New DM Need Help with a Campaign

ashderf

Channel: dungeons-n-drags

So Basically I very recently got into DnD. The only version I have played so far is 5e of D&D. I got copies of the base manuals, but it is not quite what I wanted. I am instead creating the world from scratch with multiple campaigns in mind to help develop the lore. Each campaign containing lore from the previous, etc.

I have never DM'ed before, and I am facing issues of my own magic system, races, and classes. I also want to keep it open for the players to help create the world. I have no idea how to properly balance what I have so far. If anyone is willing to help me create the base world, races, and classes, along with give me some tips for DMing, I would appreciate it.

Here is a sample of what I have so far:

My religious system is interesting as I wanted to make the alignments matter, but allow for more flexibility than what I have heard of other campaigns. Rather than making it set that certain classes have to be LG or TN or whatever. So instead, when I created my deities, I described how each deity functions and what they stand for. When players choose their races, there are deities who created the race they can worship. There are also three overarching deities of brothers and a sister. These represent Good, Evil, and Neutral.

Each player can choose the deities they worship, and how they act in accordance with the alignment of the god or goddess can affect their rolles or provides specials items as rewards. For example, in custom class creation, I am thinking that if a cleric chooses to worship Erva, the neutral goddess of Death, then it creates a necromancer. Or something along the lines.

I have the entire pantheon drafted along with some religious/historical lore, as the world currently interacts a lot with the gods and goddesses.

My magic system also stems from this, as the Creator, named Ara, is the original god. He created the universe, which at the time was one mass where the planes were not separated. He created Valtheim (Good), then Erebar (Evil), and finally Ianite (Neutral).

Long story short, Valtheim and Erebar began fighting for dominance. This wrecked the whole of existence. I will mention here Erebar is more talented than Valtheim. I mentioned it as an addition of lore I hope to use later. Ara and Ianite saw this conflict, and decided there was only way to stop it.

Ara sacrificed himself, and his death shattered the planes and separated them. His site of death was on the physical plane and features a valley with floating mountains. His remnants scattered throughout existence, and this life essence is the origin of all magic, although in my world it is called Ara. All beasts of creation also have a small amount of Ara, and that is their aura (I love wordplay and puns).

I have no idea where to take the magic system from here. I want it to be open ended, but not overpowered. I also want to encourage players to be creative with it. Like how a spell that could provide drinking water could be used to attack.

Any help would be appreciated, and I have a lot more information on races, lore, etc. if you are interested...

Tags: DnD | new DM

Views:	2251
Favorited:	2
Submitted:	11/24/2015

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#14 - ashderf [OP](12/02/2015) [-]

stickied by ashderf

Rakshasa Race: /channel/dungeons-n-drags/Rakshasa+playable+race+need+feedback/wLffLjY/

#2 - rho (11/24/2015) [-]

Look, I wish you all the luck in the world. But, coming from someone who has over 450 pages of homebrew lore, stories and worldbuilding which I've been DMing for a good amount of years, heed me:

There is a reason that a game as open-ended, free and creative as D&D has a somewhat limiting magic system. A game with over 30 years of established dominance when it comes to freedom and creativity.

Balancing. Balancing is ******* hard. It takes so much practice. It's great that you have ideas, man, keep writing, keep up the creativity. But if you want my advice, take a small, established campaign and DM that first. Get a feel for the game, how to play the players. If you start with your story, you get possessive, players go against your intricately thought out plothooks and dodge masterfully crafted encounters, and you feel cheated. You're not reading them a book. Shutting down PC's because you feel like you want this part of the story to happen now because that's how you planned it is how you lose the player's interest. Sling up an existing, well-written campaign, get a feel for how to DM. Learn how to DM as someone who's not playing a game, or forcing narrative. Learn how to inspire and tug the players instead of aiming them at wherever you feel they should go next. Remember, they should want to choose to go north, you shouldn't have to tell them to. And, of course, to each their own ways, this is just advice from an experienced (I would like to think, anyway) homebrew DM.

TL;DR: DMing is hard, learn the game by heart, learn the players, balancing narrative, freedom and immersion are key. And also hard.

Unless this was just to show off lore you thought up, in that case, there's better places to do that.

#3 to #2 - senseiweasel (11/24/2015) [-]

I agree with this dude 100%. I'm 34 now, been playing D&D since I was 15 (2nd edition). Homebrew almost never works out, and in a turn-based combat heavy system like D&D, balance is everything. There are game systems where you can mess with rules a bit more, but they tend to be more narrative/story led systems. Combat based systems have spent YEARS getting the balance right, and an unbalanced combat system is boring & frustrating.

#4 to #3 - senseiweasel (11/24/2015) [-]

That being said (and so I give you something a little more constructive than "this is a bad idea"), have a look at the magic system from White Wolf's Mage games (either Mage: The Awakening, or Dark Ages: Mage). The magic system in Mage is very versatile, with many different spheres of influence that can be combined and overlapped to create a variety of different spells on the fly.

As a fairly major caveat, however, the White Wolf game system is TOTALLY different from D&D, and I haven't the slightest clue how you'd even BEGIN to migrate it to D&D. Might give you some insight into how a free-form magic system can work, though.

#7 to #4 - ashderf [OP](11/24/2015) [-]

Thanks! So with the White Wolf games, are the two mage games separate bonuses to the base game? If the game systems are different, I would need to read through the base games to begin working on the integration.

#9 to #7 - senseiweasel (11/24/2015) [-]

Nope, I'm wrong, base ruleset is in the Vampire books - however I don't think you'll need them to understand the magic system. Gimme 15 mins and I'll type up a brief rundown of how it works and a few example spells out of the book.

#10 to #7 - senseiweasel (11/24/2015) [-]

Basically, the control of different aspects of the world around the caster are seperated into what the game calls pillars, and which are levelled from 0-5 to represent that character's mastery over that particular aspect. The game has several different types of mage (classes, essentially) who each have access to different pillars. For the purposes of this example I'll focus on the Order of Hermes, as they most closely resemble the classic pointy-hat mages of D&D (there are other classes which specialise in nature magic, divine & healing magic, necromancy, etc, who will get access to different pillars than the ones I list)

So the pillars accessible to this class are:

Anima - Command of Life
Corona - Command of the Mind
Primus - Command of Quintessence (basically the stuff magic is made of in the WW universe, magic power itself)
Vires - Command of Elemental Forces

Each rank in a pillar opens up more that you can do with it (for example, corona 1 might let you read surface thoughts, 2 for deeper secrets, 3 would allow you to start influencing someone, etc) - the scope can be fairly large, to allow the players to choose their own effect. Simple spells are easy, they use only a single pillar and you can pretty much choose what they do by reading the power's description at that rank. A sample basic spells from the book would be Aegis Magicus (Primus 3) - Magical shield that stops spells. Pretty straightforward.

It gets interesting when you combine two or more pillars to make what the game calls a complex spell, letting you make some really crazy and specific effects. Some example complex spells are:

Hermes' Brand (Anima 3, Primus 3, Vires 3) - turns the blood in your body into a weapon against vampires, which will burst into flames in their throat if they drink from you

The Incorruptible Water (Anima 5, Corona 4, Primus 4) - creates an elixir of eternal life, basically. Drink it & live forever, gets slightly more dangerous every time you use it, having an increasing chance of backfiring and causing you to age 1000 years at once.

Wrath of Apollo (Primus 5, Vires 5) Calls down a 100ft wide pillar of flame, that utterly nukes everything. Seriously, nothing in any of the White Wolf games could survive this. I haven't ever seen anybody get close to powerful enough to cast it

I'll spare the exact details of how these are rolled, as the system is quite different - basically instead of rolling a single dice, you roll a heap of them and count your number of successes, with more successes giving better results (longer duration, more damage, etc). In D&D the best way I could think of to replicate that would be by granting better results if they beat the DC on the nose, by 2, 5, 10, etc.

tl;dr set a few broad-covering magical influences that can be leveled up, combine different broad categories to make specific spells.

See if you can grab a copy of either Mage book and check out the pillars. I don't think you need to look any further into the system than that though, it's probably too different from D&D to be of much use.

#11 to #10 - ashderf [OP](11/24/2015) [-]

Thanks. i will look for them. I will probably be posting more later once I have a base idea down for the magic system.

#8 to #7 - senseiweasel (11/24/2015) [-]

The base game(s) in the White Wolf franchise are the Vampire games (Vampire: The Masquerade for modern day, Dark Ages: Vampire for medieval). However, I'm 99% sure that the Mage books do have the base White Wolf ruleset included in them, so you shouldn't need the base games to work it out - I'll check my copy of Mage when I get home from work.

#6 to #2 - ashderf [OP](11/24/2015) [-]

Thank you. This is great advice. As much as I would like to lead off with a campaign in this world, I probably should find a campaign to practice with.

#1 - wraithguard (11/24/2015) [-]

I can't help you too much, but I will say that I know from a years worth of experience that DM'ing is harder than it looks, but it can be really rewarding if you can get good.

#15 - tacoandshoe ONLINE (12/11/2015) [-]

i was in the same boat as you, i am a budding 5e dm, who is starting my own home brew adventure myself, and what i recommend is now that you have that idea of it keep it light, keep most lore about the surrounding area, for example the history of a country rather then a world, and let the back rounds of your players also help shape it, as for things like magic, fallow the main rules, but dont fallow to the letter, its easiest to let the adventure build the world around it rather then make a world and have an adventure in it, dont try to remake the game. i hope this makes sense im awful at typing, but oh and a good must have is to make sure you have one god for the different cleric dominions.
P.S. make a map for the adventure

#5 - mortolife ONLINE (11/24/2015) [-]

Hey man, I don't have really any experience with D&D but I'm a decent writer and wouldn't mind helping develop the lore of your universe in whatever way I can. If you do want any help, you can PM me a skype username, email, or whatever your preferred communication medium is.

#12 - quiescat (11/25/2015) [-]

i am with rho and senseiweasel here, you really might want to look at other systems, if your beef with DnD goes all the its classes. at least until you have run a few games and get a feel for your group, or find a group you like. DM has a lot more on his plate just getting every thing going in one direction as apposed to worrying about if your players know what they can or cannot do.

on that note savage world and 13th age are both more story driven systems, savage world more so that might be useful for what your doing. also i found both on torrents pretty easily so not hard to check out with out investing in books just yet . try not to get bogged down in the fluff, really just look at the mechanics around it. an orc and a leopard seal is the same thing if all they do is hurt you for a d12 and have 30 hit and 12 ac.

build your own world its great fun, rename the classes and powers all you want. even a few small tweaks cant **** up that bad, as long as you don't give out limited resources IE spell slots or ways to concentrate more then there already are you in the classes that are pre built you should be fine. stick to the 6-8 resource consuming challenges a long rest with 2 short rests and there is a lot of story you and your group can tell with the 5e system. that being said

inkarnate.com/ its still beta but works well enough if you want a down and dirty way to go about building a map that looks ok with out photo shop.

www.brockjones.com/dieroller/dice.htm i use it to pre map out my dice rolls for building monsters as you seem to be the kind guy who will do that anyways. might help
theangrygm.com/monster-building-101-its-alive-its-alive/
he is wordy but its a good break down with 2-4 articles on 5e monster building if you go that way
http://kobold.club/fight/#/encounter-builder
easy encounter calculator for the fights at low levels you will feel like your throwing soft ball pitch at your players but about level 8 you get to start using some scary monsters. remember your not trying to kill them just scare them.
donjon.bin.sh/ this has a lot of odd ball random generators also pretty good for quick page reference for 5e spells and items
1-dot-encounter-planner.appspot.com/ also some usefull stuff mostly if you keep with 5e though
www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/ i dont know you might find better places for dnd info but they have a fairly good board at least as far as reddit goes. lot of info in there new DM section and lots of stuff that just helps with ideas.

rpg.stackexchange.com/ more rules clarifications then you can shake a stick at with supporting evidence, not as important in world building but its useful after you get going and your not 100% how a rule works out.

how some of this helps