I'll jump on the advice bandwagon =) Game System and First Campaign First of all, 5e is a good choice, and if you haven't already be sure to download the basic rules from Wizard. I'd highly recommend picking up a Player's Handbook as well...you can get it from a local store or at Amazon for $20 less (in the U.S., not sure about elsewhere). The basic rules have all the core rules and four classes with one option each, Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, and Wizard, but the PHB has a ton more options if your players want them (plus I find it easier to reference a physical book sometimes). If you want to keep it simple the basic rules have what you want. Either way you're going to need the DM basic rules for monsters and items. If you are having trouble coming up with a game idea and aren't comfortable with the idea of CR yet I would recommend a module (pro tip: do NOT add the levels of the party to get your target CR! My first time DMing I figured a CR 12 vampire monk would be a good challenge for three 4th level characters...it was not pretty. Also, flurry of blows with energy drain is mean, heh). Right now the only official module (that I've found) for 5e is the Starter Set ($20 at most stores, $12 at Amazon ) and you can't buy a PDF version. It includes the basic rules to level 5 and a decent starting adventure designed to take players from level 1 to level 5. It also includes some tips for running the game and special notes for the DM. You'll have to create your own versions of its maps, though. Another option is to use a module from a different system and adapt it. Pathfinder has a ton of fantastic modules and old Dungeon magazines from Wizard can give you some good 4e modules. Adapting a different module isn't as hard as it sounds; just replace NPCs with the equivalent NPC from 5e. 4e may be harder to update since some of the CRs (just called level in 4e) don't match up but Pathfinder should be pretty close at low levels. Your last option is to just create something yourself. This isn't so bad. The basic rules have a little bit about CR and a bunch of monsters, most of which are low CR. I highly recommend starting at 1st level. Experienced players will sometimes start at higher levels to play more established characters, but usually everyone involved has played numerous games at 1st level. If you try and skip it things will get much more complicated very quickly. The basics...an encounter's CR should be roughly equivalent to your party's level. So a CR 1 encounter is a good match for a level 1 party of four players, and should take roughly 1/4 of their resources (HP, special abilities, etc.). This is a very general rule, and you can boost up the CR for a harder encounter or lower it to make something easier (or set the players up for something later!). You can try breaking this rule as you gain experience and a feel for encounter difficulty...in the beginning I'd stick with it completely. Character Creation There's a lot of different philosophies about this...I'm going to recommend what I feel is easiest for a new DM. I'll start with character creation. There are two main ways you can do this; you can create pregenerated characters for your group or have them create characters on their own. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Pregenerated characters work well if you are using a module and already have them (like the Starter Set) and want to jump straight into the action on game day (or if your players are new as well and don't know how to make characters!). Depending on how much you want to fill out the character sheets this can take a while; I think it took me about an hour per sheet to fill in the five Starter Set character sheets, which is a hefty time investment for something that doesn't directly benefit campaign prep. You may see me say this again, but beware too much prep! Overprepping can easily lead to DM burnout , a common phenomenon where the DM gets sick of all the extra work and stops having fun. If you aren't having fun, your players are probably going to be miserable too! Having your players create their own characters has a couple of advantages. First of all, you don't have to do all the work, so it really cuts down on your prep time. Second, it ensures the players have read what their characters can do and have a least a basic understanding of their stats and abilities. You can do this one of two main ways...prior to the game or during your first session. Roll20 has an awesome campaign forum system and your players can log into the game at any time, even when you aren't there. This means you can have your players discuss classes outside actual game time and they can modify and view their character sheets without you. To create sheets prior to the game, create an empty character sheet for each of your players, give them control, and tell them to have them complete prior to your first session. Poof, all the work is done for you! There are some disadvantages to this. First, if your players are new, they may not know how to make characters and possibly screw it up. You can still do rolling for stats if you want...their rolls will be in the chat log so you can validate them later. I suppose your group could cheat too but it's usually pretty easy to catch (the character sheets do most of the calculation for you and you can just check their rolls...if the math doesn't work, they either cheated or messed up) and fairly rare (in my experience). You can also use the main portion of your first session with character creation. This lets everyone discuss their characters and lets you walk them through the process. I usually have a little one-encounter fight so people get a taste for how their new character works as well, but you can just stick with character creation. The disadvantage is that you tend to have to do it one-on-one so you end up focused with a single player while the others sit around waiting for something to do. You could try coaching but in my experience brand-new players can't get very far on their own without help. Map I highly recommend ignoring most, if not all, of the tiles and map tokens out there. Don't get me wrong, there is some great artwork out there, but for your first campaign you can easily get sucked into trying to make everything look pretty and never actually playing the game. This may be controversial, but I'd also recommend just ignoring lighting. In actual gameplay it tends to be a minor influence unless you're going for a more simulation-based game and can quickly bog a session down. Focus on the core mechanics of combat and social interaction, then worry about darkvision and trail rations once you get the big stuff down. For an initial game if you want to simulate hidden stuff just roll Stealth checks for the monsters and compare them to passive Perception for the players...much easier to manage and has a similar effect. Instead, focus on learning the line and polygon tools. You can create entire maps with just these two things very easily, just like with graph paper. Squares typically represent 5 foot increments; if you're using a prebuilt campaign, just get a rough outline of the maps (details rarely matter) and for a custom campaign just make series of preferably square rooms connected by hallways. No need to get fancy here. The shift key is your friend...this will snap your lines to the grid making it easy to draw straight lines. Right click when you're done with a series of lines. Use basic colors; I usually use black for dungeon walls, brown for caves or roads, blue for water, green to mark trees, grey for statues or altars, etc. Don't worry if it doesn't look perfect, just describe it when you play. The purpose of the map is to mark tactical positions, not look pretty! Your players won't care if it's all just lines...people have been playing like this pretty much since the beginning of D&D (or without a map at all!). This will save you a ton of prep time, load faster, and create larger distinctions between tokens (enemies and players) and the environment. Keep in mind that you aren't stuck with a white background; you can change the background in the menu options. For woods I'll often change the ground to a dark green to make it obvious what kind of environment we're in. For dungeon areas I usually just stick with white since dark colors tend to be hard to see. Tokens and Monsters For player and monster tokens I recommend keeping them simple at first. There's some cool tokens out there that give a "top down" view of monsters. In play, however, they tend to be a bit hard to see. In 5e the direction a character is "facing" is largely irrelevant. I usually use a program called TokenTool which can quickly and easily create tokens from pictures. You can usually use Google images to find a portrait you want (Pathfinder in particular has a lot of pictures you can use) and just crop out the face into a circle or square of your choosing. I tend to use a unique boarder for the players and another one for NPCs but it's up to you. I also recommend leaving most of the fancy stuff, like nametags, off for tokens, especially NPCs. It just clutters up the screen and isn't really necessary when you already have a border around your tokens. I use a fancier system for NPCs utilizing token actions (a type of macro) but I wouldn't bother with them at first. For your token, just put the hit points of the creature in bar 1 (default the middle green one), its AC in bar 2 (default the right blue one) and it's attack bonus in bar 3 (default red left one). If you're using the basic rules, you can then just copy and paste the stat block into the tokens Bio section, and you're done. If your token has, say, a 5 in the red circle, then when it attacks just type /r d20+5 and you have an attack roll, if it hits, double click it and type /r and the damage dice. Eventually you'll want to make macros to speed this up (for example, the first can be changed to /r d20+@{selected|bar3} and get the same result) but it will help you learn the game if you do it manually for the first couple sessions. If you want to speed things up a little more, do the exact same thing, but create a journal entry for each monster type. After you've created a token for that monster, select it and choose "Set as Default Token." From then on, if you want to add a new monster of that type, you can just drag and drop it onto the battlefield. This will also make setting up token actions really easy if you want to do that later. I'd recommend against trying to do things with the NPC character sheet at first; it's definitely harder to use and has a lot of info you'll rarely use in the beginning. Conclusion Hope that helps you out (and any other new GMs interested in 5e). Good luck and remember to have fun!
