This past Thanksgiving weekend, I had my first experience with playing Dungeons & Dragons in the classic role of the Dungeon Master. My D&D experience is not much, just a few games with some friend at college during 3rd edition. Recently I became interested in playing as a way of spending time with my kids and encouraging their creativity. I looked into it and heard good things about the new 5th edition that made it sound like a good fit for me, so I picked up the starter set as a good introduction and, importantly, having a prepared module ready to run. Being with family during the holiday got the numbers up to four players plus me as DM so that we could run the adventure without having to modify things. With that we were set for our first adventure.
None of my players really have any previous experience with D&D. One (Gamer) has extensive experience playing digital RPGs and so has the best grasp of how things should generally proceed. Another (Reader) has read a lot of fantasy novels and knows something of how stories go. The last two (Goldfish and Foghorn) are under the age of ten and have only a minimal grasp of the world, so I knew adventuring with them would be unpredictable.
Rather than getting bogged down in character creation, I made out all the character sheets, worrying about the nitty gritty of stat value assignment and spell selection, and let players got to choose the more important role-playing aspects of their characters, like race, class, and background. I was limited to the four classes and races outlined in the free PDF available online, so nothing strange was allowed, but I did make adjustment for Reader who wanted her human wizard to have cat ears and tail, and to wield a sword. She gained keen smell and shortsword proficiency, which I felt wouldn't be too unbalanced.
We ended up with pretty standard archetypes: a human rogue Inigo Tabor (Gamer), a human/cat wizard Nissa Olem (Reader), a wood elf fighter/archer Olva Moonsdotter (Goldfish), and a hill dwarf cleric/healer Carlita Runeheim (Foghorn). There was no real tank character, though Carlita did an OK job in that role. We also had some interesting role-play elements to flesh out the environment. Reader came late to the game and so didn't have her own character setup before the first session, so I gave her a human fighter to play until I could make up her character. It worked out well as it meant her character could "hide her power" until she needed to reveal it later in the game (after we had decided what that power was). Carlita and Olva had known each other for a long time before this adventure and were good friends. Olva worked as an explorer and cartographer and wanted to make a map of her travels round Phandalin, which gave Goldfish a job to do during gameplay and a reason for being on the adventure. Inigo was a smuggler who had seen too much and was on the run from his last employer. I'm looking for ways to work that into future episodes.
As a first-time DM, I played the rules pretty loose and adhered to the first golden rule: "story and fun trump rules as written." This made for some memorable, but unplanned, occurrences that will have unexpected repercussions as the story progresses. With that understood, we began playing . . .
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