I've noticed that the D&D games I've played with the people I play them with can get pretty goofy. While lighthearted lenience is nice and all, I feel it puts a bullet in the foot when it comes to progressed a real in-depth plot where interesting shit happens when one of the characters is behaving like a child and others are behaving like anime fangirls. I feel as though in other campaigns I've played the story seemed pretty trivial, like it didn't matter why we were fighting monsters, just that we had monsters to kill. I want a campaign with epic shit going down, emotional responses from players in and out of character.

Plus I've got so many character ideas brewing in my head, and I'd be able to put damn near all of them (particularly the evil ones) into action, and maybe convince friends to jump in to see if they could take an interest.


I've got a story in mind. Villains, evil plans, motivations for said plans. I've got a recurring NPC to have pop up for the players to deal with from time to time, and I've got a starting low level mission idea to introduce him in. I want to get a good backstory from all my players so I can really integrate them all, play on each character's background, probably do horrible things to loved ones, basically make the PCs lives hell, but hopefully a rewarding hell.

I've tied it in with the Eberron setting(it's what I know best, and I like Warforged), already have the main villain's base of operations picked out, so I'm even working out geographical

I'm relatively new to the game, I've only played three characters, two of haven't yet made it past level 7 (one being a part of a two-night campaign), and am still working out some details, often asking the active DM a lot of questions like "What do I add that with?" and "Can I do that within this round or is that a full action?" But I feel I'm finding out more. I still have lots of questions though that I'd like answered by someone who knows the game better.

One question I've researched but still can't figure out myself is how level adjustment works. I want to be permitting on race so long as the players can give them a genuinely good back story and really good reason for playing them, and I've noticed the Level Adjustment +3 or whatever number. Does that mean that they have 3 levels in their race before taking any in a class? Like if I started everyone out at level 5, and someone plays a Thri-Kreen ranger, would the +2 level adjustment make him a level 3 ranger with an ECL of 5?

I'll have more questions as I further my preparations for getting the game in order.

Getting the players to get involved in the story isn't impossible if you are playing with people who like that, if they don't then you are shit outta luck and are going to have to roll with it. Requiring the characters to have backgrounds is actually very common and I would encourage it as it allows you give the characters a reason why they are partying up and it also gives potential plot devices.

Level adjustment: If you have a lvl 1 character whose race has a level adjustment of 2 then his effective character level is 3 and for him to level up he would have to reach the exp requirement that it takes to reach level 4.

note: If the race has racial levels you add those to the effective character level as well.

if you've got anymore questions ask away I've got a ton of 3.5 shit memorized, even page numbers for some of it.

If you have people who are acting too goofy then you just have to put your foot down and tell them to knock it off That's whats good about being DM, its your way or the highway. If they keep doing it anyway your pretty much SOL and should find new people to play with.

About the rules, its really not feasible to know every rule, but you should atleast know about all the rules, so then you know where you can look them up. Also, most of the time you can just make minor shit up to keep the game running along.

I'd say the best advice I can give you is to read the DM's Guide, it really is a lot of help to a DM and gives you a lot of good tips and tricks to running a campaign

You kind of have to be careful with plotting your stories too far ahead. The beauty of tabletops is that you can do anything, so you either have to get creative and leave enough leeway that your stories will work no matter what or herd your players down a linear path that they may not care about. It's apparently a common mistake for rookie DMs or young DMs is to try and write the next epic fantasy at the expense of their players fun.

Probably the most difficult thing is making the players regularly fear for their characters lives without actually slaughtering them every time out or making it seem like you're giving them too many breaks.

Also, toss out complex rules to make things flow better.

Bold = Very bad advice. A DM is like the referee you don't really control anything, your players do you're job is to make the game flow smoothly and ensure everyone has a good time.

other than that I pretty much agree with the above.

I doubt I'll be forced to railroad my players, but I'll have a no-bullshit attitude when it comes to metagaming, and pointless dicking around. And if the characters are distracted by the urge to make annoying puns and geeky references, I think the solution to that is to summon an Inevitable and kill them.

I'm not plotting all that far ahead, I just wanted to have an overall quest in mind that's globally effecting enough to start players on an epic journey to learn/stop nefarious plans. Figured that's probably better than spitting out a bunch of little simple quests eventually to make an evil character with a generic world domination plan.

Still working on an idea to give the characters a real reason to team up, rather than chance meeting and characters just going "What the hell, sure. We'll team up to take out these goblins" and then inexplicably not going their separate ways.

Mayhaps you could put less of an emphasis on overpowering combat and reward players some XP for using their brains, avoiding unnecessary battles and for roleplaying in character. Palladium's major system (ironically enough, since it's a munchkin's wet dream) use that kind of thing. Maybe take 1/4 XP off of the regular ways of gaining it and add the final quarter for doing something interesting.

I dunno what the new D&D's experience systems are like though, so mebs they already do it.

aye it does, it's called the CR (challenge rating) system. A challenge can be anything from bypassing a trap or convincing an executioner to not lop your head off. the harder it is, the more exp you get.

Is it in 3rd, 3.5, 4th or all of them?

Shit sounds gud

the CR system is 3.5, 4.0 has a different way of distributing exp.... each trap has its own exp it gives for bypassing, each monster has its own exp for defeating, and there is something called a skill challenge that covers everything else.... honestly, 3.5's was simpler if a bit crunchier.

3.5 is what I know, and what most of the people I know that play know.

As for the rewards system of XP, none of the games I've played so far have bothered really with exp points, it's more like every so often when we finish something big, the group takes a level. I'd love to get rewards for out of combat shit over in-combat stuff on the campaign I'm in now since my class is more suited for out of combat abilities(Beguilers ain't exactly the "blow shit up" magic user).

Shaky as I am on details, I don't know if I want to hop into a system I'm not really familiar with XP, so I'd feel weird putting an unfamiliar system into my game. My original plan was to just give a level on the first day, then two days after that, then three days after that, and so on. But with a reward system in mind, maybe I could dish out levels on a more individual level. Or at leas throw nice items at people for playing good and punish those who fuck around with whatever.

That can work but you have to be careful. If you favor some players more than others the players who aren't getting awesome magical items might become bratty because they aren't getting what everyone else is

Edit: wow I wrote that like I was wasted

what he said ^