Leveling Up As An Inexperienced DM

I still consider myself an inexperienced DM. The 4th Edition campaign that I’m currently running has just passed twenty adventures and is the longest campaign I’ve ever run.  Hell, it was the longest game I’ve ever run when it hit ten adventures back in May.

Years ago, while still in high school, we had a regular gaming group that got together every Saturday to hang out and play games.  As a result we went through many different tabletop RPGs run by various people, and somewhere in there I ran a World of Darkness game that was probably horrendously bad.  It coined several inside jokes with our group, the most popular of which was the existence of square werewolves who can take up an entire elevator all on their own.  At least one  of the adventures went really well, but the game was short lived at only 4 or 5 adventures and that was probably a good thing.  After this I attempted to run another short-lived World of Darkness game, the concept of combining the Vampire, Mage, and Werewolf game rules was very appealing to me but was honestly too large of an undertaking for me at the time, especially being a rookie GM.

It wasn’t until college that I had any excuse to run my own D&D game. Dave’s campaigns were always the staple of our gaming and when he went to college we had two years where we played games other than D&D or a continuation of Dave’s campaign world that our friend The O ran.  It happened that in the first few months of college I found myself with one experienced D&D player (my future wife) and three or four new players that were really excited to play their first game of D&D.  I can’t remember exactly what went through my head while preparing my first D&D campaign back in the spring of 2002, but the general concept I held onto was that the party would be following in the footsteps of an old group of heroes that had adventured years before them.  I ran this first game for five or six adventures, all of which were pretty good quality from what I remember, but the game fizzled out due to college scheduling and impending breaks.  What I ended up with from this first game was quite surprising: I had actually created a world with a very detailed back story that had just as much content to it as the adventures the PCs had gone through and experienced.  I essentially found myself with twice the amount of content that I’d actually used in game.

One summer later, we all were back at college, and I found myself in the seat as a slightly more experienced DM.  I decided to use the same game world, but moved the action to an new and unknown part of the continent that was only hinted at in my previous game.  The same players were present, and many of the inexperienced ones had become truly excellent after only one game, but what I found was that many of the same problems still plagued my DMing efforts and the game.  This campaign lasted a similar amount of time, only about five adventures, before it too fizzled out and faded away.  It was done in by the fact that out of five players and me as the DM, three guys and three girls, all of us were dating another person in the group and one of those couples had just broken up.  The nail hadn’t fully been put in the coffin for the game, but summer break arrived and it was simply time for it to come to an end.  After this one of the players who we had introduced to D&D wanted to take a stab at running D&D, and arguably achieved greater success than I had.  In fact, I went back to run a single adventure of his game at a later date that I feel was a bit amateur and probably gave him a bad taste with regards to letting others DM in his game.  I’m glad that I realized it at the time, but it was also a very bitter pill to swallow that someone I’d introduced to the game had already achieved greater success at running a game then I had.

Flash forward to a little over a year ago, Dave had announced that his 3.5 campaign would come to an end with the release of 4th Edition, and we found ourselves with over twelve players interested in trying out the new rules.  What sealed the deal for me attempting to run another game was when we received an early copy of the first WotC module for 4E, Keep on the Shadowfell.  We wanted to play it and review it before 4E was even released so I found myself thrust into the DM position again, and on my birthday no less!  What resulted was actually a very fun session that reignited my desires to become a good DM again.  I’d never tried to run a published D&D adventure before, but a few years earlier I ran a one-shot of the “End of Paradise” adventure from the d20 Call of Cthulhu book which ended up going very well, back then I should have taken the hint that I needed more practice with running a game and less practice with world building!  My success at running 4E was most likely in part a result of the ease of the new system on DMs, but I believe it was also largely due to running a published adventure / dungeon and getting a feel for how things should be done.

Currently I am getting ready to take my campaign into the Paragon tier of play, with over twenty adventures behind us, and I still find myself with some of the same concerns I had years ago.  I still find myself second guessing certain decisions, or hitting a brick wall when trying to design an adventure or brainstorm a plot arch.  The difference now is that I have a wider set of tools to draw on to help with running my game.

This campaign takes place in the same world that I created back in college, expanded to include a lot more of the world including the locations from both of my previous games, the difference now is that I’m running the game hundreds of years after my previous adventures.  One of the best tools that I’ve had to help with planning my game is the fact that Dave is also running a campaign in my game world, but his takes place only a handful of years after my last college game ended.  His game has been in the paragon tier for a few adventures already, but what I’m finding is that if I’m ever strapped for ideas I now have a whole new campaign to draw inspiration and ideas from.  The coolest part to me is that Dave is effectively building up the history of my current campaign, a history which I can reveal to my players in as big or small chunks as is needed.  Oh, and we’ve thrown in some obscure methods of time travel, just to see what happens!

If you’re a full-fledged newbie DM, or if you’re like me and still feel like one, I recommend you check out Newbie DM.  He has lots of great advice for people like us, and he’s a great guy on top of that!