Level Up (A5E) New to the DM's Chair

[Vampersan]

Hello all. I'm going to be running a group soon using the Level Up rules, and as the title alludes, I'm pretty new to the DM role. In addition, the group in question has no experience playing D&D, so this will be their inaugural experience to the game.

I could use some help so as to make this a smooth and enjoyable experience for them. I plan on having a Session 0 sometime next week so they can build characters, discuss ideas/expectations, etc, but as I've only ever been a player for the most part, I'd like to get some input from the community.

Any advice you can provide would be invaluable. We'll be starting at 1st level, and for what it's worth, all of the players are really into the Harry Potter franchise.

Thank you in advance. I will be checking this thread as much as I can to answer questions and ask for clarifications myself.

 

[Anselm]

My advice would be to run a short campaign that is maybe a one shot with a little extra content here and there (maybe two to three sessions) to get your feet wet. This allows you flex some dm muscles without diving into a months long setting or the pressure of finishing all your content in a single night. The other thing this let's you do is put the premade LU: A5E characters in front of your players, rather than making a bunch before you're familiar with the rules. I've helped my players make 4 characters and made 1 myself since the rules dropped and, while it's not necessarily more complicated that O5E, it certainly has more options and therefore takes a significant bit of time longer to make characters.

(This is all a selling point for me as the origin options are a big reason for the increase, and offer really interesting combinations to base a character on. The early class options really allow you to flesh out a character from a mechanicals pov beyond the single subclass decision.)

The premades are very good and are here: Resources — Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition (A5E)

You of course can do whatever is most fun for your group but my advice is simply "limit your scope" so you can focus on a limited number of new things (like how to run a game ) and premade characters and a few sessions long game are two ways to do that.

Enjoy!

 

[rules.mechanic]

Hello all. I'm going to be running a group soon using the Level Up rules, and as the title alludes, I'm pretty new to the DM role. In addition, the group in question has no experience playing D&D, so this will be their inaugural experience to the game.

I could use some help so as to make this a smooth and enjoyable experience for them. I plan on having a Session 0 sometime next week so they can build characters, discuss ideas/expectations, etc, but as I've only ever been a player for the most part, I'd like to get some input from the community.

Any advice you can provide would be invaluable. We'll be starting at 1st level, and for what it's worth, all of the players are really into the Harry Potter franchise.

Thank you in advance. I will be checking this thread as much as I can to answer questions and ask for clarifications myself.

Good on you! There will be lots of great tips here and the O5E DMG & A5E TNT both have really good guidance. But if you want one simple source that gives a comprehensive set of simple tips in an easily-manageable format, then Sly Flourish's Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is brilliant and is used by many many DMs / Narrators.

 

[Anselm]

Good on you! There will be lots of great tips here and the O5E DMG & A5E TNT both have really good guidance. But if you want one simple source that gives a comprehensive set of simple tips in an easily-manageable format, then Sly Flourish's Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is brilliant and is used by many many DMs / Narrators.

Agree whole heartedly. I didn't know about Sly Flourish's books when I started dming (4 years ago?) but when I gtot them, they made my approach significantly more focused and prepping 10x more enjoyable.

 

[Morrus]

Your best bet is to use a starter adventure. We have one called Memories of Holdenshire, but any 5E starter adventure should be a fine way to ease you into the game and get the basics down.

 

[aco175]

Start small. You only need a local area map and a small town. You can steal these off the interwebs or make something basic. Flesh out 3-4 NPCs that the PCs will likely meet and have a few secrets and a few quests that the PCs can learn and go on.

Plan a monster threat that lasts the first 5 levels with a larger threat for another 5 levels but you do not need to detail this yet. Focus on the first threat. Maybe there is a giant gathering local ogres and orcs. The quest from the farmer to find his lost child leads to orcs and goblins and the PCs learn the name of the giant. Maybe the innkeeper quest for rats in the basement does not tie to this giant and can lead to another cult adventure. By the time the PCs are 3rd level they should know something it up and have an idea where to go to deal with the giant.

In the big encounter with the first threat, they find out about a larger threat to the whole region and that the giant was just a part of it. Kind of like defeating Darth Vader and then learning about the emperor.

 

[Gandalf970]

KISS, Keep it simply stupid. I use this acronym to this day and I have been DMing for 40+ years. Yes the Return of the Lazy DM is wonderful. Remember whatever your players pick as heritage, culture, background and class that is what they want to play, so make THAT part of the story.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Hello all. I'm going to be running a group soon using the Level Up rules, and as the title alludes, I'm pretty new to the DM role. In addition, the group in question has no experience playing D&D, so this will be their inaugural experience to the game.

I could use some help so as to make this a smooth and enjoyable experience for them. I plan on having a Session 0 sometime next week so they can build characters, discuss ideas/expectations, etc, but as I've only ever been a player for the most part, I'd like to get some input from the community.

Any advice you can provide would be invaluable. We'll be starting at 1st level, and for what it's worth, all of the players are really into the Harry Potter franchise.

Thank you in advance. I will be checking this thread as much as I can to answer questions and ask for clarifications myself.

My advice is to run some off the cuff arena style combats between the characters after character creation to have a low stress moment to get accused to GMing combat. Beyond that I think the advice is probably very dependent on what type of campaign you plan to run (you mention your players are into Harry Potter and a campaign where they are all wizards are a magic school would be very different from a campaign where they are venturing into the wilderness and exploring dungeons. If it is a standard type of campaign, start small. So if you are doing exploration, just plan out a small map with some interesting locations, or just start with a dungeon if you need to; if you are going more with a quest based adventure, keep it fairly simple your first time so you can focus on running the system and not get overwhelmed by having too many elements in play. If its your first adventure, players will understand so you can probably keep it real basic and rip something out of a film as a focus. For example one of my friends when were in middle school ran an adventure where he basically watched Conan the Destroyer that week and made an adventure where we had to go into a castle in the middle of a lake like Thoth-Amon and steal a gem. It might not have been his first adventure, but it was definitely pretty early in his GMing experience. We had a blast. We all knew it was basically just Thoth-Amon, but that was kind of cool because it made it very easy for us to visualize what was going on.

Also, try to overthink things. It is your first time, don't worry about hitting out of the park (you may well do so, but don't worry about it). Just focus on staying relaxed, remembering this is a fun game, and paying attention to the reactions of your players (it is very easy as a GM to think "this isn't working/this isn't any good" or "this is genius!" but what you really need to be looking at is how your players are reacting. If they are having fun and enjoying your adventure, then it is going well. If they seem low energy or bored, that is when you might want to introduce either a new development, change course a little, or simply ask them what their characters are doing.

 

[Stone Dog]

Basically what I've done with new groups and new rules is very close to what is in the Trials and Treasures book for advice.

Set expectations early so nobody gets surprised or frustrated. Session Zero is your friend.

You are (possibly all of you) learning. Learning both rules and each other's playstyles. Mistakes will be made. Talk about what happened in the session, what went well, what could use some work.

Don't waste too much time searching for the right rule. If you can't find it right away write down what the question is, make a temporary ruling about it, and do full research when you have more time. Make sure people know that this is a stopgap ruling and you'll come back to it outside of game time. Who knows, maybe it will be a good house rule for your table!

Use published adventures as outlines of events since players may or may not follow the road laid out. Starting out it might be okay to ask them to follow plot prompts so that everybody can learn how the game works, but eventually they are going to want to go off script and as the DM you are going to want the skills to roll with that. A lot of published adventures lay out what the party should do, but expect that they won't.

When you start making your own plots and adventures, remember to give situations for them to interact with, not scenarios that need to go a certain way. If your adventure demands that the royal scion needs requeuing, just have them kidnapped already when the adventure starts, don't give the party false hope that they can stop the kidnapping in progress.

Our Star Trek Adventures group had a problem with an adventure that involved a shuttle crash. It called for all sorts of rolls to avoid crashing with the expectation that we'd crash anyway, just safely. The problem was that we were presented with a broken shuttle and what we immediately wanted to do was fix it all technobabbly style. Nothing we wanted to do was covered in the adventure, but instead of "Hey, just for this session, can we follow the plot so we can learn the ropes?" we muddled through things and had to revisit mechanical questions. Future sessions were a lot more fun.

 

[Stone Dog]

My advice is to run some off the cuff arena style combats between the characters after character creation to have a low stress moment to get accused to GMing combat.

There are two things sort of similar to this that I've seen in published material.

One is the Character Funnel from Dungeon Crawl Classics. Everybody rolls up four level zero characters and plays them all. Just random rolls for ability scores and no class features. Whatever survives gets to be level one. That might not work well for actual 5e, but it is a fun idea.

The other was a scene from the Conan RPG where the players played NPCs getting slaughtered by the monster of the adventure. Basically, starting things off with redshirts nobody cares about so they can learn how combat works.