painted_klown
First Post
Hello all,
First, I want to give all of you a hearty and sincere "Thank You" for all of your support, help, tips, ideas, and encouragement.
This past Sunday (01/11/15) was my first time ever playing 5E, I was the DM, and we had 4 players, who had also never played before. Two of the players I have known for a while, and the other two I didn't know from before the game. The two I knew, along with myself, are the ones who were really wanting to play. One of them recruited his girlfriend, and the other recruited a friend from work to round out our table.
We were hoping the two "recruited players" would enjoy themselves, so we can get a regular game going. The plan was to only do one game a month, due to everyone's schedules, family lives, etc. How did it go? Please read on for the story.
When we all sat down to play, I spent quite a bit of time going over rules, explaining how to read their character sheets, covering some basics, answering questions for the players, etc.
I then asked if they would like to do some pre-adventure playing, to see how things worked. They all agreed, so I drew a quick (made up on the spot) dungeon, and had them play through it. To be honest, I was just kind of making it all up as I went along, but the players all really seemed to enjoy it, and were commenting on how well prepared they thought I was.
They finished my impromptu dungeon and were all eager to jump into the actual adventure.
I am sure all of you are familiar with LMoP, so I won't rehash the adventure, but would like to cover a couple of the highlights. The players were all using the pre-gen characters that came with the starter set, so they were familiarizing themselves with the their characters, and everyone seemed to really like them as well. In the time frame leading up to the game, there was a lot of talk about wanting to roll up their own characters. By the time we were pretty well into the session, some of the players had grown to really like their characters, with one player even saying he wanted to roll up the same character with some minor changes.
I did give some hints to the players as the game went along, advising them they don't have to kill every single monster they run across. They then decided to keep one goblin alive and question him. I had a little bit of fun with this part, letting the players decide how they would try to get information from the goblin. Some tried intimidation, others thought they would use their charisma to get him to talk. After some hilariously bad rolls, I decided the goblin was finally scared enough to tell them everything he knew.
Inside the Cragmaw Hideout, my players did decide to climb the rubble from room 3 to room 8. Honestly, I think they kind of thought they were supposed to do that, so I let them go for it. Describing the rubble to them, one player tried to climb and fell down, taking some damage. Then they all started thinking and two of them saw that they had pitons and rope in their inventory. The two with pitons decided to give some pitons to the players that didn't have them, and the two with rope decided they would climb up first, then hold the ropes for their friends. Due to them thinking this out, and figuring out a great way to work together, I decided to give them all advantage on their athletics checks. One player rolled at natural 20 from the ground, everyone cheered, so I said that she made it to the top with the single roll. Everybody really seemed to like the ruling.
When they got to the top, one player with darkvision was able to see inside the room. I described the room to them, then placed the monsters in the room. I then had them do STR checks to break the rubble down enough to climb through the hole and fight the monsters. The bugbear was hitting them hard, and I was afraid of having a party member die, fortunately, they all worked together well as a team and the healer kept players alive as the battle went on. The way the bugbear actually died was pretty cool. The fighter in the group runs up to him and hit him with his great axe. On the attack roll he rolled a critical hit, and the entire group cheered loudly. Even I was excited and stood up to cheer and toss out some fist bumps to the players.
As the session was winding down, my friend asked his work recruit friend what he thought, and his response was "I'm going to buy some dice". Needless to say, the session was a total success, and while they did give me a little grief (friendly teasing) when I had to read a bit here and there (saying it was the loading screen LOL! ) everyone thought I did a great job, and seeming impressed with my level of preparation.
Then on Monday, everyone was still reeling from the excitement of the adventure and agreed to have gaming sessions as much as our schedules will allow (as opposed to only 1 a month) and the recruited work friend, even mentioned that he would like to try DM'ing some time in the future, if I was cool with it. WOO HOO!!! I said I would totally be down with that, and had no problem with rotating the DM as much as the group wanted.
I am now preparing for our next session (which we're all planning for 2 weeks from now) and going over some rules, to be sure we ran them correctly. Thanks again all for your help. I feel like I would not have been as near as successful as I was without your help.
-Dave
First, I want to give all of you a hearty and sincere "Thank You" for all of your support, help, tips, ideas, and encouragement.
This past Sunday (01/11/15) was my first time ever playing 5E, I was the DM, and we had 4 players, who had also never played before. Two of the players I have known for a while, and the other two I didn't know from before the game. The two I knew, along with myself, are the ones who were really wanting to play. One of them recruited his girlfriend, and the other recruited a friend from work to round out our table.
We were hoping the two "recruited players" would enjoy themselves, so we can get a regular game going. The plan was to only do one game a month, due to everyone's schedules, family lives, etc. How did it go? Please read on for the story.
When we all sat down to play, I spent quite a bit of time going over rules, explaining how to read their character sheets, covering some basics, answering questions for the players, etc.
I then asked if they would like to do some pre-adventure playing, to see how things worked. They all agreed, so I drew a quick (made up on the spot) dungeon, and had them play through it. To be honest, I was just kind of making it all up as I went along, but the players all really seemed to enjoy it, and were commenting on how well prepared they thought I was.
They finished my impromptu dungeon and were all eager to jump into the actual adventure. I am sure all of you are familiar with LMoP, so I won't rehash the adventure, but would like to cover a couple of the highlights. The players were all using the pre-gen characters that came with the starter set, so they were familiarizing themselves with the their characters, and everyone seemed to really like them as well. In the time frame leading up to the game, there was a lot of talk about wanting to roll up their own characters. By the time we were pretty well into the session, some of the players had grown to really like their characters, with one player even saying he wanted to roll up the same character with some minor changes.
I did give some hints to the players as the game went along, advising them they don't have to kill every single monster they run across. They then decided to keep one goblin alive and question him. I had a little bit of fun with this part, letting the players decide how they would try to get information from the goblin. Some tried intimidation, others thought they would use their charisma to get him to talk. After some hilariously bad rolls, I decided the goblin was finally scared enough to tell them everything he knew.
Inside the Cragmaw Hideout, my players did decide to climb the rubble from room 3 to room 8. Honestly, I think they kind of thought they were supposed to do that, so I let them go for it. Describing the rubble to them, one player tried to climb and fell down, taking some damage. Then they all started thinking and two of them saw that they had pitons and rope in their inventory. The two with pitons decided to give some pitons to the players that didn't have them, and the two with rope decided they would climb up first, then hold the ropes for their friends. Due to them thinking this out, and figuring out a great way to work together, I decided to give them all advantage on their athletics checks. One player rolled at natural 20 from the ground, everyone cheered, so I said that she made it to the top with the single roll. Everybody really seemed to like the ruling.
When they got to the top, one player with darkvision was able to see inside the room. I described the room to them, then placed the monsters in the room. I then had them do STR checks to break the rubble down enough to climb through the hole and fight the monsters. The bugbear was hitting them hard, and I was afraid of having a party member die, fortunately, they all worked together well as a team and the healer kept players alive as the battle went on. The way the bugbear actually died was pretty cool. The fighter in the group runs up to him and hit him with his great axe. On the attack roll he rolled a critical hit, and the entire group cheered loudly. Even I was excited and stood up to cheer and toss out some fist bumps to the players.
As the session was winding down, my friend asked his work recruit friend what he thought, and his response was "I'm going to buy some dice". Needless to say, the session was a total success, and while they did give me a little grief (friendly teasing) when I had to read a bit here and there (saying it was the loading screen LOL! ) everyone thought I did a great job, and seeming impressed with my level of preparation.
Then on Monday, everyone was still reeling from the excitement of the adventure and agreed to have gaming sessions as much as our schedules will allow (as opposed to only 1 a month) and the recruited work friend, even mentioned that he would like to try DM'ing some time in the future, if I was cool with it. WOO HOO!!! I said I would totally be down with that, and had no problem with rotating the DM as much as the group wanted.
I am now preparing for our next session (which we're all planning for 2 weeks from now) and going over some rules, to be sure we ran them correctly. Thanks again all for your help. I feel like I would not have been as near as successful as I was without your help.
-Dave
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