D Amp;d 5e Dungeon Master 39;s Guide Pdf Download
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The very idea of starting a D&D campaign can feel pretty intimidating. How much stuff do you need to buy? How can you possibly learn all the rules before you start? How long does it take to plan a campaign? Do you need maps and mini-figures?
As this guide may very well be your first entry point to the world of Dungeons & Dragons, let me take this opportunity to give you the single most important piece of advice. No matter what else you learn and add to your personal philosophy, this is the foundation: There is no wrong way to play D&D as long as everyone is having fun. The rules are more like guidelines, than actual "rules."
Generally speaking, the ideal party size is 3 to 5 people (plus you, the DM). Close friends work best, but strangers will do in a pinch. Enemies are a last resort. As you start exploring the books and pre-built campaigns, you'll find that this party size is the benchmark for difficulty, leveling, and rewards. By all means, you can certainly play with more or less people, just know that it will result in more work for you, and most likely less fun for the players.
If you've ever watched streaming D&D, you usually see these large parties of smooth, patient, and highly collaborative characters. These players are actors. They're there to entertain you, and they're making money doing it. Your game will usually not run like these, and that's okay. What makes it great is that it's yours.
Just so you know, there is a way to play D&D with huge groups. It's called the West Marches style. It's pretty neat actually, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's keep it simple. Long story short, just stick to the classic party of four if you can.
It's up to you, the DM, the set what races and classes the players can pick from. If this is your first time behind the DM screen, I highly recommend avoiding homebrew classes and variants. As long as your players pick from the official material, the Players Handbook and any of the supplements (like Xanathar's Guide to Everything), you'll be fine. D&D 5th Edition is very balanced and hard to "break". Wizards of the Coast have done a phenomenal job with that. It's plug-and-play.
5th Edition is designed so you don't need a healer in your party to survive. Characters can heal themselves during short rest by spending "hit dice". These dice are renewed at long rests, and as you level up you get more of them. This gives your players a lot more flexibility in how they compose the party.
If you don't plan on doing a heavy story-driven campaign and just want to kill some bad guys and find the loot, you can try meeting once a month on a Saturday and playing one-shot adventures with whoever comes. Have some pre-built characters in case they forget theirs or bring a friend.
You can run infinite campaigns for years with nothing but these 3 books. Whether you choose hardcover or digital is totally up to you. I prefer the hardcover books because I can slap sticky tabs all over the place for quick reference and they look awesome on my bookshelf. Going digital is cool because you can search, bookmark, and have access anywhere you. Your call, your style.
These 3 books combined on Amazon will run about $95. It's reasonable to ask your friends to pitch in and split the cost. After all, you're going to be doing all the planning and prep work while they get to roll in a few minutes late and jump right into combat.
If you want to go digital, checkout DND Beyond, the official source for digital rulebooks and adventure modules. You'll need to sign in with Twitch to even realize you can buy the material this way, but once you do, you'll also unlock a bunch of killer tools to go along with your content.You can worry about the rest of the books later as you need them. We can help you decide if and when the time is right to expand the library. If you're itching for just one more book to spice things up, I'd recommend Xanathar's Guide to Everything. It's an expansion to the Dungon Master's Guide and includes new spells, subclasses, magic items, backgrounds, and a bunch of other cool stuff. I quite like the "Common Magical Items" - a list of whimsical loot that doesn't affect combat, but rather provides fun role playing opportunities. Like the Cloak of Billowing. It just billows on command, making you look awesome. Or the Wand of Smiles. It makes people smile whether they like it or not. That's it.
Time for the funky dice with all different sides. There are whole sites dedicated to reviewing the vast hoards of dice sets out there. You can spend hundreds on solid metal dwarven-style dice if you want. But you're just getting started, and dice probably isn't the best place to spend your money. You're likely going to be rolling behind a screen anyway, fudging a roll here and there. They don't need to be fancy.
Totally optional of course, but most people want a cool looking screen to hide their notes, books, and whatnot. Your side of the screen is covered with quick reference information that you can keep handy. The official Dungeon Master's Screen runs about $10.
No problem. Keep it really simple and grab the D&D Starter Set for $15 and use Roll20.net to look up monster stats. The Starter Set strips out a lot of really good content from the Dungeon Master's Guide (like how to fill out character sheets, handle leveling up, only has a few classes and races, etc), but is good enough to get the adventure moving and you can use the internet to fill in the gaps. If you're not sure your friends are going to love D&D (don't worry, they will), just start here.
Plus, it comes with one of the best starter adventures, The Lost Mine of Phandelver. Honestly, it's worth buying just for the adventure. It's by far the most loved level 1-5 adventure in the D&D universe.
It is very well organized, has fun mysteries and plot twists, some good villains, a quaint little town that that the party can feel at home in, a nice cast of NPCs, plenty of optional side-quest content, interesting encounters, and reasonably good exploration aspects. Quite frankly, it's as close to perfect as a prewritten adventures come.
The Curse of Strahd is vampire themed, Tomb of Annihilation is a meat-grinder set in a jungle full of undead dinosaurs, Out of the Abyss starts the players captured by dark elves in the Underdark while demons battle for the world, and you should stay away from Storm King's Thunder because its sandbox style campaign is very, very hard for new DMs (or any DM to be honest) to run effectively without getting lost. If you want to kick it old school, check out Tales from the Yawning Portal, a compilation of the most classic dungeons over the last 40 years of D&D, updated for 5th edition.
The Session Zero is a special session with your players. You spend time working on character creation, explaining core rules, answering questions, and covering player backstories. It's an opportunity to explain to your players how you want to run the game, and get their input on what they want out of it.
A good rule of thumb for on-the-fly rulings is to just make the action in question have advantage or disadvantage. Not sure how to adjust stats for shooting a crossbow over your shoulder through a window at a moving target using a mirror? Sounds like disadvantage to me.
Establish your phone policy up front. Trust me, it's a lot less awkward to get ahead of this one than to have to talk to that one guy. I prefer no phones. It means players can't be looking things up online on Roll20 (bummer) but you always worry less about the nitty gritty details and stay "in the game" better.
Have them each come up with a "hook" from their backstory. It can be anything, and as simple as they'd like. "Brolin has a fear of spiders because of childhood incident." or "Maz likes carving sailboats in his freetime." Each of these little facts gives you a chance to weave situations into the story that affect them personally, and provide role-play opportunities. You better be sure Brolin is going to run across some nasty spiders, and perhaps Maz is more equipped to handle a puzzle situation where a stone object is broken and he can craft one out of wood. That kind of thing. Just store these little hooks somewhere. We'll get into tips on organizing your campaign later.
If you're working through a pre-built campaign, I generally recommend reading the entire book end to end before you get started. That's not a big ask for LMOP, but if you plan to run Storm King's Thunder, Out of the Abyss, or another 300 page adventure, it's a decent under taking. Feel free to skim along but make an outline of the key themes and villains early on so you can start to foreshadow details.
Make some notes on 3x5 cards (or note taking app, or whatever you feel comfortable with). Compile the monsters you're pretty sure the party will encounter, sketch out the combat strategies for the various mobs (The Monster's Know is an amazing resource for monster tactics), list your key NPCs and a few details about each. Assemble a few facts/clues/secrets/quests you plan to the party to encounter.
If your players have skipped something important or fun you've worked up, just repurpose it elsewhere. Your NPCs can be pretty interchangeable - that quest doesn't have to come from the militia captain, perhaps there's a rich noble nearby, a mysterious stranger in a tavern, or farmer on the road that will serve the purpose just fine.
Every group is unique. My players love a mix of tactical combat and narrative, "Theater of the Mind" encounters. Because of that, I'll run more important combat sequences on a gridded dry erase mat with miniatures, and the more simple ones narratively. For example, if they're in a 30'x30' square room with 2 orcs and 2 goblins, we don't need to see it. Everyone is in reach of each other, and the party is probably blocking the only way in and out.
You do not need to spend a fortune to make tactical grid combat work. The simplest method is to buy a dry erase game mat and use whatever you've got around the house as markers. Chess pieces, legos, small action figures and toys, it doesn't matter too much. If you want to put a little time in, there are some awesome Papercraft minis you can get into. Print off a bunch of these mobs, tent them up and you're good to go.
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