How did your first ever DM game go? Was it successful? Did it die, and how long did it take...

We made a mistake of playing it on a forum, play-by-post. Of course it fucking died.

I ran a Deathwatch game.

Honestly that's about all the information necessary to know how bad of an idea it was.

Poorly. We were playing D&D 3.5 and the main DM took a break so each player could run their own one-shot highlighting their characters backstory. So I created an incredibly stupid plot involving the death of my grandfather, my evil wizard grand-uncle and a lot of bullshit. I had about 200 pages of notes, railroaded incredibly hard, overdesigned the 6 level wizard tower dungeon. What was supposed to be one session turned into 8 sessions over 5 weeks.

I took it as a learning experience and have since GM-d multiple failed campaigns, and two or three successful ones.

i was like 12. i'm pretty sure it was as good as any 12-year-old could come up with, but it lasted a good 10-ish sessions before i got bored and wanted to not play D&D, leading to a long string through grade school where i'd just pick up and learn games over a week, then make my players go through it on the weekend, every week, for years.

This is your daily reminder to jerk off before coming to Veeky Forums

What would you even do with cat girls in a fantasy setting?

Catgirls are for cuddling

Fucking terrible. Only lasted one session. None of us had any idea how stuff worked.

>How did your first ever DM game go?
It went fairly well but it was the first time any of us had tried our hands at tabletop RPGs.
>Was it successful?
Yes. People had fun and the main story arc had concluded.
>Did it die, and how long did it take?
Technically yes as I had wanted it to go farther but we just kinda dropped it and let other group members take-up GM duties.
>Did you have That Guy(s) in your game?
Yes. One of our members played the classic dick ass thief who turned on the party at the end and treated his follower character (fluffed as an orphan he took in) like garbage expecting said follower to just put-up with that shit. Nothing too terrible came of it though...
>Did you have a really creative interesting story, or was in standard?
It was a fairly standard story in a fairly standard fantasy setting using a simple game known as Warrior, Rogue, and Mage. Not sure how but the final leg of the story ended-up being the PCs wandering their way to a floating sorcerer city comprised of a grey porous stone-like material that is able to be shaped by the thoughts of any sorcerer. Sorcerer's in this setting were a race.

Great thread OP.

I was very new to GM'ing, like single digit hours new. I made a giant dragon and made an adventure about getting to the dragon.

At the time I was quite young and impatient so I just said screw it you all are level 15 and made the party fight a dragon.

Their samurai had an Ice sword and the Ronin ability to NAT 20 So with a 1.5*Str modifier, Crit Modifier, Elemental Vulnerability, and additional buffs added by the cleric, it nearly took it out in one blow.

It was a very fun fight though.

I’d say it was successful, but I was seven at the time, and it was more than twenty years ago now, so my memory might be failing me.

The party had to stop Nerull from taking over the world. They got locked away in time when they tried to stop some Tiefling who made a pyramid and split his personality (that was a published module). When they got out Nerull had already taken everything over and they had to go get orbs he had locked away in dungeons to kill him. The orbs had the souls of the gods locked away in them and they had to shove them through his body to kill him from the inside out. There were 12 players at the end. To this day I am still perma-DM by choice.

I was nine years old when I first DM'd, it was fucking terrible. Don't remember it well but I do remember it was not a grand success. People still had enough fun though to keep playing since we didn't realize how awful we all were.

Still ongoing, and we're having a good time I think. Nobody has suggested stopping or taking a break after 3 months. No negative behavior. Players are invested in the story enough to get creeped out or audibly upset about bad things happening.

feelsgoodman.jpg

>How did your first ever DM game go?
Fucking terrible
>Was it successful?
Fuck no
>Did it die, and how long did it take?
yes, and 5 sessions
>Did you have That Guy(s) in your game?
I had 5 players. 2 of them were that guys in game, 1 of them was a that guy out of game. One of the in-game that guys was custom made to blow up the game and they caused everyone else to quit. One player was only there for 2 sessions. Thats not an exaggeration btw. They straight up said they made this character to destroy the campaign.
>Did you have a really creative interesting story, or was in standard?
No My plan was throwing a lot of hooks at the party and seeing what they engaged with and building the story off of what they would enjoy most. They engaged with nothing. Part of that was my fault because I just stopped giving a shit after session 2 when I saw how things were going though

My other group is all friends I've known for 5 years though and its went far better. Don't fucking run games for internet acquaintances. you can run games with internet friends though.

>How did your first ever DM game go?
Meh
>Was it successful?
No, not really.
>Did it die, and how long did it take?
Yes. Only 4 or 5 sessions.
> Did you have That Guy(s) in your game?
One guy was a rules lawyer, but it wasn't anything too terrible.
>Did you have a really creative interesting story, or was in standard?
I was trying to make something interesting happen, but my lack of experience killed the chances of that happening.

>How did your first ever DM game go?
Okay-ish, I guess.
>Was it successful?
We finished the module, so yes.
>Did it die, and how long did it take?
We rotated to a different system after finishing the module, which took about 3 or 4 sessions.
>Did you have That Guy(s) in your game?
Nah.
>Did you have a really creative interesting story, or was in standard?
It was N1, the most basic bitch "investigate snake cult" module on the planet.

>How did your first ever DM game go?
Was pretty cool.

Was it successful?
It was fun, so yes.

Did it die, and how long did it take?
It died after we finished school and moved to different cities for college/work. Took about two years.

Did you have That Guy(s) in your game?
Nope, only nice people I already knew. The "worst" player was a very shy girl who hardly did any roleplaying at all despite my and the other players best efforts to help her open up.

Did you have a really creative interesting story, or was in standard?
Pretty standard story in D&D 4e. The nations high priestess got kidnapped and her father killed by an unknown evil organization. The PCs had to find and follow hints to save her and fought various foes along the way. Slowly it became clear that the whole incident was linked to an imminent war with a neighbouring country. The characters got sent over as spies to collect informations. Later the guy who send them on the mission provided them with other ones regarding the war including destroying an enemy harbor, finding the blueprints for an ancient flying ship or infiltrating a third nation who supposedly dealt in weapons with the enemy. There were also LOTS of intrigues and double, triple, quadruple and quintuple agent shit going most which I unfortunately couldn't deliver on since the game ended too early. Was also pretty sandboxy but the PCs quickly jumped on most hooks I gave them.

bump!

It failed in the most spectacular way imaginable, mostly because my players were completely fucking green to this stuff too.
After finishing introductionary scenario and collecting the reward, one of the players declared that they are not getting enough and started to be really pushy about it in-character.
Long story short, they've wiped out the entire monastery that originally hired them for protection and set it ablaze to cover the tracks, so the blame would go on the bandits they've already killed and burried in the nearby forest.

On the plus-side, this allowed a great set-up for much later campaign, while my players kept on burrying slain people or paying undertaker to do this. Don't know why, but they just keep on doing this for past 3 years

It was an absolute shitshow. It died two sessions in because one of the players was a That Guy who basically destroyed the game because he made all sorts of assumptions about how I was DMing and what my "real intentions" were about things.

The story and setting were both homebrew of my own design, in which the material plane does not exist. Instead, life as we know it takes place on the Elemental Plane of Air, and we are all beings native to that plane, since the one thing we all share in common is that we absolutely must have air to survive. The plane was configured like a real-life galaxy, but the void of space does not exist: it's all atmosphere up there, so travel to other planets is possible on enchanted airships. Stars were stabilized gateways to the Elemental Plane of Fire, black and white holes were passages to the Postive and Negative Energy Plane, and other astral phenenoma were expressions of overlap with other various planes of elements.

The other planes were configured in a similar manner, with the primary element of that plane being the key feature of that dimension, and native residents of those planes being equally reliant upon that element's presence as we ourselves are reliant on air. Those planes also possessed cosmic phenenoma parallel to our own that helped seed and preserve life, such as Ice Stars on the Fire Plane that exude cold and darkness to create moderate zones where life can more easily thrive.

I had put together a number of smaller metaplots about war, politics, and a power-mad wizard with delusions of demigodhood (ironically, his grandson, a lich who had been reduced to a head in a box for opposing his grandparent, was slated to be the party's best lead to thwarting him).

(cont)

and there was also a larger overarching metaplot about why the Demiurge who created the cosmos isn't directly present (the metaplanes as we know them exist in a soapbubble drifting in a sea of chaos, and the only reason we exist is because 'God's standing outside of his own creation protecting it from sentient Outsiders trying to get in).

If the party seemed interested in the greater goings on of the multiverse, I had breadcrumbs prepared where each primary elemental plane as three artifacts on it corresponding to the OTHER three elemental planes (i.e. the Earth Plane doesn't have an Earth Artifact on it), and seeking out others or stumbling across them would reveal Outsider infiltration into our multiverse as they too seek the artifacts to circumvent the Demiurge.

If they weren't interested or didn't seem to care, I had a whole bunch of other smaller things they could deal with, including local level plots for a few major locations and some larger scale things like wars and their associated politics, crazy wizards, and a religious crusade against a cult that was enslaving djinni to their service.

But the game didn't make to the third session, because That Guy claimed that the cohorts I had given each of the players were actually DMPCs, and threw a giant shitfit over it that drove the friend he brought to the game away before he himself abandoned ship, leaving me, my friend who talked me into DMing, and the fourth guy just staring at each other awkwardly.

(cont)

For the record, the cohorts were there explicitly to serve as possible replacement PCs if I accidentially killed somebody with my own inexperience with DMing. They were not DMPCs; I had no control over them at all beyond helping to manage their inventories to try and keep the player paperwork to a minimum.

Needless to say, the game collapsed after half the party fucked off, and while I offered to keep it going with just my friend and his acquaintance, and said they could each run their cohort as a full PC so we'd have a complete party, they declined, since the drama and arguments had left a bad taste in everyone's mouths.The game died, I haven't spoken to the other three people who weren't my friend since, and I never got a chance to do anything with the setting or game I'd put together.

The experience really turned me off of DMing. I haven't bothered trying since.

That Guy's name was Roy, by the way. Fucking Roy.

My first campaign DMing is a pirate themed 4e setting of my own creation. After a couple years of 4e we switched that campaign to pathfinder since 4e is so terrible at high levels. Been ongoing for over 3 yeads now I think. Went bretty gud

You go with dumbest stereotypes possible, make them all act like retarded kittens, dump truckfuls of cat puns every time one appears and frequently mention catboys' barbed dicks and such even if catpeople in your setting look exactly like human. Make sure everyone DROWNS in cringe the moment they see one.

Anyone can prohibit catgirls in the setting or kick a player. The real art is to include them but make them so terrible, your depiction of them will hurt weeb's very soul.

A tribe of moon worshiping huntresses who eat their young.

It must be nice to cynically bitch about the plight of the board before the thread even starts. It's just a picture, user. The pre-emptive whinging is almost as bad as the shitposting.

My first ever DM didn't go past session0.
> Read DtF, decide would be a fun game to play.
> Gather 3 players who seem willing to play.
> They make characters.
> Realize the system is a bitch and I have no idea of how to run a game.
> Real life intervents.
> Get depressed, leave roleplaying entirely for like several months.

>Was it successful?
Yes. It's still a game we talk about to this day, 6 years on.
>Did it die, and how long did it take?
It lasted 3 months, and nearly died before the last session, but we were able to finish in the end.
>Did you have That Guy(s) in your game?
Not really. We mostly just winged it half the time, and no one tried to impose their autism on anyone else. Well, except for one player who decided she would sell the party out under mere threat of torture, which basically shattered the entire game just before the climax and kicked off a fucking war in the streets that the party had to wrangle back under control before the BBEG killed them all.
>Did you have a really creative interesting story, or was in standard?
Depends on what you consider creative. A team of murderhobos were forced by a Death Cult to carry out legally dubious assassinations in a large port city, only to run across a web of conspiracies and bastards. Culminated in a lot of death and property damage. And ultimately the end of an empire.

Fuck Druids, by the way.

Every game I'm in has at least one That Guy.

I made my players HIT THE MONSTER REEEAALLLL GOOD.

Bad greentext incoming.

>Shadowrun 4th edition
>I tell the players metahumans ONLY, NO metavariants, NO qualities like Dracoform and SURGE, it's my first game so don't go all extreme on me
>First player comes with a fucking amnesiac Mr Lucky (build he found on the net but I didn't know at the time) human street samurai
>His own words: "You'll probably think of a better backstory than me". Yeah, not because he couldn't be arsed to come up with a backstory
>Second player comes with a badly-built human katana-wielding mage, ow the edge
>He actually followed a Lone Star officer to his house, burnt him and then killed both of his kids
>Third player comes with a human face, all good in the beginning
>Every mission ends in bloodbath due to the street sam and the mage
>Even those that were planned not to
>Guys, this mission is stealth, relax with your killing
>Nope can't do, the mission ends in so a great bloodbath that Khorne twisted on his throne
>The game lasted for IIRC 5 sessions because on the last mission the third player turns to me and tells me he transforms into his true drake form and kills the opposition and, I shit you not, that he is Lofwyr's son
>Even though I specifically said no drakes and with a backstory that should have been consulted with me (I wouldn't allow it)
>I checked his char sheet, he was BSing me, he hadn't even picked up Dracoform
>Later he told me that he did all that because he was feeling I wasn't putting him enough on the spotlight
>The campaign died at that moment though

So essentially you yourself need to be a weeb and then pretend not to be one to get it 'done" your way?
Fucking horrible.

>How did your first ever DM game go?
Pretty good, all things considered. But then again, I've been a player for previous 9 years, so...
>Was it successful?
I guess so. People liked it enough to show up for another one and not counting single "early" flake (he dropped after 3 months), the group remained intact ever since
>Did it die, and how long did it take?
It lasted long enough to create a long-reaching repercussions for the party, since we pretty much play a continous campaign, making such stuff almost mandatory
>Did you have That Guy(s) in your game?
Not really. Out of initial 5 people, only one person had any prior experience playing (and it was AD&D 2e out of all things) and one person played a lot of cRPG. So they simply lacked capacity for being That Guy or Girl (2 chicks in the party never a single drama with them for past couple of years)
>Did you have a really creative interesting story, or was in standard?
It was as generic as only possible, to help them figure things out without much complication and so the plot wouldn't further make their lives complicated when learning the ropes of the game itself.

No, you mock them. You give them exactly what they want, but in a way that's utterly unenjoyable by anyone.

I actually tested it several times, with different snowflake races. After a couple cmpaigns' worth of cunt tieflings and Veeky Forums meme elves nobody in my group wants to play tieflings, elves and couple other races anymore.

I consider it a great success.

>You need to act like a fussy 5 year old
Considering I never in my life had a single issue with weeb players, despite two of them being in the group, I'll skip your "solution" for problems that I don't have in the first place

>Considering I never in my life had a single issue with weeb players, despite two of them being in the group

You're sitting on a ticking time bomb, m8. Remember this post when your group falls apart because of them sperging out.

My group is holding all-right for almost 5 years (it will be this February). And I doubt I will remember your post at all, and if - as a way how people mishandle inter-group communication by acting like actual spergs.

I would normally wish you fun, but since for you "fun" means acting like an asshole and actively ruining your games for everyone present at the table ever considered the non-weeb members of your group hit by this, you idiot?, to you my sir I say - good bye

>ever considered the non-weeb members of your group hit by this, you idiot?

No, because any sensible normal human will support mocking snowflakes and weebs.

>Hey guys, here are our options!
>We can play the game...
>... or we can spend next 5 hours sperging out
>And then repeat the sperging out until half of the group leaves
>Because I'm unwilling to talk with players and have paranoid delusions to boot

Different user, but are you and your party by chance made out of neets? Because I can't imagine any "sensible normal human" wasting time that could be used for a game to chimp out instead. Considering it's adult-only board, people have obligations in form of either job, university or both. Meaning they don't have time for your kind of fuckery. Unless they are neets, that is. But that exclused the concept of "sensible normal human".

the game/campaign/setting is about to turn two years old. My >that guy is a former DM who has a different philosophy to my own, whereas I think the system should be a bit flexible for narrative/world's sake, he thinks it is all built exclusively on top of the system in use. For reference we're in Pathfinder 3.5, altho I have DM'd Modern roll20 set in the late 80s/early90s, and will DM Retirement d20 which is a modern20 adaptation I am working on.

First ever game was a star wars game where the party travelled around the galaxy during the jedi purge, attempting to find traces of ancient Rakatan technology to use it to rule the galaxy.

My players still tell me it was the best game i ever hosted, with long running antics, interesting NPC's people felt involved and attached to, and a desperate want to actually bring the galaxy back together.

I can't seem to recapture the magic of it.

My first session happened around 7 months ago. I bought the 5e starter set and gathered some friends. They were excited to play, but would've never taken initiative themselves. I'm a big nerd, and obsessive enough to be DM.

First session was entirely Theater of The Mind. It worked pretty well, though of course there was ruling confusion, and gauging distances in TotM is/was hard. I since bought a battle mat. LMoP is great for newbies, and my friends eagerly follow even the tiniest of plot hooks, so there were few issues really. There was a good mix of diplomacy (or diplomacy attempts, which often failed and have since become our group's most fond memories), and our extremely non-nerdy female friend drew first blood in the entire campaign by firing an arrow into our fighter's back as he was charging the goblins from the ambush. Great fun!

Next month we'll start Curse of Strahd, and I can't wait to kill them all in Death House. Kiddie time's over, friends.

>How did your first ever DM game go?
Relatively well considering I was new, had multiple problem players, and didn't know the system very well.

>Was it successful? Did it die, and how long did it take?
It ran almost two years, from level 1 to 13 in DnD, until I could not stand a couple of my players any more and had decided I hated 3.5, and I wrapped the story up and brought it to a close.

>Did you have That Guy(s) in your game?
Oh ho ho, yes. Of the five players, two I avoided ever playing with again, and another I booted a while later.

>Did you have a really creative interesting story, or was in standard?
I don't know how creative or interesting it was. I liked it, but my players largely did not even know there was a story. Maybe I was doing badly, or maybe they were just that way. Maybe a little of both.

Ongoing, but holy fucking ever-living Christ, my group will never keep a stable amount of people.
The group was started with like 6 total as a 5e group, but the person who 'started' it never showed and we lost a guy after the second session. We had a 2 people join at that point, and the 2nd of the two never played again because he didn't like how DnD on the net was.Then we got another person, then we swapped to the 1st-midjoiner's first time DMing, with PF being the system of choice. We had the original DM of the 5e campaign leave, and invited two others, who never showed up to any session. Then this DM stepped down because he was depressed and stressed out, plus he didn't know the system, so I took up DMing like I had wanted to do before he started to, but he insisted on DMing his campaign first. Like, a month+ ago, if not more, we started my campaign, and there was recently a hiatus because I was on vacation + it was Christmas, thus everyone else was okay with it. We started back up since, but now we're PROBABLY going to lose my buddy who was the 2nd person to DM because he's feeling depressed.
Why can't the gods let me have stability in this group? I really like everyone in it, so fuck.

cont.
Forgot the half that mattered for this thread:
It's a Pathfinder campaign under a homebrew setting that's going to be mostly set within a not!HRE [with a lot of differences from the HRE, so it's barely a not!HRE, but that's the closest thing I can compare it to).
The first session had the 2nd DM guy missing, but he said he was fine w/ it, so we went through with it. I introduced the party to a city laying on the 'borders' between the empire-place and a tainted area that's like the Abyss flowing on the Material Plane.
I was going to make it pretty brutal and dark-themed, but before I even went through with doing that, I asked my players what sort of story themes or adventures they'd like, and they wanted something less dark, so it's basically just the same setting, but less hopelessness and gritty reality shit. I have planned mostly them fighting evil like heroes or some cheesy shit, possibly warding off the total destruction of the world (for the second time in the homebrew setting lol).
That's about it.

>Be dumb faggot in high school
>Join pathfinder club because I enjoyed stories I read on Veeky Forums
>"So user about how much have you played?"
>"H-ha I've played plenty of games and GM'd just as many"
>"Great we needed another GM for the second table"
>feign ignorance of rules as homebrew
>don't know just how bloated the game is and allow everything
>for the first few sessions assume people were just being nice when they said they enjoyed
In hindsight I really lucked out with GMing a bunch of other first timers as we had a pretty good time

Kid. That was so long ago I can barely remember when I started DMing.