How to DM 5e

 I finally understand how to be a DM for 5e. I must embrace my role as Entertainer, Storyteller, Railroad Engineer, Babysitter, and Live-Action Video Game. 5e players want to be spoonfed their "entertainment". And to get the most out of that relationship, I should focus on playing the game I want to play, the story I want to tell, the plot I want to run. The players can go through it at the pace I decide. And here’s the evil part, they love it. They will ALWAYS ask for more.

Today, I ran a 3 hour session of Lost Mines of Phandelver for a 5e group. Normally, when I run LMOP, I let players explore the town of Phandalin, do a short hex crawl on the Sword Coast map, and present to them options on pursuing the goblins or saving their employer or delivering the cart. This time, I didn't do any of that. Well, I kept the hex crawl. But otherwise I pushed  the players from encounter to encounter, with little choice in where they got to go.  And they loved it. They want another game next week. They "like the group dynamic"
Everything I know about RPGs is a lie. I'm Booboo the Clown.

I managed to fill up the group in under an hour by recruiting from a Discord. The players weren't technically mentally stable, but I think they were pretty average for zoomers. When I play AD&D, its exclusively with 40+ year old men. I have never had an AD&D group where the average age was below 39. This group was mostly college or post college adults. There was an almost 50/50 parity between the sexes. And they had all signed up completely at random.

House Rules for 5e

 This is not a typical campaign as I am using a host of variant rules aimed at making this a more engaging and immersive experience. Please read on for details:

Character Creation

Allowed Races: Human, Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Halfling, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, Dragonborn, and Tiefling

Allowed Classes: Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard

Character stats can be generated by using Standard Array or Point Buy.

You may choose starting gold or background equipment for starting equipment.

PHB races and classes only. Subclasses and spells from only one of the following books of your choice: Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, Volo’s Guide to Monsters, and Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.  

Races and Classes not listed above are not allowed in this campaign. No Unearthed Arcana allowed, no homebrew.

Skills

Please only roll skill checks when I call for them. Any skill rolls that I did not call for will result in an automatic failure. 

Persuasion, Deception and Intimidation are not mind-control, they will not function like a Charm Person spell.

Milestone Levels 

Levels will be gained for completing story milestones and time played. The time required per level is shown below:

Tier	Hours of Play to Gain a Level
1	4
2	8
3	12
4	16

Variant Rules

Variant: Encumbrance 

We are using variant encumbrance rules from the PHB.

 If the total weight you carry is 5 times your strength score, your speed drops by 5 feet. If it is 10 times, your speed drops by 20 feet and you have disadvantage on ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws that use Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution.

You cannot automatically convert currency to the most convenient coinage. You have to carry coins individually until you can convert them at a banker or money changer.

Magic Item Variants 

Potion miscibility.

Wands don't recharge and have a finite amount of uses. To "regain" the charges of a wand, you will have to craft it again.

Roleplay

I prefer role-playing over "roll-playing". This means that I will ask you to describe your character's actions before you attempt to roll the dice. I will ignore any dice rolls that I did not call for. 

I generally assume that your character knows as much as you know, so if you have knowledge of the lore and history of a place, item or monster, you can just convey that to the rest of the party. 

I do not follow the "rule of cool".

Death and Recovery

If your character dies, you may create another one of the same level.

How to play solo D&D

The introduction of the 5th edition rules describe the basic gameplay loop of D&D:

1. The DM describes the environment.

2. The players describe what they want to do.

3. The DM narrates the results of the adventurers’ actions.

We can rephrase this into technical jargon as:
1. Content generation
2. Player action
3. Action resolution

To determine how to play solo, we can examine all 3 steps individually and take into account the special considerations of each.

1. Content Generation

In a traditional live game this is the purview of the Dungeon Master, who creates the content of the campaign and expresses it to the players. Conveying the right amount of information is crucial, because if the players know too much then they will not be surprised or challenged, and if they know too little then they will be confused and unable to engage with the game properly. In a solo game, the player and the DM are the same person, so this makes separating the content of the game tricky.

The "Master of Adventures" section of the Dungeon Master's Guide is presented as a toolkit for creating adventures. Many of the options for creating an adventure are presented as tables, and those tables can be used to randomly generate content through the use of dice rolls. 

Randomly generating content through the use of dice rolls and table lookups is a natural method for OSR gamers. The AD&D 1e Dungeon Masters Guide provides three appendices devoted to the random generation of dungeons and wilderness terrain, random determination of monster encounters, and a chapter on random determination of treasure. 

Randomly generating content provides an exciting level of the uncertainty for the solo gamer.

2. Player Action

This is where the actual fun of the game is. This is where the DM asks "What do you do?" Given the world elements, the NPCs, the environment and location your characters are in, your player characters can take their actions. Sometimes the elements of your scene are not clear, and that requires interpretation through a question and answer oracle, or through some guided inspiration like a Tarot deck, but this is where the solitaire gamer can put on their player hat and indulge in the fun.

This is the phase where you put everything together. You can now animate all that content that you previously generated by having your character(s) interact with it all. What happens when they interact with it? Why is it all there? How did it get there? Answering these questions can be useful prompts for writing your character's story.

3. Action Resolution

The 5e system provides a universal mechanic for action resolution, using a d20:

       1. Roll the die and add a modifier
       2. Apply circumstantial bonuses and penalties

       3. Compare the total to a target number

The thresholds for the target number (called Difficulty Classes or DC) are described in plain English, so this system can be used as-is for most in-game task resolution. For the solo gamer, simply determine what you think the DC of an action is, then roll the d20 and add modifiers to see if you succeed.

Most of the action resolution rules in 5e are split between player facing and DM facing rules. The chapters devoted to "Using Ability Scores", "Adventuring", and "Combat" are all technically player facing, while the DMG chapter "Running the game" is for the DM. Simple dice mechanics can be used to cover almost all types of results, and for the rest of the unknown results it is advisable to use some kind of oracle, such as the Mythic GME.

Most solo oracles are devoted to the Action Resolution stage of gameplay. The Mythic GME uses the Fate chart, while other oracles use simple yes or no resolution. A simple d20 roll can also be used as a "yes or no" oracle as well.

Once all success or failure results have been determined, the solitaire player can return to the Content Generation or Player Action stages of the game, to keep playing and continuing the loop.

These three steps cover the "how to play" section of solitaire role-playing, and to know "what to do", the player must adapt the "Three Pillars of Adventure" to solo play, which I discuss further in depth here: https://farooqsgaming.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-three-pillars-of-d-solo.html

Tyranny of Dragonlance

There's a lot in the published Tyranny of Dragons campaign that's nonsensical, and the whole reason is because this storyline is a bad fit for the Forgotten Realms. Stripped of the setting of Faerun, and this adventure is almost exactly the Dragonlance storyline condensed into two volumes. The way to fix the fundamental story flaws is to bring that War of the Lance goodness back into plot.

No, I don't mean bring back Goldmoon and Raistlin.

In the adventure as written, Tiamat is almost an entirely passive entity and if run strictly by the book she should not appear at all at the Well of Dragons, as the Cult of Dragon's plans to resurrect her would be completely thwarted. What fun is that? Instead of such an anticlimactic end, Tiamat should be given a more active role in the story by taking cues from Dragonlance's Takhisis and restored to her place as the main antagonist of the story.

Similarly, Bahamut is not mentioned or used at all in this storyline, and the only time the Metallic Dragons are involved is during a turgidly dull political council scene. Instead of that scene, whisk the players away to Bahamut's castle, in Celestia from 4e's Scales of War adventure path, or Paladine's Glitter Palace, and have the heroes undergo Paladine's tests of worthiness.

The final assault on the Well of Dragons is meant to be a massive clash between the armies of good and the Cult of the Dragon, exactly like the climax to the War of the Lance, but this first publication for 5e lacks any sort of mass combat rules so it all falls by the wayside. Honestly though, I would rather leave it there, as I feel that shoehorning in a mass combat wargame would only detract from the chapter. Contextualize the PCs as a special unit sneaking behind the battle lines while the main forces of good hold off the enemy just long enough to give the players an opening.

The Well of Dragons itself is a terrible dungeon, as it only exists as an area for a large battle and a pit for Tiamat to rise from. Replace it with any of the Temples of Takhisis or Tiamat.

These suggestions change the ending, and in doing so re-contextualizes the whole adventure. Now it truly is an epic battle between good and evil, between the two dragon deities, and not a hodgepodge collection of loose allies from around the Sword Coast fighting a demented cult and some scheming wizards.

To build up to this finale, I sprinkle in references to the two dragon deities and explicitly have their mortal avatars show up in certain instances. For example, Takhisis speaks to Frulam and Cyanwrath in the dragon hatchery just before they are interrupted by the players, and Paladine is encountered during the long caravan ride and offers words of wisdom and caution.

This also resolves my issues with the "half-dragons" introduced in Hoard of the Dragon Queen, as they are clearly meant to be Dragonlance's Draconians, but the official races of 5e have already retrofitted Draconians into the Dragonborn race, so why do half-dragons even exist? Well now they don't, they're just evil dragonborn leading an army of dragon kind in service of the Queen of Dragons.

Retooling Hoard of the Dragon Queen...again Chapter 1

I'm starting to run this campaign again, because I just can't let it go. I posted a retrospective and a "what I would have done better" blog entry earlier, but now that I have more experience as a DM I have a lot harsher criticisms for this module and a lot more restructuring I would want to do.

Starting with Chapter 1, I like the metaplot of this chapter - a dragon attacks a town. It's the stuff of high fantasy and a great set-piece introduction. However the implementation of this chapter is terrible.  The missions and encounters are written to be given to the players in a purely reactive manner. The DM is supposed to spring the encounters on the players in a random order, or have a quest giver NPC, Governer Nighthill, merely give players the missions in sequence, like an NPC in a video game.  I do not like running my games this way and I prefer players to be more proactive and choose the encounters that they are involved in.

I never run the opening as written, where the PCs are assumed to be a random band of adventurers who see Greenest being attacked in the distance, and take it upon themselves (i.e. are railroaded) to help.  Instead, I always use the classic opening - the players meet at an inn. I give them time to introduce themselves and their characters, and form some base level of comfort with each other. Then I tell them that they can hear sounds of an attack outside. The tavern that they're inside is in Greenest.

From there I let the players choose what they want to do. I've given them the basic hook - they're being attacked and the city is burning around them. Whether they choose to fight or flee is up to them. I'm still using some subtle railroading, but its much more interesting than the heavy handed method that the module itself provides.

But I do run one thing as written, which is the first encounter with Linan Swift and her family.  I use this to give the players their first goal - run to the Keep for safety, and it helps me keep them on the rails in a subtle manner.  The usefulness of Linan Swift as the voice of the DM cannot be understated.

But the worst part of the opening chapter is how the players get to the keep. By the book, for every 100 feet the party moves, the DM is to roll for a random encounter, then have those encounters sprung on the players. This is awful, because who is going to measure 100 ft increments? And with what map, the tiny quarter page one in the book? What is there to keep the players from simply making a beeline to the keep?  Instead, I run this sequence as scenes of rioting or street fighting. I have Linan direct the way to the keep, but the party will frequently find their path blocked by fighting, looters, or fires and other hazards. This lets them choose whether to fight or find another way around. Sometimes I let them escape from the bands of kobolds and cultists roaming the streets, sometimes I have them give chase. Eventually the players reach the keep and bargain for entry with the Sergeant of the Guard, where they can finally rest and recover some HP and spells. By this point they should advance from level 1 to 2, and make it a little of the way to level 3. Since level 1 characters are fairly fragile, only one or two encounters are really necessary for them to cross into level 2, and if HP is a concern, a single short rest somewhere in the town should be enough, or the encounters can turn into roleplay or skill challenges instead of combat for XP.  Inside the keep, I offer professional healing services and some minor provisions for the players to replenish their fighting capacity.

The advice in the DMG is that players should have around 6 encounters per level, one easy, one hard, and four of moderate difficulty. I think that results in a bit too much combat for this chapter, so by granting all players 100XP just for reaching the keep I lower the number of encounters necessary to level up by two. Using the option to grant players XP for saved civilians also lowers the necessary requirement, and boosts them on their way to level 3. 

This means that the missions in the Keep bring the characters along the way to level 3. Honestly, I only run 3 of the encounters in this chapter - the secret tunnel with the swarm of rats, an optional save the mill, sanctuary or sally port, whichever is the player's choice, and the dragon assault. After the dragon assault, the players engage in the duel with Cyanwrath. With these 3-4 encounters, the players can make it just shy of level 3 and prepare themselves for Chapter 2.

As I said before, I think the assault on Greenest is a fantastic set piece battle, but the actual direction for running it in the book is lacking. By restructuring it so that players have more freedom of choice and more agency in their character actions, and by keeping a closer eye to the mechanical details of XP progression and encounter challenge, the event becomes much more enjoyable for the players, much less frustrating for the GM, and a better springboard into the larger campaign.

A brief of different editions of D&D for solo

AD&D 1e is the best edition for solitaire play. It not only comes with a section on "Random dungeon generation for solo play", but with the Random Wilderness Generation table, it can also be used for solo wilderness exploration, and the many, many other charts can easily be adapted into random generators as well. This means you can randomly create whole towns, npcs in detail, encounters, and even new monsters and magic items. Using all this content generation with the random encounter chances, and the solo player can readily simulate the procedural creation and exploration of a roguelike videogame, such as the Diablo series.

AD&D 1e is a very rules-heavy game, and has many subsystems governing player actions, and many rules for resolving those actions. This makes adjudicating certain situations just a matter of following the guidance in the book, and whole games could be played without any external resources. Although, AD&D does place a lot of importance on the role of the Dungeon Master, but those situations that the book does not cover can be filled in with a GM emulator, such as the Mythic GME.  This, however, means that playing AD&D solo is excruciatingly slow, and requires a lot of bookkeeping.

D&D BECMI is very similar to AD&D but is much simplified. In fact, many of the rules and systems described in BECMI have a direct counterpart in AD&D, but with simpler mechanics.  What the BECMI rulebooks are missing, though, is a random method for creating a map or a dungeon, but they do suggest a procedural method for creating one, and then randomly stocking them with monsters, treasures and traps in the case of dungeons, or with random encounters in the wilderness. The Expert book also comes with maps of Threshold, Karameikos and the Known World, so maybe creating a custom map is unnecessary when the player can follow the adventuring rules to gallivant across the prebuilt setting.  The looser nature of the D&D rules means that the player is freer to pursue any imagined course of action, without consulting the rules, and without needing a die roll for everything.

5th Edition D&D is built upon the chassis of the d20 system, and as such has a universal system of conflict resolution, which the AD&D and OD&D systems lack. 5e's basic method for handling any situation is to assign it a "Challenge Rating", and then resolve success based on the roll of a d20, modified by ability and skill scores.  This makes the base system much easier to learn and run, and provides an elegant solution to any unknown situation. The 5e DMG also took cues from the 1e AD&D DMG, and contains charts and tables for random generation and stocking of content. The dungeon generation chart in particular is more balanced than its 1e counterpart. 5e is more story oriented than 1e, though, and as a result has a section devoted to generation of quests, NPC motivations, and plot twists. This could theoretically elevate the nature of the game from the procedural dungeon crawling focus of the earlier games to one more goal oriented, but I haven't actually tested it out.

5e is also an evolution upon 3e D&D, but is a lot lighter on the rules. An explicit design choice in 3e was to reduce the role of the DM from the adjudicator of all scenarios to a referee of the rules, and there were rules for many, many scenarios. The rules heavy nature of 3e makes it more workable to facilitate a game solo as there are a lot less unknowns. 3.5e and Pathfinder are still popular choices when it comes to tabletop roleplaying, but I've never played them.

Best review

http://dungeonofsigns.blogspot.com/2015/12/lost-mines-of-phandelver-review.html

Bounded accuracy

This feature alone makes 5e a better system than 4e, which had level dependent scaling defenses and accuracy