Adventure Prep, Special Session: Introducing Newbies to D&D

Since PM posted his first ‘Perspective‘ post yesterday, I thought it was the perfect timing for posting this Adventure Prep/Response to PM’s post

Next Friday, PM has agreed to get a few friends together and allow me to DM an introductory D&D game. I feel honored to be entrusted a mission so many of us geeks have botched one way or the other… and that is showing D&D to new players without flooding said newbies with too much Crunch!

PM seemed to have been briefly exposed to a GURPS space game a few years ago but it left him more confused than curious about the hobby.

It’s okay PM, Gurps has a tendency to do that… I know, I GMed the damn game for 10 years. But believe me there are ways to ease smoothly into a roleplaying game.

Aside: Heck, if you can handle Descent : Journeys in the Dark and Arkham Horror, I’m not too worried about your eventual grasp of D&D’s mechanics. After this week’s game, if your still interested, I suggest you check out the online rules of the game here. Also have a look at Stupid Ranger’s excellent Orientation 101 series.

My goal for this night is to bury the crunch under enough fluff that you won’t have to worry about rules and mechanics. I want you guys to trust me with the rules and explore the flavour and genre of the game instead.

Aside the second: Essentially, I’ll be applying my own advice from the Forming post.

Along with PM, there’s going to be Vince, one of PM’s friend’s I have yet to meet. There’s also going to be Mike, Franky’s big brother, with whom I played some World of Warcraft. Mike’s played older versions of the game as well as a lot of other games (probably the same ones as Franky) but he feels rusty. Franky will also join us to provide support to the other players and round out the party to an even and iconic 4.

My choice for this evening was to go for something as simple as possible but at the same time close enough to my natural style to allow me to show the game in the most comfortable manner. I choose vanilla D&D 3.5 (i.e. just the core books) because that’s what I mostly play and that’s a game where I can DM a 1st level adventure for a full evening without looking into the Player’s Handbook or the Dungeon Master Guide.

In fact I’m toying with going commando and discard the use of a battle map or any other form of formal tactical representations of the game. I’ll ask what PM wants and decide from there.

As for an adventure, since I want something exceedingly fluffy to distract the players from the rules, I chose to start with Paizo’s 1st Pathfinder adventure ‘Burnt Offering’. While I agree that it’s an overkill for a D&D demo, it’s a great introductory adventure and everything in it is ready-to-play. Plus, if the evening is a success, I’d like to turn this game into a mini-campaign.

In order to allow jumping into the game as fast as possible, I photocopied (in color) the Pregenerated characters (Fighter, Sorcerer, Rogue, Cleric) and plastified each into a neat 3,75” X 8” card. Also, I choose a D&D painted figurine for each character and a full set of polyhedral dice. I put each set of dice and one mini in a ziplock bag.

On Friday evening, I’ll give out a bag and the plastic card, one pencil and a blank sheet of paper and we’ll be ready to start with a short description of the character sheets and the game’s most basic mechanic:

Whenever you attempt an action that has some chance of failure, you roll a twenty-sided die (d20). To determine if your character succeeds at a task you do this:

• Roll a d20.
• Add any relevant modifiers.
• Compare the result to a target number.

If the result equals or exceeds the target number, your character succeeds. If the result is lower than the target number, you fail.

I’ll answer questions for about 5 minutes and then we’ll dive into the adventures of the residents of the Village of Sandpoint.

I hope it will go well. I’m open to suggestions, from both player and DM readers or from the new players themselves.