DnD my first time playing and I was DM.....

[rpspartin]

Note this is mostly a story that I felt like sharing.

Well A couple of months ago I got around to playing DnD with a couple of friends. 2 of them knew the game fairly well and the rest of us didn't. We knew the EXTREME basics and that is it. Well I got picked to be the DM by some cruel twist of fate. After being given a whopping 1&1/2 hours to prepare we set off on the adventure. It was so basic I kinda felt bad. King has job - they go to dungeon and do job. I had a couple of basic story elements that I could work on later but other then that it seemed EXTREMELY cookie cutter. Well I am bringing this up now because last weekend I played with the same group of people ( with another new guy ) and because of my nack for being on the escapist for WAY to much time then I should and reading checking for traps, I was ( according to the players ) A MUCH better DM. Hell it even had a real story unlike the cookie cutter from last time.

For discussion what was your first few times playing the game like ?

 

[child of lileth]

My friend always told me being a DM is insanely time consuming and difficult just from all the possibilities you can play with when you do it. I never played D&D, but I always kinda wanted to look into it.

The closest I play is the Queen's Blade combat books.

 

[Angry Caterpillar]

I've not played yet. Currently trying to grab some friends to form a group, already got shot down by one. Oh well.

Good job improving your DM skills, anyways.

 

[Naheal]

My first was back in 2nd edition (Wow, I think I just got dated a bit), I was introduced to D&D by playing a mage. Aside from the one person in the group that said that it was too complicated for my first character, everyone else was fine with it..

Turned out well, too. I've been the mage of the group for years now.

 

[Vhite]

I always wanted to play it but there is no way for me besides games like Baldurs gate.

 

[voetballeeuw]

I tried to play DnD once, wasn't for me though. Congratulations on your success, though.

 

[Aerodyamic]

My first was back in 2nd edition (Wow, I think I just got dated a bit), I was introduced to D&D by playing a mage. Aside from the one person in the group that said that it was too complicated for my first character, everyone else was fine with it..

Turned out well, too. I've been the mage of the group for years now.

At least you dated yourself; I'm not sure anyone else is interested.
*cue laugh track*

OT: I played 2nd Ed. too, and loved 3rd, for the much simpler (and completely cribbed from Palladium Games) combat system. I've given 4th a pass, though.

 

[Meander112]

Congratulations on running a good game! If you're running a 3.5e game then you could do worse than picking up a (at 50% discount) copy of the Shackled City Adventure Path. Between it's two covers you get an entire campaign, from 1st to 20th level. I've been running it for over a year and it's the first time that any game I've ran has lasted longer than two games and everyone is having a great time.

 

[zen5887]

Nice work man,DMing isn't for everyone.

I play weekly and I think I prefer being on the other side of the DM screen, something about writing a plot and a world and seeing how the characters work within it.

 

[Eumersian]

If you're ever stuck, tell give the players a reason to mull about for maybe 10-15 minutes. You'll be bound to come up with some ideas by then.

 

[Living Contradiction]

Yi. You'd never played before and got elected to DM the first time out with ninety minutes of prep time. That's a bit like taking an Amish teenager to an urban center, placing him in the driver's seat of a Volkswagen, filling the rest of the car with a street gang, and shouting "To the rave, my good man!" (Congrats on making your way through it and sticking with it. May you take much delight in driving your players nuts.)

I got my first exposure to D&D at the tender age of nine with the basic box set of the original D&D and after a year or so, my friends started to ask me why I kept thinking up all kinds of weird stories. I told them about the red box with dice and neat stuff in that I'd gotten for Christmas and they were utterly blown away, partially because this was back in the eighties and D&D was EVIL. Little did I know that someone with even more free time than I had on my hands had decided to produce a small comic proclaiming that D&D was a gateway to joining occult conspiracies and that the only way to free yourself from the tentacles of roleplaying was to have a public bonfire of gaming paraphenalia while pledging your soul to Christianity. (If anyone had been stupid enough to try and raid one of our gaming evenings in the hopes of finding anything occult, they'd probably stare in wonder at five pre-pubescent boys who could spend twenty minutes debating combat tactics while making penis jokes.)

Anyway, I lent the set to one of them and he came back a week later and said, "Okay, I think I can do this DM thing. Let's give it a shot." Cue fun, late night partying, and insane laughter that didn't stop until we hit the tail end of high school and leveled up our characters to the point where we each had our own town and private economy. We didn't take the game too seriously and if we screwed up, we tried to patch it up as best we could to keep ourselves alive. The DM was invaluable and a true master of making the game move forward. If we spent too much time planning on how to rush into a room, he'd calmly announce that the corridor we were standing in was starting to echo with the sounds of hundreds of tiny feet and we'd quickly pull out our weapons and run before we saw something that would be much more daunting than the ogre on the other side of the door. He was also an ingenous bastard that made traps that were so incredibly elegant, you wound up applauding as your character was reduced to a pile of charred dust (yes, we used resurrection a LOT. Shut up. It was fun.)

I will always look back at that gaming with fondness, remembering moments of wonder and horror alike (including one particular moment where the entire party paused and uttered "Holy shit." in perfect synch after the description of a room jammed full of dauntingly vicious monsters. Much laughter ensued.) and I hope that you and your friends get as much of a kick out of playing as we did.