Sunday, May 19, 2013

New game preparation

So tomorrow is the character generation session for my new OD&D game I'll be running. This will be the first time outside of a one-shot, and a short lived play-by-post game that I'll be DMing for people that aren't my original group.

I'm expecting this game to be a little different from my normal group, since they're mostly a group of some of my best friends, whom really barely even understand the basics of D&D (or CoC when we play it), who basically just like kicking back with friends, killing some monsters, and creating havoc everywhere they go. Now, I of course expect quite a bit of that too, but I know I am running for people who understand the game, and most who have been in the hobby for quite a while longer than I!

So what do you do to prepare for a new campaign, and especially for new people?

Myself, I'm going to try and get some ideas from them when we're creating characters about what we would prefer, story driven, hex crawling, dungeon delving, and of course, all will be included either way, but what they'd like as the main focus.

I'm also working on typing up my house-rules, which I'm realizing I have never done before, so I'm excited to see myself what all my changes are from the RAW (rules as written).

I'm creating a campaign world. I've never done a lot of world building, but I always have a rough idea. I like to improvise a lot as a DM, partly because I'm a musician, and a jazz musician at that and that is just what we do, and partly because my players have never been predictable (not even in the slightest), so I've just learned to roll with the punches (our current CoC game I've only prepared one monster encounter in the entire campaign so far).

And of course, I'm starting an opening adventure. It will be a simple, short dungeon crawl, just to get things started, let the players get used to each other and my style, let them start building their character personalities, etc...

So that is my prep work. Anything you see missing? How do you prepare for a new game?