I try to find some common interest with each kid. With my oldest it’s been the easiest because he seems to like most things I do (reading, camping, games). My daughters have been more challenging. Sometimes I get the feeling that my daughter who is just 2 years younger than my son doesn’t like things my son likes simply because my son likes it. She seems to be growing out of that though.
But yeah, it’s been fun that he likes D&D. The hardest part is he gets disappointed when we can’t just spend our entire evenings/weekends playing D&D. I get it, it’s fun, but we have other things that have to happen too!
Check out either the Starter Set or the Essentials Kit. Both have mini versions of what you need to be a player and both have highly rated adventures.
I’ve played the one from the Starter Set (Lost Mines of Phandevler) and it’s a good one for new players and New DMs.
It has everything you need, you dont need to own the DMG or Monster Manual.
Yeah, I have the Essentials kit and we’ve been playing through that adventure. Lost Mines of Phandelver was the first campaign I ever DM’d. It’s a good one!
I actually was frustrated by that one. It may have been the DM not setting up our inciting incident very well but might’ve been my character not meshing with the story, which I didn’t know at character creation.
Our first-time DM requested we all have a bit of backstory and motivation. My character had a single father who was screwed over by a shifty business partner and lost everything and had to scrounge to give me a good upbringing. My motivation was to get enough gold to set him up for a comfy life as my way of thanking him.
When we got to the magical forge, my character honestly was ready to seize control of it and start an independent micronation inside the mountain using its powers and make tons of money. I think half the party was pretty much on the same page as me, we didn’t care about the character we rescued, but I could tell that the DM and the player who had helped the DM set up the module were getting frustrated so I just played along like I was “supposed” to.
Yeah, it’s hard when one person wants to go “off script” and others don’t. As a DM I don’t mind that, but I try to keep an eye on other players to see who isn’t having fun. When you’re lucky, you can find some sort of middle ground where everyone’s happy.
I think the DM instigated that because my clan were mostly tinkerers and/or Artificers, so I asked if we saw the Tinkerfoot sigil on any of the armor strewn about or otherwise, indicating my family had worked with the forge in the past and he said yes, you see it, so my character felt they had a family claim to it. I let myself get roped back into the script though, wasn’t a sore loser, but it felt against my motivations.
So, I’m already planning my next mini-campaign. Looking for suggestions.
Our existing campaign is in a country that’s at a standstill/“Cold War” after the Waste War that lasted 100 years. Obviously the other country is Bad Guys
This campaign is at the origins of the Waste War and the party is part of the Bad Guys; we are showing that Bad Guys consider the other side bad guys and they are actually on the side of good. They are being contracted to retrieve a magical object from the desert. The desert folk are loosely aligned with Bad Guys and this artifact, contained in a laboratory within a sand walker (a mobile small town essentially, think Jawas in Star Wars) was lost in a storm and a distress beacon was just detected. We have word that Good Guys have dispatched a party to retrieve the magical object and Bad Guys are being sent to get to it first.
I plan to have Bad Guys encounter Good Guys, but I want additional conflict. I was thinking something from the desert has invaded the sand walker and the researchers are also in danger, maybe they’re barricaded inside a room. I’m also hoping for Bad Guys and Good Guys to have more than one encounter, so their Wizard might have a Teleport spell to zoop them away, but that’s a high-level spell so I don’t want to abuse it. I’m not sure how else to have them meet, likely fight, and remain a rivalry throughout.
I’m looking at maybe 4-7 sessions depending how they play it.
I already know what the artifact is and I’m working to construct a Good Guys party that will be a hard encounter in a skirmish, hopefully not deadly, but consistently a threat.
A rival party would be good drama, but I’ve never really thought of a good way to do it without totally forcing my player’s hands.
Have them meet the other party before the adventure starts, in a place where it’s socially unacceptable to kill them, then have them be on the periphery of the adventure?
Have them all belong to the same international org where killing fellow members is a no-no?
Could be something where they’re forced to work together to save the trapped people, but then there’s still the eventual conflicting goals and probably a fight to the death. I might have to scrap Good Guys altogether, but I don’t want to!
You could have them show up to places just after the other party left, with some story about what the other team did (not sure if you want the other team to have done something bad, or maybe there is a hint that they discovered some important clue and left quickly)
I like this and sorry I mistook this excellent part of the suggestion from @Woodrow. Kind of an “always one step ahead” thing.
I want the opposing party to be “evil” but not “actually evil”. I’m not going to have them murder all the civilians for example, but they might not help them at all, they are allied to an opposing force in wartime!
I might roll some luck checks to see if, say, a clearly useful item/clue was just snatched away before they could get to it. Or maybe they roll high enough on Investigation and they do find the thing was concealed under a pile of something. Would have to be careful to actually reward the players and not take away critical clues but it would give a sense of urgency.
Would be fun to find some things that the “other” party could do that they would see as good, but your players would see as evil. Like helping find escaped slaves, or beating up the local gang, creating a power struggle (chaos) in the town.
Yeah. I’m going to have to be careful about that - the world belongs to my partner but I don’t want to give them too much information, I want to surprise them too.
The Bad Guys (Player Characters for this session) party is moreso the country of oppression but the Good Guys country is not too accepting of refugees, so I might do something along those lines - at minimum, arresting some refugees or something.
It’s interesting though, the desert they’d eventually collide in (or at least be near each other) is technically Bad Guy territory so I’m thinking on how to get Good Guys to… I could probably ask if there can be a border town on the arid zone abridging Bad Guy territory. Maybe the refugees are the ones who detected the beacon and were taken for questioning and gave up information .
An idea I had that I never implemented:
The party is hired to rescue a kidnapped kid. Maybe they get the job through the rivals, before they consider them rivals
The party approaches this place through the “front door” fights lots of monsters, survives lots of traps. If the final fight is going really badly maybe one of the rivals comes in and saves their life.
After the final fight, they go to where the kid is - and the rivals are there, having gone in the back door. The kid is being soothed by a gentle charming member of the rivals. The rivals will claim the rich reward
What are they going to do, kill the people who rescued this kid? Plus the party is beat up and low on spell slots, the rivals are at full health. They have to watch the rivals walk out with their prize.
Maybe rather than a front door / back door there are two equivalent paths, but whichever one the party takes they make so much noise they attract the monsters from the other track, clearing it for the others to go in.
This is based heavily on New Mutants #53-54
The biggest problem with this is this game should be fun for the players. It shouldn’t be “Ha Ha, I’m the DM and I fooled you - suck it!”. Maybe there is something in my idea you can use that would be more fun than taunting.
I think it depends on what makes them “rivals”? If your characters are actually role-playing (and if not then throw them the eff out) then their decision to literally kill each other depends entirely on whether or not they are murderers.
But yes, taking the treasure away at the last minute is kind of annoying. Reminds me a bit of old TV shows that always have to end where they started.
IIRC, my brother ran twin campaigns in his school, where he planned on the parties eventually meeting over a treasure. But then the evil campaign when too evil and died.
Hmmm. If it’s a key plot point, then you sort of half to give them an answer. But you could delay the solution. Give them a few clues, lead them down wrong paths, introduce an npc to help or “help”.
Oh, I see your rivals are at war. Yeah, I think that’s interesting. Just make them fight over limited resources?
Yeah, thanks all, I have easily several months to think on this (and build out a bunch of improvised/stolen maps in Roll20…)
I might have them have to work together against a larger threat, some kind of sand wurm like creature. I like the idea of the rivals being empathetic saviors and the party retrieving the artifact. The artifact is key for them to get. It’s a magical crystal being developed to provide magic, of a sort, in a country where magic and the gods are dying off, leading 100 years later into Main Campaign 2 of a dystopian techno-magical world.
As @Woodrow said I’ll get it to a point where the rivals are beaten up and you could basically finish them off without problem, but they are ready to simply leave.
1 Like