Planning a DND Game from Scratch

Hey Everybody,

So over the course of planning around 10 games I've unintentionally came up with a system that I wanted to share. Hopefully this will cut some of the initial planning time for new DM's who are trying to start creating their own story lines from scratch. I've found their to be on average seven main points every story should hit before the players sit down at the table. I try to plan these in order, Environment, Story, Maps, Characters, Monsters, Traps, and Loot.

First off is the environment, jungle, forest, urban or anything else, knowing your environment before planning a game helps shape the story more easily that you would believe. The setting and story are hand in hand. Which leads into step two creating your story.

Your story is entirely based on the concept you want to convey, I usually prefer an emotion as a center focus because its generally easier to keep the main theme. It's extremely beneficial to know your players while planning a game because you can cater to their general mindsets. The story line I've been planning revolves around the setting of Disney and the emotion of fear. This allows me to pull from a large array of environments and also use the players previous conception against them. The story is your bread and butter of your game but its best to keep it flexible. I prefer to plan the personalities of the NPC and to keep a general situation for the driving plot. This way the players can interact and the NPC can act logically and without information the players are fully aware of, this creates story depth and more realism.

The third step is maps, main goal here is options. Linear games are frustrating to players because it limits their options in a game based on creativity. I like to try to situate my players in maps that have at minimum two options of ways to go. Its best to stick to around three to four options think more mansion than strait cave. Given the opportunity players will surprise you with their out of the box thinking, and immediate willingness to split up. From the DM's chair handling two or three skirmishes between monsters and players vs. team fight, skirmishes are always easier to handle. I've also noticed that in smaller fights players are more likely to be creative verses just hitting the guy the party is hitting.

Four step characters, we went over this a little bit in story, but to elaborate its best to give your characters a bit of personality even if its very general stuff. The more pinnacle to the story the more personality they should have. Its good to give them a few memorable ticks or features to give them a sense of realism.

Monsters, best I can say here is to use them to teach your players some tactics they're lacking. If they never combat maneuver, spend a encounter showing them how awesome it can be. Have a wizard who complains about not being powerful enough, use a comparable wizard and use good tactics. This is the best way I've found to teach players. I also would like to caution you to not always make them human and dumb, they can be cleaver, they can be vicious. Only good rule of thumb, never make something strong enough to one hit a player, no easier way to make them feel cheated than instant death. Unless your monster crits, then throw them around like rag dolls.

Last thing to consider is traps and loot, planning these two things before the game and writing them down can solve arguments in an instant. They also helps to minimize the amount of things to adlib. If you have a player who feels like you're intentionally trapping them repeatedly or one who feels like they don't get enough loot, showing a list of concrete areas they didn't check or walked right into will quickly resolve the issue.

Feel free to go above or beyond these steps or try to add more, hopefully this will act as a decent basis to work off of, for anyone interested I also created a online website shop for the game I'm currently running. If you want to use it for reference check it out at duanelouispierce.wix.com/boatsinthedungeon.

Game on,

            Duane