D&D 5E Advice for Running 5E -- Your Experiences

[Queer Venger]

I just wanted to pop in and thank everyone again. I ran 5 sessions (20 hours!) of my 5e "massive multiplayer table top RPG" this weekend at Carnage and it went far better than I could have imagined. I will be doing a full blog write up about it soon (see sig).

I have found 5e to be the friendliest to DM's, cant tell you how much fun Im having DM'ing again. Im running my group through the starter box and Im not had this much fun at the helm in a while. Glad you are having a great time and we look forward to reading your blog.

 

[Rhenny]

I just wanted to pop in and thank everyone again. I ran 5 sessions (20 hours!) of my 5e "massive multiplayer table top RPG" this weekend at Carnage and it went far better than I could have imagined. I will be doing a full blog write up about it soon (see sig).

Awesome. I look forward to reading more.

 

[Greg Benage]

I'd be interested to hear how you handled the "adventuring day" and related issues (encounter building, PC resource management, short/long rest assumptions) in the context of an exploration-focused hexcrawl game. Traditionally, this kind of game would feature far fewer encounters per day than the default assumption in 5E. How do you make this work when the game's resource management is based on 6-8 encounters, 2-3 short rests and one long rest per day?

 

[Reynard]

I'd be interested to hear how you handled the "adventuring day" and related issues (encounter building, PC resource management, short/long rest assumptions) in the context of an exploration-focused hexcrawl game. Traditionally, this kind of game would feature far fewer encounters per day than the default assumption in 5E. How do you make this work when the game's resource management is based on 6-8 encounters, 2-3 short rests and one long rest per day?

I was also concerned about the "nova" problem with a primarily outdoor exploration game that did not necessarily hew to the encounters-per-rest paradigm. I did not actually do anything to address it, as I wanted to see where it would go, but in the end it did not really seem to impact things. Note that I am a long time D&D DM but very new to 5E (I had previously run only 1 session of LMoP and 1 20th level PCs versus a Tarrasque fight for giggles). In addition, I had no 5E "experts" at my table. Of the total 16 or so players I had over the course of the weekend, only 2 had actual play experience with 5E and only about half had read or owned the books.

In the end, things seemed to work themselves out. Since the possibility of a random wilderness encounter was always there and the PCs knew they were likely to find a location based encounter -- ranging from a single creature to an entire mini dungeon -- they did not tend to waste resources too much. One night of encounter checks for every watch was enough to convince them going to bed "spent" was a bad idea. And because they were generally conserving resources for the next potential encounter or site, they did not need to take too many short rests. It all seemed to work out pretty well (especially after I re-read the healing rules!).

Hope that helps.

 

[Greg Benage]

That's good to hear. Thanks for the report!