I wanted to report in to let anyone scanning these kind of threads know how things went and to thank all of those who replied. Your advice really helped (I did read through everyone, despite not having a chance to respond)

Firstly, the session was a great success and we are making plans for a second as soon as we can. Everyone was amazed by the amount of detail that goes into Dnd (such as alignments and weaponry and so on) I took pretty much all of the advice into play for the session, and I have you all to thank for it.

Some stats:


  • Ran DnD 5e with 3 New Players (Were not even sure what dnd was)
  • I pre-built each of their characters (based on a few questions on my part about their preferences), which consisted of:
    1. Drow Monk
    2. Teifling Rogue
    3. Human Ranger
  • Despite prebuilding, I did leave the Backgrounds and such for their building pleasure, which they later filled out during a break.


Do to the slow nature of first time players, they did not make it very far. Despite a slow to start, they really picked up their pace as they got the hang of things. I started them in a mysterious room deep within a dungeon. Some simple things that I often take for granted as a DM were quite novel to the group (such as what green liquid on the floor might be--most players immediately consider it to be acid and this really threw them for a loop).

The dungeon had a number of clues/riddles, which they eagerly wrote down and considered at length. They really seemed to enjoy the puzzles, but only discovered what a few meant since they only made it through about six rooms. (One clue/riddle was "Use your head, protect your feet" which they deciphered when they found the hollow heads of statues and used them as shoes to run over the acid pool).

The party faced three physical encounters (undead themed) consisting of two sets of skeletons and a set of zombies, which were quite devastating to the novice party. I provided ample healing to avoid any deaths at the outset.

After the break (and building their backgrounds) they started to define their characters pretty well and did some mild rp, in terms to who each person thought should keep track of treasure and who they felt might betray them. We eventually stopped playing (after about 4-5 hours) because one of the players had to leave. The other two wanted to keep play and spent a while debating before finally deciding to wait until they could all play together.

If anyone has any questions or wants more detail, let me know. I had an absolute blast playing with these new fellows. I think it really helped that everyone in the party was new and they got to try out DnD together.

Thanks again for the great advice!

T