On the weekend that just passed I had my very first ever D&D session as a Dungeon Master, this was overall an incredible experience and a fun one. This post mortem will cover events during the session of what went well and what I should do to replicate this success and what didn’t go well and what I should do to avoid these things from happening again. In this adventure, four players, a bard, barbarian, monk and sorcerer, had to rescue the mayor of Cliffgrove’s daughter who was kidnapped by bandits. They figured out that the bandits were paid off and she was actually kidnapped by a werebear who was planning on turning her into a werebear so that she would finally love him.
What went well?
Overall the game went well, the players were having fun and they were enjoying overcoming obstacles and enemies, they enjoyed exploring and looking for loot.
Characters
Their characters were played very well, they enjoyed playing someone out of their skin, the standout character for this was Kashton, played by Sherry, who played her character extremely well, doing barbarian things. This success was due her having an absolutely clear idea in her mind of who this character is (Gaston from beauty and the beast) and did things that she thought her character should do. To capitalise on this successful character I should attempt to build characters with strong motivations or possibly inspiration from other well-known fictional characters for players to be able to fully understand the.
Dungeon
The players really enjoyed the dungeon, exploring all of the rooms, and fighting the encounters that they fought. They even double backed to an early juncture to explore the leftover room, they were able to piece together the story from the dungeon descriptions and story items that they found. The success of the dungeon was assisted from the bonus material that I added to make the experience better such as:
- Map for the dungeon
- Letter of the villain
- Map of the town
- Map of the trap room with puzzle
- 3D models for the adventure
In an attempt to replicate this experience I will try to have other supporting material for the adventure with maps, letters and drawings of rooms or castles.
Combat
Combat was something I was quite worried about going into the session was running combat correctly and efficiently. The combat sessions ran very well, each player was challenged to make a decision on their turns and felt useful during the fight. This happened due to the amount of planning that went into each encounter, this sheet helped with that, working out the purpose of each encounter, determining what could happen on each turn that the players need to adapt to and figuring out changes that could be performed on the fly assisted with the combat. This helped greatly with running combat and I will be aiming to do the same form of planning for the next session.
What Didn’t Go So Well
As stated above, overall the game went fairly well and without too much issue, but seeing as it was my first session as a dungeon master there are things that I can improve upon to improve the experience for my players.
Characters
Overall most of the characters went well, however I could tell that the bard player was feeling a bit underwhelmed as they don’t have the best spells and they don’t deal too much damage to other characters. In addition to this other than the barbarian the other characters were mostly acting like their real life selves, although they didn’t have too many opportunities to act out their character this is something that I wish to improve upon. Finally keeping track of inspiration, throughout the game I completely forgot about keeping track of inspiration and this is something that I should be more aware of as it will encourage players to act out their characters more. These problems will be fixed by doing the following, checking over characters before the game to ensure that they will be fun to play, giving the characters more distinct backstories and motivations to make it easier for players to act out their character, and always paying attention to the game board to give the players inspiration.
Dungeon
I was extremely happy with how the dungeon went using the extra material to help the dungeon went very well. In addition having a central theme to the dungeon made it make sense, each room can be attributed to something that the villain of the dungeon did or was doing. They were able to overcome the puzzles fairly easily and therefore maybe I should have them be more difficult and challenging.
Combat
Combat went fairly smoothly, I underestimated how powerful their characters were and how proficient my players would be at controlling their characters. Creating more difficult encounters will be my next step in the session seeing as my players were able to handle it. I made a huge error with the barbarian with their rage ability, I gave them an extra damage die when I should’ve instead given them an extra +2 damage instead, I thought that this felt wrong but kept with it anyway, next time I should look at the characters and class sheets properly to ensure that I wasn’t getting it wrong.
General DMing
The NPC’s felt weak and shallow, when I was acting out as Lena at the end of the adventure I didn’t know what to do and where to go, the NPC felt quite awkward. The ones that I enjoyed acting out were the Dragon and Kauri, the merchant. I should counteract this next session by writing out a bio for NPCs with their motivations. Loot was something that I wasn’t really thinking about and therefore next time either should be something that I think more about, I was able to improvise and think on my feet fairly often while adding flair to some actions that the player’s took, this was really good and I wish to replicate that, I can do this by keeping an open mind while playing and rationally thinking about things that would happen for the actions, this will also improve slowly over time as I become more comfortable with DMing.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I had an absolute blast and I cannot wait until the next time I run a session. The one-shot session style is something that they want to play again so I will have to think of another adventure to play. This was an unforgettable experience and it was so great to see them all laughing and enjoying themselves during all of the encounters and adventures.
Leave a comment