D&D 5E Meanwhile - new DMs are having fun! How was your very first session as a GM/DM?

[Eyes of Nine]

Thought I would share my son's text

He ran his very first RPG last night for his college housemates (on my recommendation, he's running Phandelver)

I actually don't remember my very first game I ran, we were a crew of 5 with 3 of us cycling DM duties - I was 13. Clearly I had enough fun that I'm still running games 44 years later

How was your first ever game behind the screen?

 

[Fifinjir]

Pretty good. The situation descended into madness and chaos, but that par for the course with my group.

 

[cbwjm]

I don't know exactly what the first game I ran was, but I do remember reading through the Rules Cyclopedia and making characters. It was just me and my cousin so I think he ended up running multiple PCs while I DMd, possibly quest for the silver sword or raven's ruin. Great times.

 

[iserith]

Time and booze have erased any memory of my first DMing experience. But it must have been okay since I'm still at it 30+ years later.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Mine was so long ago, I can't remember it. It was almost certainly running the moathouse from the Village of Homlett or, equally likely, my players robbing the town blind. (They did the same thing with Restenford in the Secret of Bone Hill -- if you put a dungeon full of treasure under the baron's castle, middle school boys will rob it.)

 

[overgeeked]

My first time was a wonderful disaster. Absolute learning & teaching moment.

I tried to run a module. I say tried because the players immediately zigged when they needed to zag. Immediately as in the first five minutes of the first session. All the money and time prepping it went out the window. I learned real quick to adapt and go with the flow. It was still an incredibly rough session, about four hours of improvising when I hadn't planned on improvising at all. But still, lesson learned. Never again. It's all open-world sandboxes or nothing. No set story, no railroads, no adventure paths.

 

[payn]

Mine was similar to OPs son. I had a lot of chucklehead players back then, but we had time on our side so it wasnt a big deal.

 

[GuyBoy]

My 13 year old grandson is about to run his first campaign (Dragon of Icespire Peak) for his 9 year old sister, my wife and myself.
I’m sure he'll make a better job of it than I did back in c.1977 when Celetan the Wizard, Valon the Priest and Johan the Fighter entered the Dungeon of the Shadowed Hand, which I’d designed on graph paper stolen from the maths department at school in my first go as a DM.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

As someone said in another group I am in... "Just wait until they don't roll any dice"

 

[Clint_L]

I think my first DMing experience was trying to run something out of Dragon magazine or maybe some simple home-brew. My first strong memory is of trying to run "Against the Giants" and it being a total crap-show, though we had a great time. I remember that my friends were reading the module along with me as we were trying to figure it out. And I also had a character in the party; back then the DM always had a character that they would play as a party member, and we took turns DMing (that way you didn't get punished by having your character miss out on earning experience because you were DMing).