A Donut with Sprinklez

What Was the Plan?

After talking about being a Dungeon Master with several friends over the course of at least a year, I was able to successfully get a group interested in having a session. It would be four friends going through a “short” one-shot.

The meet up would be hosted at my house, around lunch, on a weekend we were all free. I would make the maps needed and get them printed out as posters to act as the battle maps, and possibly 3d print some figures for the players.

To prepare the actual adventure, I decided to follow a basic and highly recommended “recipe” for one-shots. It was something I had seen suggested on several forums and seemed perfect for a first time DM such as myself.

The one-shot “recipe” was pretty simple: the party meets in a tavern, they travel to the location of the one-shot’s “Big Bad”, and then they run through a small dungeon and come out as heroes.

Three scenes, three maps, three hours. Quick in and out adventure.

I asked the group to come up with a level three character for each of them, as I figured level three in 5e is when a character’s build can at least start to be fun, but it was not yet so powerful that I would have trouble balancing the encounters. Then I got to working up all of the needed NPCs, maps, enemies, and history. Since I’m using the world that I have been building for quite a number of years, it was pretty easy to choose a location to place the adventure in. I also had a wealth of characters and lore to choose from, most requiring only minor tweaks.

I made the maps in a piece of software called “Dungeondraft”, a nice piece of software. This was the only software I paid for, since I did not want a monthly subscription or web-based application. I would go more into depth on it, as I did a fair bit of research into alternatives, but that seems out of the scope of this post. Long story short, I made three maps in Dungeondraft: one for the tavern, one for the road, and one for the dungeon.

Once those were done, I started to get worried that the “required” scenes would not be long enough to fill a three hour session, so I ended up coming up with three “optional” scenes that would be able to be placed in or removed naturally. This would allow for the session to be dynamically adjusted to fit the assumed timeframe.

The “required” scenes should be straight forward to figure out. A scene for the tavern, where someone will ask for help, a scene where the party is on the road, traveling to the dungeon, and a scene for the dungeon, where the party fights the villain. The “optional” scenes included a potential bar fight, a surprise attack on the road, and a traveling merchant that could sell some some stuff at a steep discount or even offer tips on the dungeon depending on how the interaction goes.

Cool. Everything on my side was figured out. I let the group know where the adventure would start, and gave some basic details on the world to help them create their characters.

Time to figure out the day to meet.

What Ended Up Happening

After a series of scheduling conflicts, we as a group realized that doing it online would be the best bet. The month was extremely unlucky in terms of how busy it was, with some people being out of town and others being too busy to meet at all.

Okay, no problem. After all, it was just a short one-shot. We could do future sessions in person.

Because we were going to be meeting virtually, we decided we could do it during the workweek as well. So the session time moved from noon to 6:30pm after everyone has gotten off and had time to settle.

I did not see the purpose in printing the maps and figures, as they would not be used for the virtual session, and there was no guarantee that they would be used in future sessions as the one-shot was a prologue into the main campaign.

We settled on using Discord since everyone already had accounts and it supported screen sharing. I created a group, and we were able to communicate easily. It also made sharing images extremely easy. The screen sharing was capped at 720p due to not paying for the “premium Discord plan”, but everyone told me that they were easily able to see my screen.

My screen simply showed the current map the party was at. I used an application called Affinity Photo, as I had purchased it years before and seemed like it could do everything I needed it to do. I had a layer for the map, layers for PC and NPC tokens, and layer for the “fog” that covers unexplored regions of each map.

For the players, they used DnD Beyond to keep track of their players. It worked out well, as everyone was able to quickly see their skills and modifiers without needing to constantly open the rulebook to figure them out. There’s a lot of reasons why someone should or should not use DnD Beyond, all I will say is that it served its purpose here.

We started at 6:30pm, and planned to finish up around 9:30pm.

At 1:20am, nearly seven hours later, we finished the one-shot.

What Went Well?

Here’s a quick overview of the good:

• My initial plot hook worked, and the adventure started without issue
• There were lots of enjoyable roleplaying interactions between players
• Lots of emergent interactions I never expected
• The party explored the dungeon in an unexpected way, leading to a fun conclusion
• Discord worked without any issues
• Dungeondraft made some nice maps
• Affinity Photo, while overpowered, worked extremely well to display maps, tokens, and fog
• Having two displays meant I could keep track of the map, while looking up info that my players could not see on the other display
• Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves

What Went Not So Well?

Here’s an overview of the bad:

• The three hour one-shot turned into a seven hour epic
• I messed up the stat blocks for the enemies in the first encounter, leading to…
• The first fight (and, well, the ones after too) went significantly longer than planned
• None of the “optional” scenes were used, leading to wasted prep time
• I “fudged” more rolls than I wanted to due to my poorly balanced fights
• The boss (unlike every other fight) went down extremely easily
• I did not confirm that everyone knew how to make their characters, leading to one player (new to DnD) to have a poorly balanced character
• Balancing “story” and “gameplay” was something I was constantly having trouble with

What Did I Learn?

Plan for Three Hours, Block out Six (or Seven in My Case)

DnD is not like a video game. Interactions and scenes that would take minutes in a video game can take hours in DnD. The tavern, which I was worried would be too short, ended up taking nearly two hours. The road, which I once again expected to take less than an hour to complete, lasted over two. The dungeon, that I expected to take about an hour, lasted nearly three.

This is not a bad thing. The group had a fantastic time interacting with the world. I was so worried about not having enough “content” to give to the players, I forgot that the players themselves will create additional interactions and do things that I could never have planned for.

I had seen countless experiences on forums about how “my one-shot took four sessions to complete”, and yet I ended up doing the same. I do not know how to shorten the experience yet, but I will keep this experience in mind and in the future will find more spots to “stop” at so that sessions don’t last over two times as long as initially planned.

Balance is Hard and CR < Action Economy

I balanced my encounters using Challenge Rating. I did not take Action Economy into account. I quickly learned that Action Economy is the difference between an easy fight and a deadly one.

Prep Those Stat Blocks

I forgot to include the stat blocks of the enemies I was using in my notes. This lead to me accidentally reading the wrong stat block for one of my basic enemies, giving them literally 3x the health that they should have had. This lead to an already unbalanced fight (due to Action Economy) turning into a deadly one.

What I should have done is prep the stat blocks in my notes to allow for them to be easily referenced instead of me flipping back and forth between my Monster Manual.

Another possible improvement would be me making a table of all of the enemies in an encounter to help me keep track of HP, AC, and various saving throws.

Communication

I should have been in better communication with the group prior to the session. One player had a poorly balanced character, and three (of the four) had backstories that I struggled to fit in to the intro last moment. I should have been in better communication with the players as the day of the session came closer, and been more proactive in making sure they had everything they needed, and I had everything I needed.

Don’t Get In the Way, but Keep Things Moving

My biggest hang up while DM’ing was trying to balance story and player interactions. When players are in the moment, playing out what their character would be doing, it is an enjoyable experience. At the same time, when a conversation about chest hair oil goes on fifteen minutes, and has nothing to do with the rest of the adventure that is already behind schedule, it should probably be pulled back on topic.

Hindsight is always 20/20, and I noticed multiple times I let interactions like those go on too long. At the same time, I probably cut some short where they would have been fine. It is a careful line to walk, as you don’t want to “railroad” your players, but you also probably don’t want them to discuss the moral implications of using a spell to burn an enemy alive for hours on end either.

Players interacting with each other is an important and super fun part of DnD. I need to learn how to facilitate that better, and it seems like practice is the best way to improve.

Contingencies are Useless

I planned contingencies. That was a mistake, as I did not use a single one, instead resorting to off the cuff responses. I am lucky that I planned the whole adventure from scratch, in a world I am intimately knowledgeable of, because I was able to quickly think of logical responses to most of the things my players threw at me.

Instead of wasting hours figuring out all of these contingencies, I should have spent more time planning out modular scenes and characters that could be quickly (hopefully as quickly as I can think of it) retrofitted to whatever need arises.

For example, a modular shopkeep that has certain quirks, but does not actually exist in the world until the players interact with a shop. That way I can have a named and unique character fully planned out, and if the player decides to go to the next town over, I can simply place the shopkeep there instead. No more wasted time, as the character is still used, and the player thinks I have an entire world 100% planned out to each individual NPC

Being the DM Means Basically No Downtime

I have been a player in multiple DnD adventures, but this was my first time DM’ing. I would say that my biggest misconception was that I thought I would be able to write notes or make adjustments to encounters while the players were talking amongst themselves. After all, as a player I could plan out my next turn during combat while waiting for others, or I could check my notes regarding the NPC I’d like to talk to while another player was speaking.

It turns out, DM’s are busy during the session. In combat, every turn is my turn. In conversations, every conversation is a conversation with me. When two players are having a roleplay conversation between themselves, I have to listen to make sure things don’t get too off topic and waste too much time.

In the end, my notes at the end of the session were three sentences. The next day when I went to write the summary for my personal notes, I was able to write several paragraphs of simplified information to remember. Being a DM means you are constantly doing something.

Conclusion

There were many more things I learned, such as better ways to store or share notes with players, but I feel like going over every individual thing would be impossible. Plus, I also plan on eventually writing about things like Dungeondraft and Obsidian in more detail down the line.

If there is one main thing to take away from my first time experience as a DM though, it would be to just go with the flow. If you have a good group of people you know well, and make your inexperience as a DM clear, the group will more often than not forgive your mistakes, and, better yet, still have fun.

My three hour one-shot that took seven hours was a train wreck of sorts. But at the end of the day, everyone had enough fun that they are still interested in doing a full campaign with me.

I’d call that a success.