So you drew the short straw...

...and have to DM.  But you've never played DnD  so you're completely panicky!

Don't worry!  You're not alone!

Some quick resources for new DMs, particularly those who have never DM'd before!

First, I recommend watching these:

PAX Celebrity Game

Dungeons and Dragons:  Robot Chicken

There are other PAX DnD videos (and hours worth of audio at Dungeons and Dragons.com).  If you've never played a pen and paper role playing game before, they're an incredible resource for how a basic game should go, and since the some of the Robot Chicken guys have never played before, you can see what the normal learning curve should be (so nobody should feel stupid.)  If you're playing 4E it's even better, since that's what they're playing, and Chris explains some of the rules (and occasionally Wizard's reasoning behind them) explicitly.

If you're DM'ing with your laptop (which I am, because it's awesome) there's some great DM programs.

Combat Manager

If you're playing Pathfinder (or I imagine 3.5, possibly even 4E), this makes combat about 10,000 times easier (well, if you're an organized person, then it may be only slightly easier than just being prepared with a pen and paper and notes about your monsters).  

Combat Manager does a great job of helping you keep track of initiative, turns, and my favorite: Monster Stats.  I was keeping all of my stat blogs in my adventure notes on my pc, but once I started using this I just let it handle that for me.  It's working pretty well so far. 

For Character creation I found two programs, one of which I liked, and is free, but ran really really slowly, and then quit working completely.  But I recommend giving it a go and see how it works for you, since I found a lot of praise for it online.  (If anyone gets it working well, let me know, I'm curious if it's just me.)

PC Gen

What I ended up going with, is a non-free solution, but it does run really well.  

Hero Lab

Hero Lab is a fine program, I have no bones about it at all, except that it's not free.  It's not super expensive either, but you do have to pay for each system you use it on, and each source book that you want to use.  As far as I can tell there's no way to add custom feats or anything either, so you're at the mercy of the books you've purchased through their website.  Not a huge deal, but I'm a pretty laid back easy going DM, so I've told my players they can use any Feat/Power/Spell/Race/Class they can find in any pathfinder or 3.5 source book they can get their hands on, something the NPCs of their world won't be able to do.

And finally some super necessary web sites that you should learn to love:

Reddit's RPG Reddit is pretty awesome

Pathfinder Treasure Generator (Combat Generator, linked above, also has a treasure generator built in)

The Hypertext D20 SRD - A fantastic resource for looking up the rules for 3.5+ fantasy games

The D20 Pathfinder SRD- Similar to above, but specific to Pathfinder

The Pathfinder Database - All sorts of useful tools for pathfinder (a lot of it would be useful for 3.5 or 4E also)

Abulafia - A random list generator.  Many, many of the lists that have been created are DM tools.

A couple of other notes:

I chose not to DM "town" interactions that aren't part of the campaign.  By that I mean:  I don't DM the pc's trips to the store to buy and sell loot, or pick up new torches, etc.  Do you want to DM being a shopkeeper?  I don't.  I want to DM being an orc about to crush someone's head in.

So between sessions I've been sending out a facebook update with everything the store has on hand "today."   I told my players items sell for 50% of their value, commodities sell for 100%.  They can do their own math, they're smart people.  I figure if anyone wants to cheat, they can cheat, but that's no fun (and my group is all cool people, so I'm not at all worried about it.)

I also include any "news."  For instance, in my first update:

As the five of us go about our regular business, we discover that news of our adventure has spread throughout our small town, and we've all become a bit of celebrities. While the attention is nice (and the free rooms at the inn are great for hook-ups), it also means that people are coming to us with their problems, and problems they have!

A number of options for adventure present themselves. We can do one of these adventures, or something else entirely. All choices have their consequences though, so choose wisely.

Missing Dwarves:
Some Dwarves passed through town a few days ago inquiring about an old gold mine just outside of town. Unfortunately, nobody has seen or heard from them since then. The Mayor would like us to go investigate.
Time Frame: No Travel time, 1-2 days to complete 
Rewards: 100 gp each, plus any items we find along the way.
Possible Costs if we avoid: Dwarves may not survive.

After that there were 5-6 more distinct jobs that people wanted their troupe to do, as well as a few general rumours.

Skill Challenges & what DND has in common with Lego

There's a thread over on Reddit about skill challenges, which got me thinking about my attempt at a skill challenge in our last game.  Here's my comment:

Is this a case of "skills for the new GM"?
By that I mean, is a skill challenge a thing in and of itself, or is it a way for a new GM to block off a section of the adventure he's put together and toss out some bonus experience?
If you're an experienced GM and don't need the structure of a skill challenge, great, ignore them, but for a new GM I can see them being a useful way to make pockets of action.
Of course, the downside is that a new GM may not be able to make them interesting.  I'm a new GM, I tried my first skill challenge last session and while it wasn't a complete failure, it wasn't the nerve-wracking pulse-pounding moment that I'd hoped it would be (possibly because nobody could roll anything above a 3, so I could blame the dice...)

Basically I didn't plan it out very well... there was only one solution, and only 2 of the party members could even attempt it.  There was a long hallway with pressure plates that set off fire traps that did 1d6 pts of damage every round.  The walls had shelves (for corpses), so climbing along the wall to the spot where the trap could be disabled should have been easy for our rogue, but her dice hate her, so she tried and fell, tried and got 1/3rd of the way down the hallway, failed and fell, failed and fell onto the floor, and got burnt as she hustled back to the group.

My bard was the only other one with disable device, and he managed to make it 2/3 of the way down the hallway before he fell... he got burnt and ran to the end of the hall and disabled the trap.

It was amusing, but not very dramatic.

Next time I'll be sure to involve as many party members as possible, and be more open to alternative solutions to the problem.  (Can a bard with mage hand and disable device disarm a trap from a distance?)

In a bigger, philosophical sense, the thread got me thinking about how lucky I am to have an easy going group.  Everyone plays to have fun, and the rules are just tools to use to have fun.  DND rules are just like legos, if you want, they serve a specific purpose, but really, you can build with them whatever you want.

On Lego Dungeons

Two dungeons down, and I wasn't happy with either one.

So I decided to go bigger and use the 10x10 lego base as my "standard" room size.  Using a 4x4 flat as a grid square I was able to make 8x8 maps (so a scale 40x40 feet) which is a workable size for a dungeon crawl battle.  Unfortunately I didn't have the right plates to create an actual floor grid, so the floor is all black, which made spacing a little problematic, but we worked with it, and overall it was pretty cool.

Each room is modular in this dungeon, and they're held together with pins.  I didn't use any hallways on this build, and there weren't a whole lot of options for the party (They could go right or left at the very beginning, and then there were two rooms off the "southern" wing, but overall it was a pretty linear little dungeon.

Since I had the whole thing laid out from the very beginning, I used cardboard to hide the actual rooms until the party got there.  In the future I'm going to do it differently.

I'm building a number of "generic" dungeon rooms and hallways with a grey and black flooring grid, which should make moving, flanking and touch attacks a little clearer.  I'm building the grid on the 10x10 inch plates, on top of 4x4 bricks (yellow, because they were cheap, yay cheap) because that feels more solid, and gives me room for pin hole bricks underneath the floor.

A 10x10 Base with 4x4 brick foundation and 4x4 blue grey plates.  The missing plates will be black.

An unfinished room with a river and waterfall.  The river will have semi-transparent blue and white dot pieces eventually.

A hallway with finished grid, visible pins and architectural flavor.

I'm new to this whole Lego thing (well, aside from playing with them as a kid of course), so if any lego master builders out there have any suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments!

For our first session we used the (really, quite nice) grid map that comes with the Pathfinder starter kit.  Since we were using the adventure from the kit, the map was pre-printed and awesome and got us going, well, right out of the box... 

At the time I had no intention of building lego dungeons or maps.  I was just thinking of using the lego figures as avatars and using whatever happened to be laying about as monsters.  I started searching about for custom figures and monsters, and ran into Brickquest, and fell madly in love with his dungeons.  Peter (the Brickquest guy) made an actual custom game to play in his lego dungeons, which I wasn't interested in doing, so I quickly realized my dungeon tiles needed to be bigger than his.  (Also, I think some of the pieces he used are no longer in production.)

I decided to use Lego's 10" base plate as my "regular" room size, with smaller plates as connecting hallways.

So setting down with the random lego I'd managed to pick up, I built this, my first dungeon.

I liked it, it was cute... but it wasn't going to work.  

For one, I had a large back wall, to show off my awesome lego building mastery (that's sarcasm), but as soon as one of my players saw it, she pointed out that nobody on that side of the table would be able to see over it.  

For two, and more significantly, it was just too small... our party would barely fit in the first room, let alone our party and enough combatants to have a meaningful fight (and forget flanking!)  

So it came down.  

As an experiment I built the map from another pre-written adventure from Paizo (Something about saving a pair of dwarves, I think it came from a starter kit expansion that I grabbed from their websites).  Using a 4x4 plate as one grid square, I was able to build it to scale, and everything seemed to fit okay.  (Although a giant spider - aka Aragog from one of the Harry Potter sets) is much bigger than 10 feet by 10 feet at this scale, at least if you count his legs...)

Of course compared to the figures, he's definitely lives up the name Giant Spider, right?

When we did actually get together to play, we played at a pub, which I have to admit being nervous about, but (noise issues aside) went pretty well.    I was a little worried we'd get beat up (too many DnD stereotypes in my brain apparently), but everyone seemed to think it was cool.  I do live in Portland though, so your mileage may vary.  We ran through this with lego figures on the bar table, with no grid, and I just drew the map on a napkin.  So we never used that dungeon either, but at least it proved I could build a reasonable sized dungeon.

Why Lego? Because I don't know any porn stars...

I should mention that this whole DND/Roleplaying thing interested me because of the blog Playing DND with Porn Stars.  Someone somewhere linked something about how creative Zak is and I ended up reading 2 years or so of posts in one sitting, and it's on my "must read" list ever since.  And it made me want to play DND (specifically, it made me want to GM DND).  If you're at all into roleplaying, or really, any type of creative endeavor, you owe it to yourself to check him out.  (And if porn stars scare you, don't worry too much, they don't take their clothes off very often while playing dnd.   And we can always hope that after getting to know Zak through his blog they'll scare you a little less.)

So, thanks Zak.

I've been getting a lot of questions about the Lego DND game we started recently, so I figure I'll just make my logs of our adventures public, maybe ramble a bit about my thoughts on Lego and role playing games, and archive a few zillion pictures.

We started back in early February.  I was getting ready to celebrate my birthday with some friends and we were trying to figure out what to do, and he noticed some Lego in my living room.  I mentioned I've always wanted to play DND with Lego, and he ran with it.

First we had to figure out what game we wanted to play.  We talked about trying to play 3.5 with some old books he had laying around, then got talking about Pathfinder and 4th Edition.  After chatting with the guys at Guardian Games (who are awesome by the way), we picked up the Pathfinder Starter Box, the Core Rules book and the GM guide.

That night we played through the starter kit mission (using lego minis as our avatars and the cardboard cut outs that come with the kit for the enemies, which worked out pretty well) and everything worked pretty well. Sadly, I don't have any pictures from that game.

The Pathfinder starter kit is pretty awesome.  It was my first time GM'ing and it went find, with minimal "Load" time as I looked up rules or figured out what I was supposed to do.  The starter kit is really well done.  I love the layout for the NPC stats in the starter kit, and if Paizo is smart, they'll use that layout for every NPC stat block going forward, it's super easy to read and find what you need.

The player book is a little less user friendly, but it manages to do the job.  We got lost a few times figuring out how to make our characters, but eventually we (mostly) figured it out.

I've since picked up the 4E book, and it's also pretty well done, although it's a little less robust physically (cheaper paper, round little tiles instead of cardboard and plastic stand ups), but it's also a little cheaper, so pick your poison.  One thing I really like is the cards that come with 4E.  I know for a lot of old school players they're this horrible heresy, but as a new GM/player, they're pretty helpful (in all the obvious ways).  I've started making myself cards for my NPCs, so I have a better chance of challenging my much too intelligent players.