D&D 5e, starting a game soon, any DM's have tips?

I had to run a one-off game last night, so decided to run The Master's Vault - and the results were amazingly similar. There was less acrobatics and amateur-dramatics, but when the Dragonborn Paladin was caught in the bone cage trap in front of the spider, he threw a javelin, which hit the cleric in the back - just like you lot!

From a player point of view, it's always the same player who rolls a 1 and shoots the same other player. The running joke in our group got more fuel last night :D
 
Had the second session of my home group in DnD and had "wolf arrow" the Hunters pet wolf jumping into the Gust spell flying 30 foot through the air, hitting a zombie with a crit and killing it in one, they are now obsessed :p

Running a taster session for another group tomorrow night, see how that goes!
 
I'm starting to transition over from Pathfinder to D&D 5e, been watching quite a few other people play with the system and it seems much more geared towards roleplay rather than number crunching.

Might have a play around with Roll20 at some point as I've not done much gaming over the Internet.
 
We finishing this game then guys?

I had what must be about the 8th session of our D&D group last weekend, I feel like I let them down a little as I'm normally full on RP DM and have a laugh but I was ill and it ended up a little more rulebound. We did have time for a ridiculous chase scene where they just ran round in circles round a building them chasing the pet wolf, who was chasing an illusory cat and they were all being chased by a half dozen zombies. I ran them over a trap I wanted to go off and trap them but they all passed dex checks and the zombies set it off, most of them then getting wiped out in a rockfall :p
 
Guessing finishing this is off? :(

Had another good session with my home group couple of highlights being our gender confused dwarf warrior throwing himself 50 foot down a tower to land on an enemy and instead missing and face planting himself to death, the priest being killed by our own ranger because the priest kicked her wolf for attacking him when turned into a zombie. Best moment was the wizard using thunder wave next to an open trapdoor sending my elaborately constructed boss character down a flight of stairs, off a ledge and taking a 100 foot plummet to his death. They were amused, my hard work and though put into the character was not :p

They have the final "boss" and encounter to deal with next month of chapter 3 then having a few temp/taster members over Xmas period so trying to quickly write a 6-10 hour (3 session) one shot for them. Thinking zombie beholder santa taking over their local town and them having to save Xmas :p
 
I write silly themed one shots for my lot. Tend to enjoy them a lot more. Halloween had them being ghostbusters. Last Christmas saw them visited by 3 ghosts and George Michael.

Current batch of one shots (pre gen characters are the same each time so the group get to experience different classes) have them doing pointless quests and at least 2 of the time dying at the end.
The chronological order is reversed so the end of quest 2 leads to quest 1 and so on.
It fills the time when our usual GM ( my missus) is too busy to write.
 
A friend and I are fairly new to DnD but we'd be up for a Friday evening or Saturday afternoon game if anyone would DM? Via roll 20 preferably as I'm based in Egypt and my friend is in the UK. Happy to have others in the party as well of course. PM me if anyone else is interested
 
After a couple of cancellations because of Xmas/new year calendars eventually finishing chapter 3 of my homebrew campaign tonight (be comfortably into level 4 at this point) got a month to get my imagination going as I need to write chapter 4 still (5 is largely done) going to nix up and keep it in the city and let them choose the running order. Going to have one part a murder mystery, another which is around influencing and discussion sort of collaborative gameplay and something else. Inevitably a large part of the first 3 chapters has been dungeon crawl and fighting and whilst it's been great fun I really want to mix it up with stuff you see a lot less often in dnd.

Ultimate aim is to publish this through dmguild not expecting much (if any) return financially but like the thought of offering up my work to others.
 
I'm just a bit late to this thread :D, but from having played with friends many years ago I would echo what someone else said some pages back about group size. It's not a hard and fast rule, but I think most people will find that if they expand the number of players too much, too soon, then that will usually cause problems.

Unfortunately, that's how things went in the group I played in. At first, we had a small number of people that knew each other well, which of course helps especially when you start out, but as time went on more and more players joined and in the end, it was just a total farce. The best games that I can recall were when we had just two players and the DM. That worked very, very well.
 
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My game went from 5 players to now 8 ... We're all close friends as well, so can't really split it in two. I'm secretly hoping that 2/3 players pull out >_>
 
We're on 6 players at the moment which I think is too many. Thought 2 might withdraw during the interim (1 just doesn't get and the other doesn't interact very much) but no such luck now we've just started a new campaign.
Had one of these people ask if they can join our Sunday night session. It was a very quick no from me (as I was running it at the time, hope they don't ask again).
 
We started with 4, quickly went up to 5 and on holidays we have a 6th player who joins for some quick sessions.

I agree with others it gets unmanageable quite quickly, 4 was perfect and 5 works but the few sessions with 6 I have ran have been a little hard. My group are pretty casual and it's all about the fun, which whilst a good laugh with too many people it jus ends up in (humorous) chaos and we tend to achieve very little in terms of progress.

I don't think, despite a couple of people asking, I would allow the group to go beyond 5 for the main campaign as I think it would slow things down too much.
 
We have five players max in our games. We've had emails from people wanting to join, but we just don't have the space - and more than 5 makes the game too unwieldy for me as DM.

That said, at the moment I'm primarily a player and it's good fun. Tonight, however, our DM can't make it, so I'm going back to DM with our high-level group (a bunch of level 12s) who went through Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat - and ended up failing at the final hurdle and letting Tiamat back into the world. They then got captured by the Red Wizards of Thay and during a one-off last month escaped from prison and made it back to Waterdeep. It's gonna be good fun :D

I also get to put my new toy into practice tonight: a portable digital tabletop that I built myself. All my tests so far have been awesome and I'm ridiculously excited to use it in a proper game :D
 
You still need to tell me if you get any room for a player pookie as whilst I'm enjoying DM'ing I'm really missing being a player and I don't think any of my group will be DM worthy any time soon if ever. :(
 
No1newts;30486999 said:
You still need to tell me if you get any room for a player pookie as whilst I'm enjoying DM'ing I'm really missing being a player and I don't think any of my group will be DM worthy any time soon if ever. :(
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I've not forgotten - we have six in the group and there just isn't space, physically to fit another in. If you're up for it, maybe the next time we're a man down, I'll give you a shout for a one-off? We often play Call of Cthulhu or random games on weeks off (usually at least once every couple of months). That's how our last member joined, actually - he came along for a one-off game and RP'd a farmer with delusions of grandeur who nearly killed our cleric throwing a sword. Good times - it was before we blogged our games, so no written records, sadly.

gradyhawks;30489078 said:
Pictures man, we need pictures!
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They're all on my phone - I need to find an easy way to store and share online as I normally just use Facebook.
 
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