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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Victrix" data-source="post: 2458541" data-attributes="member: 11464">Which really, is a much more impressive topic title than the content you are likely to find here  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> My friends and I just recently decided to start playing D&D (3.5), and as I was the driving force behind this, I'm now in the DMs chair, frantically attempting to recall rules, arbitrate the ones we do remember, keep the adventure moving, keep the combats moving, act out the NPCs with some semblance of realism, and vainly strive to give the players a glimpse into another world.We're playing in the Forgotten Realms. Due to time constraints, all the adventures will be preprepared. Last weekend, we started on the Forge of Fury (wth is with that Roper and the Dragon?). There have been some screwed up rules, some confusion about characters and combat, and a general amount of bumbling along, but my players seem to be having fun, and I am, so that's all that really matters. Their next step will likely be a Dungeon adventure, but which one depends on what they decide to pursue. Adlibbing an adventure fills me with something like cold, stark terror, due in large part to the limited amount of time I have to prepare any adventure. I've been reading and soaking up advice like a sponge, but the time to act on some of the useful tips I've found doesn't exist at the moment. At the same time, I don't want to railroad the players, and I'd like them to have choices about where to go and what to do (within some limits, even with extra prepared encounters and mini-adventures, I can only wing it so far at this point).I've got a good selection of books for reference material, and a nice stack of Dungeons from when I had a subscription some years ago. I've also got plenty of miscellaneous rules questions and probably a few about general DMing, but I suppose those belong over in the rules forum.I tell you what - D&D is *really* well designed. It's very easy to explain, easy to play, and pretty easy to extrapolate from existing rules for unexpected situations.At the same time, it sometimes has an annoying amount of Rules In Different Places (advancing the Druid's Wolf companion proved to be a book and page shuffling wonder), and while the DMG (and DMG2) have some excellent and well written tools for constructing adventures, campaigns, monsters, classes, items, and so on, they tend to run light on practical advice for how to pull it all together and actually play the game. That might seem painfully obvious, but I assure you, to my group of players and to me, it is anything but.The books seem to bizarrely skirt around the issue of actually playing the game. The PHB has straightforward and nicely organized tools to create a character, and mostly clear rules for combat and spells. The DMG has straightforward and nicely organized tools to create an adventure, trap, monster encounter, npc, map, campaign, magic item, and so on, but while it happily dances around concepts of playing the game, it never really digs into them with as much vigor as other topics.On some level, I wish there were a set of 'newbie oriented' modules out there. I realize that Sunless Citadel/FoF/etc are probably partially supposed to fill this need, and Dungeon adventures provide a lot of grist for the mill, but even with those resources, some things simply aren't obvious.Ah well. Again, as long as we're having fun, I suppose that's the most important point. I just want to provide all the hooks I can for my players to have fun with. Especially in the case of one of my players who spent some time on his background and would be prime for a set of custom encounters and adventures oriented around his character (something that I can't quite so easily adapt from a printed module or a Dungeon adventure).That's enough words for now <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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