D&D General Most helpful/useful product to help run sessions for a DM ?

[abazaba]

Ah, sorry - I was thinking obviously more about at-table resources moreso than prep.

No need to worry or be sorry, the responses (including this one) are all valuable. And perhaps I was (unintended, but still) a little bit vague. Thanks again.

 

[abazaba]

A lot of my adventure design roots came from the old 1E & B/X adventures and disassembling those to put together my own stuff. However, I greatly enjoyed the Reincarnated series, especially "Into the Borderlands", "Isle of Dread" and "The Lost City" as not only did they reproduce the originals and convert these to 5E, but they got the authors to go into the design aspects of these adventures so you got insights into why they did what they did and point out some of the more interesting aspects of these adventures. Out of the three mentioned above I find I like "The Lost City" the most, because it isn't just a run-of-the-mill dungeon crawl, it's an investigation into the collapse of a whole society and interaction (and possibly rebuilding) while dealing with a powerful (but not world-ending) enemy force/organization.

I may be wildly mistaken, but. As far as the 'old-school' material or general presentation goes: I really have a hard time trying to grasp the material the way it is presented. By contrast (and I am not saying it is perfect by any means) I read the D&D 5e starter set 'Lost Mine of Phandalver' (after we finished the campaign, so no spoilers, and I was wondering what the source material was that our DM had to work with) that all seemed to be presented in a way that I could almost - almost - think of being able to run myself, if it would ever come to that.

PS: I only came to D&D with 5e, and am only playing for a few years.

 

[Coroc]

I may be wildly mistaken, but. As far as the 'old-school' material or general presentation goes: I really have a hard time trying to grasp the material the way it is presented. By contrast (and I am not saying it is perfect by any means) I read the D&D 5e starter set 'Lost Mine of Phandalver' (after we finished the campaign, so no spoilers, and I was wondering what the source material was that our DM had to work with) that all seemed to be presented in a way that I could almost - almost - think of being able to run myself, if it would ever come to that.

PS: I only came to D&D with 5e, and am only playing for a few years.

That explains a lot. The old school stuff is rich in content ideas and fluff but one thing it is not: Ready to play out of the box.

Also converting old school stuff to 5e requires a lot of system mastery for both editions (in my case 2e and 5e), and that encompasses not only on how to proper convert stats and the purely mathematical stuff, but also the different approach and playstyles of decades ago and now.

There is a 2e sourcebook which helped me a lot and they are quite edition (and even system independant) i would have to dig deep in my cabinet right now to find them, it is called Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide (1990) and it is pure gold
If you get your hands on that one it teaches loads about being a good DM.

 

[Stormonu]

I may be wildly mistaken, but. As far as the 'old-school' material or general presentation goes: I really have a hard time trying to grasp the material the way it is presented. By contrast (and I am not saying it is perfect by any means) I read the D&D 5e starter set 'Lost Mine of Phandalver' (after we finished the campaign, so no spoilers, and I was wondering what the source material was that our DM had to work with) that all seemed to be presented in a way that I could almost - almost - think of being able to run myself, if it would ever come to that.

PS: I only came to D&D with 5e, and am only playing for a few years.

It may very well be the case that us old-timers worked with the stuff we had at hand back in the day and just sort of had to puzzle it out. Though I do feel that those old modules still have a lot of good rooms/encounters to pull out and plop into current games. As teaching tools, they're not so great compared to modern offerings - good as pre-built encounters/resources though. I will say that I've kept all my 1E adventures, but there's not one 2E adventure I felt worth keeping in my library - and a lot of that is due to the railroading/metaplot of those later adventures.

You also bring up another wonderful item - the starter set adventure "Lost Mine of Phandelver" I think is a great adventure that really hits all the "this is D&D's essence" for me. I had a great time with that adventure, and would probably rank it as #2 of 5E adventures (with Curse of Strahd being number #1, but then I've always loved Castle Ravenloft and the villain Strahd).

 

[Coroc]

It may very well be the case that us old-timers worked with the stuff we had at hand back in the day and just sort of had to puzzle it out. Though I do feel that those old modules still have a lot of good rooms/encounters to pull out and plop into current games. As teaching tools, they're not so great compared to modern offerings - good as pre-built encounters/resources though. I will say that I've kept all my 1E adventures, but there's not one 2E adventure I felt worth keeping in my library - and a lot of that is due to the railroading/metaplot of those later adventures.

You also bring up another wonderful item - the starter set adventure "Lost Mine of Phandelver" I think is a great adventure that really hits all the "this is D&D's essence" for me. I had a great time with that adventure, and would probably rank it as #2 of 5E adventures (with Curse of Strahd being number #1, but then I've always loved Castle Ravenloft and the villain Strahd).

Well 2e ravenloft partially has the best fleshed out npcs ever from that era, and the biggest roleplay support (it even surpasses modern material rp wise). But again, you could not really play this stuff out of the box, but it usually required less work than the vanilla stuff.

Got several FR boxed sets, several greyhak boxed sets and loads of adventures from back then. I converted 2e ravenloft and greyhawk to 5e and ran two campaigns and it worked out quite well.

 

[bsss]

In my opinion it behooves every GM to read Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering.

 

[Koloth]

We use this for init tracking: Pathfinder Combat Pad
Another vote for Robin's Laws
If you are doing map and minis:
A good supply of NPC minis. Lots of cheap is often better then a few good.
20+ glass beads of several colors.
Enough maps that you can pre-draw encounters if not using specific maps.

 

[BruceWright]

Small dry-erase board behind the screen, which I use for player name, character name, character pronouns and initiative number.
Dry erase flip matte for drawing the room around the minis, writing status effects right by the monster they refer to, keeping track of how many HP a monster has lost, again right by the monster.


Table-tent placecards for each player, which sit in front of the players non-combat so they can call each other by character name, these go on top of my DM screen for initiative count during combat, along with little clips for the monsters.

 

[SlyFlourish]

Thanks for mentioning Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster!

Here's a CC-released free document with a bunch of material to help people prep and run their games:

The Lazy GM's Resource Document

Lazy GM guidelines and resources for 5th edition compatible and other fantasy tabletop roleplaying games.

slyflourish.com

and one for monsters:

The Lazy GM's 5e Monster Builder Resource Document

Lazy GM guidelines for building and running 5th edition compatible monsters.

slyflourish.com

 

[overgeeked]

Thanks for mentioning Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster!

Here's a CC-released free document with a bunch of material to help people prep and run their games:

The Lazy GM's Resource Document

Lazy GM guidelines and resources for 5th edition compatible and other fantasy tabletop roleplaying games.

slyflourish.com

and one for monsters:

The Lazy GM's 5e Monster Builder Resource Document

Lazy GM guidelines for building and running 5th edition compatible monsters.

slyflourish.com

Thanks, Mike. I love your stuff and I'm floored every time I'm reminded you've released this stuff under the CC-BY license. You're good people. You make the hobby better. Thank you.