How did your first time GMing go? and for those who haven't...

I was thinking having them being taken by human traffickers and locked up until sale in an old abandoned church crypt. I don't know how unique or interesting that start will be but it's one I have in mind.

Go for it, but don't railroad too hard, let the players have their silly moments.

I did a session of BFRP a few years ago. TPK'd in the first ten minutes. My players weren't too mad since I let them try again, things picked up later when they got into the dungeon proper.

>>Is it hard not to over plan? I'm making a setting right now and I have no idea if I'm putting to

Everyone and every group is a little different. I honestly think the best session I ever did was railroaded but a lot of people don't like it. My advice is to have something a little linear at the beginning with the openness coming from player choices. As you get better at improvising, you can start coming up with stuff on the fly a lot better.

I like thinking of five or six different locales (for a 3 hour session) with fifteen or so characters per area that the players can change their destiny. It doesn't have to be huge overarching plots, it could be something simple like they need help breaking up a rowdy fight in a bar or need help IN a rowdy fight in a bar. Then it comes down to finding a way to work it all together.

It's different than a movie or book but if you think of story structure, something you hear a lot is how it's moving the plot forward. This bar fight could be just to show you what kind of characters your PCs are or it could be a way to gain some companions in which case you can flesh out the people in the bar as you go along. It could be a situation where the bartender might let everyone sleep outback for breaking up the fight but they overhear something they're not supposed to during the night.

You can figure out how all these little things accumulate to a big thing later. The important thing is not to think in terms of: I made the beginning and the end, the players make the middle. Sometimes your BBEG can get killed early and you need to be prepared for it. It takes a great deal of improvisational story-telling to do it well but never feel like you are trying to wrestle control back or salvage things the players did. It should feel more like you are sewing together something you personally find interesting through their meandering murderhobo antics.

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Hopefully it doesn't feel like that. I'm using it to set up and bring them to the first main city where I really only have some plot hooks planned out from there, just want to let them know what the worlds like and a place they can come back to or explore

Classic mistakes:
>Overprepared, pages of quotes and narratives that I used about 10% of
>Gave players too much freedom

But it went well since I adapted quickly to my players fucking around. Still playing the same campaign two years later, nearing the end.

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that's awesome! what's the setting like? I'm glad to know sometimes it works out even if you make mistakes.

This is an amazing bit of information, I'mma kepp this in mind

100% homebrewed world. I did the mistake of making a whole world, with big cities, history, and religion and all kinds of shit before we even started.

The bad thing about doing it like that is that it's hard to improvise locations.
The good thing is that I feel like I really know the world at this point. I've actually gotten several compliments from my players saying that they're amazed how I'm able to quickly improvise characters and situations during sessions, and that's probably all thanks to all the ground work I did early on.

The finer points and fluidity of the session were non-existent, but the overall story of the night shall be never forgotten among those who were there. The name Carol never fails to get a hearty laugh even five years later.

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>they're amazed how I'm able to quickly improvise characters and situations during sessions

I was totally expecting the next line to be "and that's probably because I had several pages of backstory for each of them" , but seriously I'm glad it worked out for you, good to know that I should leave wiggle room with the world

Imma need a story of this , who's Carol?

one big thing i've changed about my preparations during this time is to make things modular. Prepare locations, NPCs, scenarios, whatever. But prepare them in a way that makes them adaptable to different situations.

It's made the game so much better and it always seems like I've prepared A LOT of shit to my players. little do they know that I simply adapt alot of stuff around the choices they make and by listening to them while they try to figure shit out by themselves.
It's super rewarding to players when they feel like they ALMOST figure shit out, not understanding that I simply make last minute changes depending on what they say to eachother.
Makes them feel like geniuses and true heroes without messing up my main story.

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Ran a game of FFd20 for my nephews last night out of nowhere, no prep time outside of character creation. Did a variant of the Chaos Shrine module to give us all a chance to get to know the game.
There was one moment where things got a little scary when Garland got some great rolls and almost OHKO'd the Ronso Monk. They're looking forward to an eventual rematch against him though, so I'd say it went well enough.

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Good to keep in mind! Lucky for your players , having such a good GM

oh stop it you!

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I had definitely tried playing before DMing though not way too much. I had barely 4 sessions under my belt before I attempted to DM. I still had way too little experience in the system however and I never had another attempt at DMing until after our group transitioned over to 5e.

Last time I DMed was for a homebrew science fantasy 5e game. It was a blast but due to time schedules the campaign fizzled out before it went anywhere super meaningful. Still had fun with it though.

>have a play by post background, get hooked on the setting
>meet with everybody personally before the game to work out their backgrounds for 2 hours
>thinking that mechanics are too hard for the players, handle everything to do with the charsheets myself
>have a swell idea of introducing everyone by essentially cutscenes which are then tied together into a single scene
>one player is taking all the spotlight, start to realize I went wrong somewhere
>visibly bored faces
>quick break, try to wrap this stuff up
>everything going wrong, they're off the planned path, don't want to railroad
>quick bullshit improvisation which somehow worked
>mechanics go to hell, I barely remember them myself
>feel like the worst shit in the universe but continued

Some shits and giggles two more times, by 4th and 5th session we finally got some fun and memorable moments although it wasn't anything impressive, especially obligatory 'lel natural 20'.

Yeah I got better.

It was everyone's first go at dnd, there were to be three players, but the rogue was the kinda guy who is eternally late to all things so we started without him. Pal B made a halfling fighter, while pal D created a seedy old man human wizard. They were tasked with investigated a manor of a nearby lord, of which no one has been seen entering or leaving for the past few weeks or so. Turns out the place was taken over by a necromancer, and there is undead all over the place. The dynamic duo first encounter a group of possessed recently-turned-into-zombies wearing chef/servant gear wielding kitchen knives and such in a large, ornate dining room. After a short spat, they kill all the cooks and continue into the next hall, where they hear some sobbing coming from a storage room. Enter Carol, the young kitchen maid, and sole survivor of the necromancer's take over. D immediately begins flirting with the distressed girl, while B manages to get her to calm down and tell them what happened. After that, she tells them that they must save her father.

"Where would we find him?"
"He works in the kitchen just down the hall from here"

Not wanting to tell her they murdered the fuck out of her possessed father, they convince her it's too dangerous for that, and the best course of action is to take out the necromancer first. She agrees and joins them on their quest. Throughout their way to the lords chamber through combat and exploration, the general vibe of D continuing to be a creepy old man and B the suave young fighter continues. D and B get into some verbal spats ooc about who is going to "get" Carol after all is said and done.

(1 outta ~3, cont...)

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Eventually they all make it to the final room where the necromancer awaits, and before combat D and B agree whoever lands the killing blow to the necromancer shall win Carol. Necrodancer has some goons they have to kill before getting to him, and third player, J, finally arrives. He had been captured and possessed by Necro man and the party is forced to non-lethally knock him out of it. Finally they get around to the Necro boy himself, and D the wizard manages to chip off the last of his health. Not wanting weird shit to happen, I decided to give the boss a second phase, where his body and the bodies of his minions explode and coalesce into a massive flesh golem. This is merely delaying the inevitable, however, and at this point J has joined in the 'who wants to win a waifu' competition. After a while the flesh golem is on its last legs and lm trying to find a way out of this romantic mess. I decided to have the golem rush over to Carol, pick her up, and attempt to crush her. Golem botches the crushing, and so quickly Carol unsheathes a large knife from her apron, and stabs the golem in the eye, dealing the mortal blow. Since the rules of the 'competition' were whoever dealt the killing blow 'won' Carol, l had successfully blue balled my players.

During the fight, the wall into the Lord's secret treasure vault had been smashed in, and so the players went to go claim their spoils. Before they can begin rummaging around the piles of gold and treasure chests, Carol gasps loudly, and begins running back to the dining room, where the party promised to take her after taking care of the Necromancer. The smart thing to do at this point would've been to grab as much loot as possible and hoof it out of the manor, but instead all three fools dropped what they were holding and ran after her. She knew the manor much better than they, however, and managed to get to the kitchen before the party.

(1 outta ~3, cont...)

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D, J, and B burst into the room to find Carol on her knees, staring down onto her father's corpse. J and B are silent, and D decides this is the perfect time to walk up and say some cheesy pick up line. Carol snaps and charges the salty wizard in a blind rage and continues to nearly kill the old man with her kitchen knife. B is at this point attempting to pry her off of D, which he eventually does, and J has pulled up a chair to watch the show. Once Carol had been removed from the severely hemorrhaging wizard, B holds her close, and begins to calm her down with soothing words. Just before she completely regains composure, however, dickthief rogue J comes up with the brilliant plan to attempt a stealth grope of Carol while she's in B's arms. Obviously this fails to go unnoticed and Carol leaps on top of him and proceeds to stab him to death.

B decided, over the death of his shitty friend he met about an hour ago, that Carol has gone too far, and that she could not be brought back to the land of the reasonable. He swiftly hefts his long sword down across her spine, killing Carol. With Carol dead, D says some weird ass 'body still warm' type of bullshit, so as B the halfling picks her up to go bury her, he rolls poorly on an athletics check, loses his balance, and stumbles backwards crashing into a window causing Carol's corpse to fall out down into the moat below. D and B then quietly watched as several crocodile type monsters swam over to where the body had crashed in the water.

That was the end of Carol, as well as the end of the session.

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>Didn't actually definitively know the rules (enough to run basic encounters but not enough to make informed judgement calls on specific issues), basically ran an incredibly dumbed down first few sessions with houserules galore
>Zero self-confidence, resulting in players getting to define how the game was run (e.g. the aforementioned houserules) and doing shit they really shouldn't have been given an option to do
>Improv ran wild at points and ended up derailing my own sessions with fluff that had no business being in the campaign
>this all started a month ago, last session was two nights ago
I'm...still a work in process

dear god that's an amazing story. and one hell of a way to start a campaign

...

It was a hell of a way to end a campaign as well, seeing as J decided dnd wasnt for him afterwards, B soon moved off to college, and D being an indecisive fool asked to try a new character.

As such, others were found, and a different, less memorable game began.

>>Didn't actually definitively know the rules (enough to run basic encounters but not enough to make informed judgement calls on specific issues), basically ran an incredibly dumbed down first few sessions with houserules galore
thats the most retarded fucking thing ive ever read

Went ok but I was tired as fuck and didn't really have anything planned except for loose details and a few created characters for an encounter.

The first half was ok. I introduced them to the overarching plot. I had a lot of fun basically throwing them into the realm of runescape where said pregen NPCs literally wildy lure them
The lure was succesful but permaDM bro was a smart asshat and subsequently they fucked my shit and steamrolled the encounter. The rest of the half of the session was pretty meh after that. Mostly because I was tired and secondly because they didn't actually go towards the fucking objective(they decided to camp in the middle of wildy...nothing of interest happens there other than a lot of annoying ass encounters)

Eventually they reach the black castle but by then we just called it. It was a pretty short session we started pretty late

I just threw together a random dungeon and had them do dungeon crawl. Went great.

One player showed up late with an incomplete character sheet which wasted 40 minutes because all his friends wanted to play with him. He didn't end up playing and left without a word midsession anyway.

The most outspoken player before the game refused to interact with any NPCs because a dwarf got shitty when his seedy arse tiefling bard whose defining character trait was "he's gay" talked to their kid.

None of them wanted to interact with all the NPCs and story hooks offered to them - good thing I planned on blowing it up anyway! Half of them nearly died and we ended the session with the roof collapsing on two of them.

7 months later and only one person of the original group is still here, and we're all having an amazing time. I'm glad I started DMing.

Improv clusterfuck and a half with like eight players on a shoddy homebrew system and ill-defined homebrew setting that ended with everyone in a pretty good mood. There was lots of laughing at the end, and only one minor snare in which a guy sperged the fuck out that I was railroading them when I was really giving them a lot of (way too much) operational freedom. The second session lost like half of the players (one of the returning players took up his character and a leaver's character and managed to roleplay better than she did) and gained one new one and was a lot more refined in structure. Was purely noncombat and everyone still had fun trying to navigate some sort of weird anomalous forest and puzzled out an interaction with an extradimensional probe. Haven't met for a session since, but I would like to try some more stuff out after a complete overhaul to my system (which is really uninspired, honestly).

>Find some random map and give it some lore
>Give gimmicks to each room
>Players hate everything
>One dude even broke off the group thanks to my DMing.

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that's rough man, did you get better or give up DMing?

It was a very beer-and-pretzels game of 3.5 that ended up having 11 people so hardly anything got done and combat was a clusterfuck. Still went okay because everyone was too drunk to notice how shit it was.

That might be worst case of murder hobos I've ever read about. I loved every sentence of it.

It's so good someone could steal it and post it on /r/dndgreentext for sweet sweet karma. But I made the thread so I shall not, would be rude.

You sicken me. Begone.

I sicken myself why do you think I'm here

>Decide to try to run Golden Sky Stories (Jap trpg meant to be a My Neighbor Totoro/Carebears style magical slice of life game)
>Post signups to private RP group
>Stereotypical weeb shows up
>Think he's one of the hand-selected, so tolerate his deep awkwardness pre-game
>Try to gently correct when he has his character destroy property in an opening scene rampage in the quiet little town
>Back off when he ignores since I don't want to offend
>they surely picked him for the group for a reason
>That Guy proceeds to interrupt & direct literally everyone
>ignores me & the other players when they shoot him down
>Oblivious when I tell him it's not his turn to speak
>Am not experienced enough to know I should bring the game to a screeching halt & tell him to either shape the fuck up or get out
>Am socially petrified when TG starts making awkward comments about the founder's wife/her character
>Founder steps in & starts hardcore trolling TG, making it his character's life mission to ruin TG's everything
>The other characters are able to more or less play unrestricted at this point, though they are sometimes interrupted by TG
>Game ends more or less okay if we discount TG's antics
>players flee, leaving TG, founder, wife & me in the chat
>TG gleefully chats about the game & brags about how often he plays JTRPGs
>Especially MAID, his fav
>Tells us about his fondest memory of having a game where it was set in space
>tl;dr: tentacle rape
>finally gets the hint we don't want to talk to him anymore & leaves
>Everyone: "WHO THE FUCK WAS THAT???"
>They are shocked when they find out I only posted it to our group
>it seems like no one else should have been able to get in
>itisamystery.gif
>apologize profusely for not kicking TG out when the weird comments to the wife started
>Founder admits he only signed up to troll me, so he got what he wanted; his wife understands my position; everyone's cool

After a few other attempts I decided TRPG GMing isn't for me. I'm a better player.

I got much better, I made maps for my games and stuff like that tho my encounters are still poor.
I broke off that group anyway and found another group that likes me DMing style.
I really like DMing and DMing is fun when you have players that like what you give to them.

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I'll let you now in a few days..
Do you think it's a reasonable idea to add certain dungeons and stuff from other content into your own homebrew world, currently doing that with stuff from the Yawning Portal and just change the fluff to represent what's going on in my own game.

yeah I think most campaigns do that, just to make easier plot hooks

my first time as GM was running a published adventure, and the PCs did something that wasn't covered in the module, so I winged a reaction,
They all liked the published adventure fine, but they really liked the bit I came up with off the top of my head, so the next adventure, also a published adventure (because I'd shelled out $20 for 3 linked adventures and I was gonna run all three damnit!) I added more impromptu stuff.
3rd session I added even more.

The only thing those hobos were really trying to murder was that puss

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