How to run your first D&D session

By Charlie Suits

Your first session is not judged on the story. It is judged on whether five people say yes to a second one. That is a much smaller problem than it feels like at three in the morning the night before, and almost all of it is decided by preparation you can do in an evening.

Prepare one evening, not one world

The instinct is to build a continent. Don't. A first session needs one place, one problem and three people who live there. Anything past that is prep you will not use, and prep you did not use is the main reason new Dungeon Masters burn out before session four.

• One location. A village, a mine, a ship. Small enough that the party cannot wander out of your notes in the first hour.
• One problem with a deadline. Something is happening, and it gets worse on its own if nobody moves. A deadline is what turns a setting into a session.
• Three named people. One who wants the party's help, one who is lying, and one who is just fun to talk to. Give each a voice, a want, and one physical detail you can repeat.
• One fight, prepared properly. Know the monsters' hit points, armour class and what they do on their turn, written on one page. Looking that up mid-combat is where the energy goes.

Write it on a single sheet. If your notes do not fit on one page, you have prepared for a campaign, not a session.

Decide the character question before anyone shows up

You have two options and they are both fine. Hand out pre-generated characters, which gets you to the table in ten minutes and is the right call for a group who have never played. Or run a session zero first and build characters together, which is more work and pays for itself over a long campaign.

What does not work is telling five first-time players to "make a character" on their own before the game. You will spend ninety minutes of your first session doing character creation badly, in parallel, while everyone else waits.

The first ten minutes decide the session

Do not open with the party meeting in a tavern and deciding what to do. Open in the middle of something: the wagon has already stopped, the door is already open, the shouting has already started. New players do not know what they are allowed to do, and a scene already in motion tells them.

Then go round the table by name and give each person one thing to react to, one at a time. The quietest player at the table is not bored; they are waiting to be invited. Asking "what does your character do?" directly, early, and to each of them in turn is the single most useful habit a new DM can build.

The four things that will actually go wrong

• Someone asks a rules question you cannot answer. Make a ruling out loud, say you will check after, and move. A wrong ruling costs nothing. A ten-minute rulebook search costs the scene.
• The table goes quiet. Have an NPC ask them a direct question. Silence is almost always people being unsure it is their turn, not people being bored.
• A player pulls in a direction you have not prepared. Let them go, and put the thing you prepared where they went. The players cannot tell the difference, and you will never win by steering them back.
• Combat drags. Cut the last round. When the fight's outcome is no longer in doubt, describe the finish and move on. Nobody has ever complained that a fight ended too soon.

Run shorter than you think

Aim for two and a half to three hours for a first session, and end on purpose, at a moment where something is about to happen. Ending because everyone is tired teaches the table that the game is long. Ending on a cliffhanger while people still have energy is what makes them ask when the next one is.

Do the one thing afterwards that most DMs skip

Message each player individually within a day and ask what their favourite moment was. Two things come back: you find out what they actually enjoyed, which is usually not what you thought, and you get an answer you can build the next session out of. It takes five minutes and it is worth more than an hour of prep.

If you want the structured version

Everything above is what our Dungeon Masters tell people who ask before their first game. If you would rather not assemble it from scratch, Crit Fails Academy is the same material in order, with a video library, a Discord of DMs at every level, and weekly office hours where you can ask about the specific thing that went wrong at your table last week. It is $25 a month, and it is free while you are running an active table through our community.

And if you would rather watch one run properly before you run your own, that is what a seat at one of our tables is for.