New 5th Ed GM requesting advice

[iserith]

Believe me, I understand the story made at the table. (Been playing since the old blue and pink books.) But sometimes there isn't too much for the story to build on, if all the module has his room after room of fights/ambushes/traps.

That just means the story that is produced potentially has a lot of exploration and violence. That's chiefly up to the players though.

Yes, I can add things for social interaction, mysteries, investigation, etc... However, if I have to add in a bunch just to make it interesting, that kinda defeats the purpose of purchasing a module so I don't have to build it myself while learning the new system.

You won't have to add those things. The characters are exploring an unknown location, which organically generates mystery and investigation. Social interaction will happen if and when the players decide they want to talk to the inhabitants of the adventure location. For example, if the players decide they don't want to fight their way through the orcs of the Mountain Door and instead make a deal with them to pass through their territory to attack the troglodytes of the Glitterhame, then great. Just play out that social interaction challenge if and when it comes up. So this isn't anything the DM need worry about in terms of prep.

So that part of the questions, was is there any sort of story present in Forge of Fury or is it just hack-n-slash as written? If it is just a HnS dungeon crawl, I will pick something else.

It depends on what your players choose to do. That's the beauty of adventure locations.

What about the Lost Mine of Phandelver? Any opinions/reports on that one?

It's a good adventure, but it will be exceedingly easy most of the way if the PCs start at 4th level. You'd have to do more prep to make the challenges more difficult, if that's a concern.

 

[robus]

Whilst LMoP doesn’t get a lot of love from me as a Starter Adventure (it’s more like an intro to 5e for existing players), it does have a story, a variety of adventures and some interesting NPCs (the whole thing is a bit wildly uneven). But if you’ve not played it (and you’re an experienced DM) you should have a good time.

There are tons of reviews around the web (and here: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?358741-D-D-5th-Edition-Starter-Set )

Edit: as iserith notes, if you’re starting at 4th level, you’ll have to make a lot of changes to the encounters to have a decent challenge (and of course they don’t tell you the intended challenge level of each encounter, easy, medium, hard, deadly, so there’s some effort to reverse engineer that (or just wing it...))

 

[S'mon]

So that part of the questions, was is there any sort of story present in Forge of Fury or is it just hack-n-slash as written? If it is just a HnS dungeon crawl, I will pick something else.

There is stuff going on, there are various monster factions, and not everything needs to be fought. If you run it as an old-school sandbox it works well.

 

[Pete B]

Search online for "The Mad Manor of Askebar" I think it was a contest entry on enworld a while back... I ran that my first time dming. It is hands down my favorite one-shot adventure! The difficulty is easy scaled for levels 1 - 4, and it's written to be easily read and run by anyone. I haven't found another one shot adventure that compares to it