan out key characters and groups but not every detail of their plans. Those WILL get changed by the PCs. General ideas are better.

[CaptainSarathai]

To OP
This comes up a lot, I've said this many times. I don't mind repeating it.
The best way to write a campaign is:
DON'T

D&D is a collaborative story. DMs who say things like,
"my characters did the unexpected, hijacked a ship, and sailed to a continent I didn't even write yet!"
are, quite frankly, doing a poor job. If that DM had been cooperating with their players to keep the players engaged in a group story, then they wouldn't have gotten so bored as to hijack the campaign - or the hijacking would have been "all part of the plan."

DMs put a lot of pressure on themselves to write THE BEST(tm) campaign. The problem is that they work themselves down a hole. They string together events, NPCs, locations, and set-pieces until eventually the whole thing is just a railroad from start to finish. The problem is, that's the campaign they want to play. If the party of other living people doesn't think/act/do exactly as the DM thinks/acts/does, then it becomes a shambles.

When I start a campaign, I go through the following steps. In all, it takes me only a few hours. A day off from work is actually plenty of time. All you're doing is sketching. Keep that in mind.

1. Write the Setting, or Find One
Have you noticed that setting books like SCAG, or older material on other settings like Eberron or Ravenloft never assume the PCs exist? They just spell out the current events, factions, and interactions between those factions.
Do that with your campaign, and make it brief. It's a sketch. The title-crawl of a StarWars film is a perfect example of what you want to do.
It helps to know ahead of time what your players want in a setting, or which setting they want to play. If they all want to be barbarians who raid crypts and pillage castles, maybe don't write a campaign set in a pirate kingdom.

1. Session Zero: Character Creation
Gather your players and sit them around a table. Nobody should have a written character yet.
Session Zero is the most important element of any successful campaign
Once everyone is seated, read them the "title crawl" that you wrote. Don't hand it out and let them read it. Keep them engaged, be dramatic. Dim the lights and play theme music if you want - whatever. Make them interested.
Then ask them,
"Who are you?"
At this point they write their characters together and while you watch. Pay attention, take notes, and help. This is where you can veto certain power-gamery type chicanery, but most importantly, it's where you learn character backgrounds, motivations, and goals.
Because they're writing together, it should form a cohesive set, defining the party background, motivations, and goals.

This has the added advantage of skipping all the
"You meet in a tavern"
or
"You have all been summoned by the King for an important blah blah blah"
The characters in this party may well decide that they're all childhood friends, some could be siblings, the Barbarian might be the Wizard's loyal bodyguard, and the Bard could be recording the tales of the duo for posterity.

1.5 Session Zero: Find the Plot
Remember how I said that settings don't assume the players exist? At no point have I told you to come up with a plot for what the characters do in your game. You do that now.
Your group may have answered this during character creation, but you should figure out what they're doing. There are two ways to do this.
If you have no time left for playing
If your session zero is just intros and character creation, then it's easy. Ask them,
"So, what are you doing?"
If they don't answer immediately, help to guide them into an answer they all agree on. Perhaps they're on a mission for the local lord, or they're guarding a caravan, or exploring rumors of a cave, or working a heist for the thief-guild, etc.
When you go home, you will then write an adventure or dungeon based on this mission, caravan journey, cave exploration, or heist.

If you are playing this session
If you are playing during your session zero, then you should have prepared enough open-ended material for a first session.
Rather than ask what they're doing, you instead tell them what they're doing, and ask them why. Examples,
"You are standing at the mouth of a deep cavern. Why have you come here?"
or
"It is dusk, and you are being pursued by , they will soon catch you. Why are they chasing you?"
The idea here is to urge the players to give you details which fit your encounter/dungeon into their story.

If I'm going to be playing Session Zero, I make sure to have a few Random Encounters ready, a regional map, and write one small town.
Even if the players say that they are running from goblins and heading for the Capitol City, you don't have to get there in this session. Stall for time. Your first encounter and character creation should have burned some time, so hit them with random encounters along the road, and as night falls, present them with the town.
The town should also "float," meaning that if they have a choice of multiple towns to move to, you always just use the same map and NPCs, and just change the town name. Leaving capitols and major cities off the regional map in a homebrew setting means the whole region can actually float - so if they say they're working for 'The King in the North,' you can actually start them nearby.

2. Write the First Adventure
At this point you've gone home, and the players have given you enough information to determine what course the party is on for the next few sessions. Write that adventure.
Do NOT write more!
If the players say that they are returning the crown of the King of the North to the Thief-Guild, then you know that they'll make good on at least that promise. Most likely. After that though, they're going to decide where to go next, and could do literally anything.

3. What About the Plot?
Right, a connected story. First, your plot will have to work around what the characters are doing, so it needs to stay very loose. I usually write in short installments. The DMG spells these out perfectly:
Tiers of Play
1-4 Local Heroes
5-10 Heroes of the Realm
11-16 Masters of the Realm
17-20 Masters of the World

So you plan accordingly. To me, those ranges represent the journey between tiers, so that at Level5, they are Local Heroes and are setting out on a path that will lead them to become Heroes of the Realm (at 10th level).

These tiers should be defined by world events. Things that will affect people on a massive scale. Sure, you may be thieves, but an outbreak of war between the kingdom of your home, and the neighboring kingdom, will still present new challenges. So maybe your characters don't choose to enlist in the war effort, but instead decide to take advantage of the turmoil and pull off the greatest heist of all time: stealing the throne itself.
The campaign could end at any of these tiers, and should if it's getting boring or if you're at a loss for how to continue. I usually try to plan 1 tier ahead, so that I can decide if I should be foreshadowing, or wrapping up any loose ends.

4. Further Sessions
Running an effective session is probably the hardest part of being a good DM. You need excellent management skills. You need to have enough material prepared to fill the time. When in doubt, I usually aim for sessions to run shorter rather than long. I can then pad out this time with:
DM Bathroom breaks
"Take 5/10/15" smoke breaks or food runs
Table Talk and letting people get a little off task where appropriate
Random Encounters
Extended Dialogue Role-playing

The goal is to end a session with the players deciding what to do next. Every time you hand over control to the players, there's a good chance they'll take the ball and run over the horizon. If they do that mid-session, there is no way to prepare for it. Sometimes they manage it anyway, but a single diversion is easy to recover from if you keep your plans fluid anyway. It's when the DM plans too far ahead, or allows the players to blindside them too often, that they run into trouble.


So I recently stepped in to DM a party that had just wrapped up Lost Mine from the starter set. So we're talking, 5th level characters here.

Finding a setting was done - we're playing Forgotten Realms, because that's where LMoP takes place.

Character Creation was also done - they're a band of local heroes who came together to save Phandelin, they are local nobility now, with salaries and even a mansion.

Title Crawl - Since the DM hadn't given them any hooks for what to do after LMoP, I decided that I'd let 2 years pass in game. So my title crawl explained a bit about world events in the mean time, and gave them an intro to The Realms that they hadnt been given by the previous DM.

Finding the Plot - I asked them, "So guys, what's next?"
They decided that they wanted to take their lordship of a mansion one step further - they wanted to be kings. I offered that perhaps they could travel to the frontier and create a new kingdom.
The party Fighter wanted to become a Knight, and asked about knightly orders in the Realms. I told him about the Purple Dragon Knights of Cormyr.
A little more talking and it was settled - they wanted to travel to the borders of Cormyr.

The First Adventure - since they want to get to Cormyr, that journey should be the first adventure. To be an armed party in Cormyr, you need a royal permit. "It just so happens" that there's a Purple Dragon Captain looking for mercenaries to fight for Cormyr against a growing threat. Once enlisted, these mercenaries will escort a caravan of supplies to the kingdom.

The Plot - so the characters are all level 5, meaning they are on their way to becoming Heroes of the Realm. This likely means saving Cormyr from some dire threat. I decided that threat should be the return of the Grodd Goblins from the Shadowfell. So I planned world events to unfold in a way that would slowly reveal the machinations of the Hobgoblin legions of Grodd, and give the characters reason to have a showdown with their leader.

Since I know that their goal is to receive a castle and lands, I decided to make their reward for loyal service to Cormyr; they may keep whatever frontier land they retake from the armies of Grodd.
This sets the campaign up to continue from levels 11-16, where they become Masters of the Realm. What realm? Their realm! So they will have to soldify their earlier alliances, finish clearing out threats, and make safe the lands they have claimed.
I decided that at level 11 they would learn that Grodd has set in motion the return of the Elf/Dragon Queen, and that it would be an enemy appropriate for 16th level characters. So at this point I imagine they will be chasing the Queen and her cult, and searching for information and new allies to defeat her.

The campaign could logically stop there. They have defeated a string of escalating enemies and have established their own small kingdom on the border of Cormyr - everything they had wanted to do.

If they [I]don't want to stop, then the next step is becoming Masters of the World - the most powerful living heroes in existence, whose deeds are legend.
As it turns out, the last time Grodd invaded, they warped seven of their enemies' heroes into powerful demons, who were defeated and trapped. Demons capable of defeating entire armies on their own. So I guess the players should fight them then, to be named the most powerful in the land?

I don't need to plan any further than that. Defeating Grodd and the events leading to it are pretty concrete right now, I can count on them to try and get that castle they want so badly, and our Fighter to become a loyal Purple Dragon Knight. After that, I can work out handling the Queen's return, but I know that I should probably be foreshadowing her existence.
After that I have no idea if I'll use the arisen demons, either because the party has a better idea or because they're finally satisfied with ending the campaign. So I don't bother writing it.

[Tawmis]

If you've already got a set of players... one of the first things I'd do, after they roll their characters - ask the PLAYERS what they hope to accomplish with their characters.

Take note of that, and begin weaving that into campaign ideas.

Then take a look at their character backgrounds (if they're not good at writing backgrounds, and you are - offer to write it for them). Present them with the backgrounds you've provided, make sure they're okay, and "feel" the character is a fit for them.

Now, pluck things from their character backgrounds to weave into the story. It's an incredible feeling (for me, as a player), when something from my background comes up as a part of an adventure hook. Because now I am personally invested in seeing this through.

Find out what kind of campaign your players are looking for. Are they looking for pretty much hack and slash, with little content? These are the easiest to write. These are just towns and villages with various problems hindered by monsters. Are they looking for story? If they're looking for story, I recommend the above of using character backgrounds. Also, are the characters looking for more of a "novel" type adventure, where ideally, most of the characters make it to the end of the "story/campaign." If so, then be wary about killing characters (unless they deserve it for doing something idiotic and utterly stupid). Otherwise, capturing the characters, rather than outright killing them, and providing them with an "adventure" to escape, is always an option.

Everything should revolve around the enjoyment of your players. So find out from them. Because without them, you're not going to have much to DM. Once you got that - that's where you begin writing out various ideas for your campaign based off all the suggestions everyone else, and myself, have given you.

[Tawmis]

I completely disagree. When building my current campaign I quickly realized that a few of my ideas just wouldn't work in Faerun, and the more I tried to make it work the more things broke. I ended up just writing an entire homebrewed setting because in the end it was easier than trying to warp any of the existing Wizards ones to fit mine. I also think many people greatly exaggerate the difficulties of DMing.


I do home brew also. Hades, world creation is one of the funnest things for me to do as a DM.



3 hours for a town map


Don't take this wrong, but I hate your artistic ability to create beautiful maps. LOL

All my years of photoshop, and I've yet to make something as beautiful as that map...

#HateYouButNotReally

[Sabeta]

CaptainSarathai, while I agree with most of your post I'd like to point out that it's just as easy to handle things the way published adventures do. For example, in my setting there's an organization called the Shepherds, who are basically an Adventurer's Guild, but with responsibility. The Shepherds guild posts a list of sidequest every day, and all of them have been fairly low effort but important world building quests.

For example, heading to the western gate to train the soldiers taught them that the setting is considered peaceful (lazy soldiers), showed off the unique magic items in my setting (they were all equipped with the ability to cast Firebolt, despite only having Fighter levels and no feats), and also taught them the importance of doing the quests to the letter (I scheduled a kobold raid for after they left. If the players defeated the soldiers then the soldiers would be humiliated and start training, which would enable them to defeat the Kobolds. If they lose then the soldiers stay normal, get overrun at the gate, and end up requiring the players to go back there.)

It's not hard to write a dozen tasks tasks of that nature in order to learn what they're interested in. As of right now my players have discovered that Kobolds are organizing, training, and acquiring better equipment. They know something is about is about to go down. Because they've spent so many sessions getting to know the townfolk they have an emotional tie to them. ths made them decide the Kobolds needed to be dealt with without being assigned a quest. Of course, as soon as they decided that I told them the mayor wanted to see them, which would naturally lead them to the Kobolds stronghold. This way they weren't wasting sessions trying to gather clues and following seas ends. (one if my biggest complaints of published adventures)

Also, while I agree that a Session 0 is important, and a fantastic way to begin any campaign I don't think it's the most important thing. My session 0 ended up a huge flop where my players were railroaded into the story. I'm still retroactively fixing things (originally they wouldn't be forced to join the Shepherds, there would be multiple guilds if various alignment. To fix that, I will soon introduce a rival guild who is impressed by the players and tries to recruit them. ) As long as you're conscious of what your players want a session zero only helps out party balance. A great tool to have on hand for sure, but not the end if the world.

Your 4th note however just strikes me as sheer laziness, unless youre running 5+ hour campaigns there's no need for breaks. I tend to call my sessions at around the three hour mark, and very rarely do I call for breaks or pad the session with random encounters. I believe that every encounter should have more meaning then "here's a guy, fight it."

Tawmis, thanks for the compliment but it really is just layer styles and a good brush. I took a black brush with a leafy texture and used that for shading. Then I took a white brush and used it for highlights. This was as simple as making clumps of trees into vague ball shapes and then shading opposite sides. Then I made a layer above that, set it to Color and dumped green over everything.

The roads are just Stroked Paths set to Overlay, and the buildings were created by filling in selections with the Marquis tool. I'm honestly not a great artist, I've just learned a few Photoshop shortcuts to make good looking maps with little skill.

[Thrudd]

I'd say the most fun thing is that I get to write a story that my friends can go through but being able to control the world is fun to ;)

It would be a mistake to view the game this way. You are not meant to "write a story that my friends can go through". If you do, you will be headed down the dark path of railroading, and that is no way to play D&D.

Your job as DM is to give the players a world to explore, and give their characters a reason to engage with the world and the action you have planned so that they will proactively seek out the adventure. An easy example: the characters are treasure hunters that want to find magic artifacts, so they will look for places where there are rumors of magic items. You would design dungeons and ruins where magic items are hidden, protected by monsters and traps, and the players will want to go there.

The best advice is to design a town or city, draw the map of the surrounding country, and design a dungeon-type adventure location or two that they can find in that territory. Create some NPCs that live in the town, some monsters and villages of different types of people and creatures that live in the wilderness. The players should have reason to want to go looking for the dungeons you've designed, such as finding treasure or recovering something for somebody.

As they play through the things you have planned, you will be designing more things to expand the world, making more maps, more NPCs they can meet, new adventures that will challenge them as they gain levels.

Don't plan a series of events that will happen regardless of what the players do. The decisions of the players need to have an impact on what happens in the game.

Do not ever plan for the PC's to get captured, that is the worst. There's no way you can know if your bad guys can succeed in capturing the PC's. Don't plan that the PC's will do anything in particular, you don't know what they'll do. What if they run away when the festival gets attacked? What if the monsters knock half of them out, and they need to hide because they don't want to die? Does the king still want to honor them, even though the town got destroyed and they hardly did anything? If the assassins want to kill the king, why would they need the PC's? Why wouldn't they send in some people who are actually assassins to do it?

This is why you make sure, when the players make their characters, that they understand the characters must all share some type of general motivation - like maybe they are sworn protectors of the kingdom. Or they are treasure hunters or explorers who want to find magic stuff. Or they are mercenaries who take dangerous jobs for pay. Then design a world where there are things those characters will want to do - people who have jobs for mercenary gangs - ruins and dungeons with magic items in them - dangers to the kingdom that the defenders must investigate and defeat -etc.

The story will emerge from the things the players choose to do and how the dice roll, you can't completely predict how it will go.

Read these blog articles: http://thealexandrian.net/gamemastery-101

http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots

it will help out immensely in thinking about and designing really great adventures and campaigns.

[Sigreid]

Thrudd,

That really depends on the group. There are groups out there that prefer to have a nice obvious track laid down for them to follow. It's not for me or my group, but if it's what they want it's just fine.

It's also where a lot of brand new playing groups start.

[Beleriphon]

For advice go with The Angry GM (warning naughty words):

http://theangrygm.com/category/how-to-gm/how-to-run/
http://theangrygm.com/category/how-to-gm/how-to-write-adventures/

There are lots of good ideas, in particular the articles about pacing are wonderful.

http://theangrygm.com/jumping-the-screen-how-to-run-your-first-rpg-session/
http://theangrygm.com/keeping-pace/

[JobsforFun]

It would be a mistake to view the game this way. You are not meant to "write a story that my friends can go through". If you do, you will be headed down the dark path of railroading, and that is no way to play D&D.

Your job as DM is to give the players a world to explore, and give their characters a reason to engage with the world and the action you have planned so that they will proactively seek out the adventure. An easy example: the characters are treasure hunters that want to find magic artifacts, so they will look for places where there are rumors of magic items. You would design dungeons and ruins where magic items are hidden, protected by monsters and traps, and the players will want to go there.

The best advice is to design a town or city, draw the map of the surrounding country, and design a dungeon-type adventure location or two that they can find in that territory. Create some NPCs that live in the town, some monsters and villages of different types of people and creatures that live in the wilderness. The players should have reason to want to go looking for the dungeons you've designed, such as finding treasure or recovering something for somebody.

As they play through the things you have planned, you will be designing more things to expand the world, making more maps, more NPCs they can meet, new adventures that will challenge them as they gain levels.

Don't plan a series of events that will happen regardless of what the players do. The decisions of the players need to have an impact on what happens in the game.

Do not ever plan for the PC's to get captured, that is the worst. There's no way you can know if your bad guys can succeed in capturing the PC's. Don't plan that the PC's will do anything in particular, you don't know what they'll do. What if they run away when the festival gets attacked? What if the monsters knock half of them out, and they need to hide because they don't want to die? Does the king still want to honor them, even though the town got destroyed and they hardly did anything? If the assassins want to kill the king, why would they need the PC's? Why wouldn't they send in some people who are actually assassins to do it?

This is why you make sure, when the players make their characters, that they understand the characters must all share some type of general motivation - like maybe they are sworn protectors of the kingdom. Or they are treasure hunters or explorers who want to find magic stuff. Or they are mercenaries who take dangerous jobs for pay. Then design a world where there are things those characters will want to do - people who have jobs for mercenary gangs - ruins and dungeons with magic items in them - dangers to the kingdom that the defenders must investigate and defeat -etc.

The story will emerge from the things the players choose to do and how the dice roll, you can't completely predict how it will go.

Read these blog articles: http://thealexandrian.net/gamemastery-101

http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots

it will help out immensely in thinking about and designing really great adventures and campaigns.

In retrospect that is what I mean, I want to write a story and create a world for my friends to go through and battle. My friends can have wild things happening so expecting them to follow through the story isn't expected.

[Thrudd]

Thrudd,

That really depends on the group. There are groups out there that prefer to have a nice obvious track laid down for them to follow. It's not for me or my group, but if it's what they want it's just fine.

It's also where a lot of brand new playing groups start.

It may be something people do, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing. I would do everything possible to discourage new groups from getting in that habit. Teach new GMs how to design games with meaningful player choices that take full advantage of the pen & paper medium, and avoid mimicing computer and console games.

[JobsforFun]

I posted my idea on how the campaign could start earlier in the thread if anyone wouldn't mind giving me some feed back :).