Tips for Phandelver?

[Poeseph Salazar]

Hello, all!

I am a relatively new dm and am about to run Lost Mines of Phandelver for a group of people. One of them has experience with 3.5e and the others have never played D&D before at all.

I was wondering if there were any tips anyone has to try and make this as fun as possible for my group.

Thank you all in advance!

[Armored Walrus]

Don't make the enemies in the first encounter "smart" unless you want to introduce your new players to the game with a loss. (you won't have a TPK, the module specifically instructs you what to do if you accidentally win that fight, but it still sucks to start out with a big fail, especially if it's their first time playing)

Other than that, be ready for your players to not swallow every hook and go where you and the module think they should. Be ready to move an encounter from where it's supposed to be to where the party actually decides to go, or be ready to use the random encounter tables to give yourself a combat to run while you think of how you can get back on track. Also do not expect them to pick up on every clue, or to explore all of the content of the module. The three times I've gone through it (twice as DM, once as player), the party gets hyper focused on tracking down the dwarf, and wants to ignore everything that comes before that.

[coolAlias]

Read the module multiple times and take notes on anything you think you'll need to remember.

Read it again before each session, especially if any length of time has passed between sessions.

Take special note of major NPCs: their motivations, goals and affiliations. It's a pretty safe bet that the PCs will be asking questions about these long before that information is provided in the module if you are playing page by page.

You may need to make up some of this information if your PCs ask, but if you make up something without knowing what is already in the module, you risk creating an inconsistent story.

[lunaticfringe]

IIRC when they make it to town it turns into a quest hub, I made that a bit more linear. I had some new players that didn't really know what to do when they got to town except shop. I few of those side quests I had NPCs approach them after the gang stuff.

I ignored my Crits during the first part, my dice were hot.

[coolAlias]

If your players are using the pre-generated characters, be sure to read the back stories on the character sheets as they tie in to the adventure and, depending on your players, may even spur them to action.

When I played, I was the halfling rogue and was hell-bent on trying to find the person that betrayed me. Of course, that information isn't specified in the adventure, as far as I know, so the DM made something up that made it more fun, rather than "Hm, it doesn't say here who betrayed you so that person doesn't exist."

So yeah, don't be afraid to improvise extraneous bits that your players take interest in.