How do you start making your first adventure?

Tell them you'll keep track of XP, and not to worry about it.
Write down what stuff they accomplish and give them a level when the list's long enough, maybe two or three times their level long. Remember to give this ""xp"" for social and stealth victories too.

These sound interesting, thanks.

You mean the total lvl right? So if the party is 2 lvl 3 dudes i can throw a cr 6 or 3 cr 2 at them?

Episodic adventures. Let's face it, your campaign will come to an unexpected end and it will be long before you intended it to. Plus taking on a new and different threat every adventure is a lot more interesting than fighting another batch of the dark lord's orc horde every week.

The biggest mistake I see new DMs making is not giving the campaign a "premise". By this I mean decide what your campaign is going to be about from the start so the players can make characters who have a reason to engage with the premise. Creating an "organization" like a guild, bounty hunter group, or noble house that the players are all loyal to or have something to gain from helps set up a situation where the players all have reason to trust eachother and work together from the start, and the goals of the organization as a whole can make for good early-game plot hooks without it feeling like one person's character is hogging all the plot.

Do NOT start your campaign off with "You all meet in a bar". This is the WORST way to start off a campaign, as it doesn't tell the players what the game is about or give them any reason to trust eachother or work together.

This. Big "save the world" plots are overdone. Give players a starting town or city and have them get invested in the NPCs there instead.

Also this. Giving players level ups after big story accomplishements is infinitely easier than all the book-keeping involved in EXP scores and makes it alot easier to pace out your campaign.

Start small. Think of an adventure that can take place in a single province, or even a single city or town and the surrounding area.

Do NOT go so deep into worldbuilding that you have a entire continent planned out with tons of different countries and races and wars and alliances and politics. Your players WILL NOT GIVE A SHIT. If your players have to read a big multi-page text dump at the start of a game to get caught up on world events, THEY WILL NOT CARE ABOUT THESE EVENTS. Keep it simple, focus on things on a local level, and maybe save the bigger international stuff until your party's gotten more used to the world and you've gotten better as a DM.
As much as I hate to use this as an example, there's reason the Elder Scrolls games always stick to a single province at time in their mainline games. Even as mediocre as Bethesda's writers have become, they know making the scope of the world TOO large actually makes the players care LESS, simply due to how overwhelming everything is from the start.

I stole it

That is totally what he ment. Please throw a CR 6 enemy at two level 3 characters.
>It Will be a good lesson for everyone, one way or the other.

Challenge Rating is busted as fuck, and not really a good indication of difficulty. Just look at how much damage an enemy can put out, how much it can soak up, and how the action economy of it's group stacks up against the action economy of the player's group. Eventually you'll get a feel for these things and stop using CR entirely.

Step 1: Listen to any metal song with intelligible lyrics

Step 2: Turn the lyrics into a narrative.

You're done. I'll give you a good example:

Black Sabbath's Iron Man:

>Has he lost his mind?
>Can he see or is he blind?
>Can he walk at all,
>Or if he moves will he fall?

>Is he alive or dead?
>Has he thoughts within his head?
>We'll just pass him there
>Why should we even care?

>He was turned to steel
>In the great magnetic field
>When he travelled time
>For the future of mankind

>Nobody wants him
>He just stares at the world
>Planning his vengeance
>That he will soon unfurl

>Now the time is here
>For Iron Man to spread fear
>Vengeance from the grave
>Kills the people he once saved

>Nobody wants him
>They just turn their heads
>Nobody helps him
>Now he has his revenge

>Heavy boots of lead
>Fills his victims full of dread
>Running as fast as they can
>Iron Man lives again!

So, a great warrior sacrificed himself to save the land long ago. Willingly donning a suit of cursed armor, his body was burned away and he now exists only as an animated statue/golem. He defeated the demon/army/dragon he faced, but was given scant reward for his efforts. People feared him, and avoided interacting with him. Over time he became lethargic, eventually freezing in place. Generations passed thinking that the cursed warrior was merely a statue of himself as he slowly went insane. Now he has finally snapped, and is marching across the kingdom, killing everything in his path. The party must find a way to stop his rampage.

Is he redeemable? Is there a trace of the hero still in there? Has he gone completely mad? Has his soul been consumed by the armor? Or has someone else sacrificed themselves to the armor for the power it offered? This could go a lot of ways. There's research into the hero's history, the armor's origin, the battles he fought. There's actually fighting the armored killer. There's questions of morality. These really write themselves.

I'm being a pedant but TES 1 was the whole continent.

Love this, gonna give it a try

Go for it. Seriously, name a metal song. There's an adventure in it somewhere.

>improvise.

dont post dungeon meshi im so fucking hungry

I kinda disagree. It's fine to go into lots of world building, just don't throw it at the players. Players disengage if you try to force it down their throats, but if you treat it like real life (where the information is there but rarely forces itself on you) it can add to the immersion when questions asked lead to answers that fit together. Of course, most GMs that do that level of world building also have the terrible habit of doing just that, and wanking off in front of their players about how awesome their world is.

If it's your first game, as it is OP's, excessive worldbuilding is distracting and causing a focus of attention in the wrong areas.It also creates these weird artificial limitations where parts of the world the party is never going to interact with may be affecting parts of the world the players DO interact with for the worse. Better to leave you options open than be beholden to things nobody will ever seen.

YOU ALL MEAT IN A TAVERN

I usually draw a map.

Step 1. Describe a town or some other initial location, and an area around it.
Step 2. Think of what adventures might await the characters in and around this town.
Step 3. Describe neighbouring places surrounding this area.
Step 4. Why are characters there and together?
Step 5. Think of an event that characters will get involved in that will change the steady and boring flow of their life - an attack of bandits, a reward promised for a seemingly simple quest, an artefact they get from somewhere, etc.

Boom! You have your first session ready.

Now think of a big problem. A villain trying to take over the world, a great disaster slowly going on, political and economical situation in the country changing.
Step 1. Why should the PCs be concerned?
Step 2. How is this problem possible to solve?
Step 3. How is this problem affecting the world?
Step 4. What other tasks the PCs should accomplish to solve this one?

Boom! You have an adventure!

Bump, some good tips here.

Can someone let me know if my opening session is doomed to fail?

This world has two countries that have been at War. recently they have been at peace. the king who has kept the peace between the two countries has recently been killed by the other country, sparking war once again.
The players all receive a letter to meet at a Manor. They meet for the first time. Manor turns out to be a dungeon. at the end of the dungeon if they survive they are told The king was murdered by the prince for reasons, then gives them a quest to find evidence it was the prince.

Is that too much junk for new players to sift through? I'm thinking of other reasons why they should actually care whether war starts again. Or if there's a better way to have them start off, and leave that part for later after they've bonded.

First one I GM'd anyway.

I thought of a concept that was pretty self contained and that I felt I could handle and present in a way that would grab players and help them feel immersed. Asking other GMs for advice on how to achieve the latter helped too.

It was a world war 1 style night time trench raid on a backwater imperial world in the 40k universe that was in the midst of a civil war, one side wanting to stay in the imperium, the other wanting to break away and fall through the cracks of the imperial bureaucracy so that the planet could stop paying taxes to some distant aloof authority.

I'd originally intended the PCs to be commissar cadets following the commissar they were apprenticed under on this mission, though the players both decided they wanted to be tech priests so instead they were the medic and the sapper/hacker of the team of soldiers going with the commissar and cadets on this mission.

It started with everyone standing in line for inspection and whispered briefing, then carefully crawling up the wall of their forward trench and across no-man's land.

Between the description of the quiet and tension among the people getting ready for the raid, writing such to point out the potential danger of normally simple things

(The commissar climbed the wall first, and didn't get his head blown off when he reached the top, before climbing the rest of the way over and crawling forward. This pushed the rest of the men to follow him.)

And doing things like rolling GM dice without telling the players what I was rolling for (sometimes nothing at all) while they were trying to crawl across the blasted, muddy moonscape of no-man's land, then get into the enemy forward trench without getting spotted, did a lot to ratchet up the tension and get them imagining the setting and their characters in it. By the time they we're across I had both player's focus hooked.

It depends on what sort of group I’m working with. If I’m just working with a group of normal people, I’ll generally start with an overall plot idea (ask for more info on how I generate ideas), and develop the setting and minor stories by asking myself questions about the story and what might happen to individuals as they travel through the story. Then I’ll work with the players in a session-zero to brief them on the setting and build characters that they’ll have fun playing.

If I’m working with one of those rare groups who share my love of RPGs as a sort-of community storytelling, I start by developing a thematic idea, and constructing a story to allow the players to develop and consider the idea. That idea will motivate all the design of the campaign; not everything that happens will be in service to that idea, but all things will be inspired by it. After all, without a motivating idea, I can’t generate new things for my players to experience and will fall back on copying and base improvisation, there will be a lack of emotional depth, and the players will be bored. (I should clarify here: The sort of players who have this view would be bored by the sort of campaign constructed by the first paragraph, but those who don’t fit into this category are, in my experience, fine with that first sort of campaign)

For the most part, anything I construct will be system-agnostic. The story and ideas can be fit to any system, though some effort will need to be put into the fitting.

Have I misunderstood your question? Are you specifically asking about how I would start a campaign, e.g., a rat-infested basement? I assumed it was a larger question.

In addition, make it very clear that you'll be considering encounters, specifically not just fights, as victories. Talking down the troll has equal, if not greater value, to killing it.

This one little detail is vital in ensuring that you aren't sowing a crop of murderhobos. The biggest source of murderhobos are DMs that look at the XP value of monsters, and make that the only way to acquire XP. If you have veteran players, then they may have already learned this mindset, so be wary, and be patient. If they start murderhoboing remind them that that isn't the best way to advance in level.

Mang, there's not gonna be a new chapter this month, is there?

Not OP but I'm a first-time GM and your second point is what I'd like to do. I'm not much for big plot stuff so I'm thinking of something closer to adventure comic strip like Terry and the Pirates. A well-fleshed out locale where the characters can interact with more emphasis on intrigue and eking out a living on the fringe. Each session would be the PCs taking on different jobs, sometimes dangerous, sometimes illegal.

Everyone meets at a bear. No one knows how they got there, or why the bear is dead.

I write out 2 to 3 stories within the world and connect them. Then narrow it down to key points and if the players are interested they can learn more through dialogue or the world. I do my own honebrewed world with 5e rules. That is how I started at least. (I really like writing my own world and the conflicts within it?

Personally, I really like worldbuilding. However,
don't tell them all of what you come up with. Don't go super in depth to bore them, hell, you don't even have to codify it all. My tip is just create your setting, then play off the tensions of natural opposing forces to create conflict within your setting and progress from there. I'd also suggest keeping things very open and free for the PCs as long as you have a good knowledge of your own setting.

This is all solid advice in my opinion.

Why is the manor a dungeon? Seems sort of shoehorned in for the sake of having a combat element.

Perhaps the prince knows about the information leak, and has sent ruffians to assassinate the Benefactor before he can spill the beans? Perhaps Ruffians let slip information as they search the manor, looking to murder Benefactor, along the lines of "intruders, Old B the Benefactor mustve called them here. Get em!"

They fight their way up to the office of the Benefactor, fight boss Ruffian, Scruff McGruff, and once the coast is clear Benefactor climbs out of his false bottomed lavish sofa to explain the situation.

Sounds fun. Just one point of warning, though: Make sure your players are fully up to and in to communal story-telling type campaigns. If even one of them isn’t, it can ruin the experience for everyone else. I speak from experience here: One sour apple will ruin the bunch.

Oh, and don’t think too big for your first campaign. Don’t try and develop a philosophical thesis on the nature of human suffering through a story about pirates. If you’ve never done it before, you’ll need to develop the skill of thematic depth. Think small, with a concentrated, punchy point. This is where your monster-of-the-week format fits well, because you can do a sort-of rapid prototyping and quickly become better at it.

The people likely to play are up for it. My wife would be one, and while we're not as experience with roleplaying as the others, she's pretty committed to it as our last, short-lived D&D campaign proved.

And I'm not that ambitious. "Punchy" is the perfect word for it. I like two-fisted tales and melodrama and would like to run something like that.

I lyke ur wurdz.

What do you mean by punchy?

Dark souls ?

Nope, February is the next chapter.