Intro adventure for new players

[lesbiasparrow]

We're introducing some friends to tabletop RPGs with 5e. They've played a bunch of computer RPGs, including Neverwinter Nights, so they're certainly familiar with the idea, but we wanted to do a couple of different one-shots (3-ish hours of play) before we all commit to a campaign (and also so those of use with more 5e experience can trade off DMing). Any suggestions for adventures to try? I'd rather do something shorter than LMoP.

[Vogonjeltz]

Have them play as consulting detectives who get called to the scene of various crimes and have to solve them. Options include: A series of grisly murders commuted by a doppelgänger, evidence/method should provide clues to both the cause and the present identity assumed.

The characters participate in a grand tourney, or race through a city, or a contest to be the first to scale a high mountain (many contestants only one winner, dirty tricks allowed, and possibly some NPCs try to kill the opposition)


If you're ok with one shots and mention it up front, don't even try to be fair, the doppelgänger might try to kill the whole party for example.

[Fishyninja]

So here is an idea.

You can do the classic 'Meet in a Bar' scenario or have them all be in a single town, they are gathered up by the militia and are taken to the mayor/lord/leader/ etc who askes them to complete a task. They meet this task giver and it is the owner of the general store.

Make this character blind which means the characters then have to prove their skills to him bwfore he can accept them for the job, this makes them do the following:


Introduce their character: Name, brief history etc.
Describe their character: Race, distinctive features, weapon loadout (if they know).

If they don't know it allows the blind NPC to make some suggestions as to what they may need.

From here the NPC can get them to practice sneaking around and various save throws and finally they can have a few rounds of combat with the training dummies in the rear.

This shouldn't take more than 30 mins to do but feel free to expand or shorten it as required.

Make the task something like 'retrieving a legendary potion' this potion could have the fluff of curing any ailment (explains why the blind NPC want's it).
From here you can build the dungeon, cave, enemies etc so it allows the characters for practice the skills they have just demonstrated. I would advise at least 1 long rest and short rest which allows the party to interact with each other.

I would suggest making the battles realtively easy but having a 'boss' like character at the end.

They get the potion return to the blind NPC and plot twist, he is not blind but an ex-adventurer looking for a new party to train to complete the next bid adventure!

[TripleD]

I'm actually running an introductory adventure for some friends right now.

What I'm trying to do is make sure that I cover all the major points of D&D in a simple campaign that takes them from level 1-4.

Here's some ideas that I've used in my campaign:

Have combat within the first ten minutes of playing. It's the most immediately exciting in 5e and gives the players a taste of things to come.
Level up at the end of the first session. Don't even bother keeping track of XP in this case. Level 1 is purely a training level for new players, and by the end of the first session they will be hungry for new things.
Use a lot of indirect combat at level 1. Make a boss that forces the players to make a lot of Wisdom or Charisma saving throws. Not only does this help keep the players alive, it teaches them a concept (the saving throw) that isn't immediately intuitive the way AC is.

For example, the backstory of my campaign is that, while journeying through a swamp, a group of adventurers were overtaken by a purple fog that knocked them out. They awake on the raft of a scout from a nearby village. Turns out his village is under the protection of a sorceress who lives in a floating tower high above the town. A month ago they lost contact with her, and the fog spread out from their borders in every direction. The scout had been sent to try and find a way through when he rescued the party.

In the first session I had a crocodile smash the side of the raft (combat within ten minutes), had them negotiate between the humans and bullywug refugees (social and roleplaying), a mix of Twig and Needle Blights as encounters in the tower (melee and ranged combat) and had hallways "trapped" with colour coordinated flowers, only a certain a colour of which would fire needles (traps and puzzle solving).

The final encounter was with a flute-playing fey who could not attack directly, but rather attempted to command the players to walk into patches of needle shooting flowers. Also, just to give them feel for them, I gave him a short teleport as a legendary action.

Overall I thought it went well. For session two I'm planning to go a bit off-railroad and give them experience with branching paths.

[lordarkness]

For player new to roll playing and one being pretty young, I started every one as 0 level humans. No combat no rolling.

THE ADVENTURE
They were tasked with rescuing abducted villagers who were being forced to mine for something by bandits that overpowered them making combat impossible. The cave had a "dragon" which the bandits avoided but it turned out to be a researcher who was trapped in there hiding from the bandits and pretending to be a dragon in order to get the bandits to do his work for him.

The players were able to flood the mine since pieces of a shipwreck were being used to create a simple damn, and they get the prisoners out through a cave leaving to the beach.

The researcher ran an academy and they were then rewarded with training in any chosen field and naturally the next mission was to return to the flooded (and now very occupied) mines and retrieve the artifact the researcher had been looking for.

WHY I WENT THIS DIRECTION
Being new to role playing I felt that dice rolls, and rules and skills and so forth was a lot to throw at them when they didn't understand how to be their character, how to problem solve and how to interact with one another; in other words, how to role play.

I prefer actual role play to hack and slash and from my experience players who start off with fights and rolls and checks have a hard time thinking outside the box afterwards. Its as if they think they are playing a video game and are restricted to whatever buttons are on their controller or keyboard. The beauty of the game to me is that you can do anything you can think of and the dice are just there to give those decisions a more interesting and unpredictable outcome.

[imneuromancer]

I ran King of the Cats (http://www.dmsguild.com/product/188274/) a few weeks ago and it lit up my players' imagination to the point where it could pretty much be the centerpiece of a whole campaign.