The Player’s Handbook does a good job of explaining the dynamic of a D&D game, with DMs presenting the world and various scenarios to players, who then choose what their characters do in that world. The dice and the DM are there to arbitrate those choices and determine the characters’ successes and failures.
Usually, adventures should be designed in terms of balancing the three pillars of play (combat, exploration and social encounters), considering monster ratings vs. party power and complications like side quests and twists to make things less straightforward. Chapter 3 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide has a lot of information about the steps of creating great adventures, including structure, villains, encounters and complications.
To start an adventure, the first thing you could do is to choose a primary antagonist. There are many cool monsters in books like the Monster Manual, Volo’s Guide to Monsters, the Tome of Beasts that you can use as a reference.
Here are a few points to keep in mind that will help you come up with quests quickly and simply
- Pick a monster you think is cool
- Consider what the monster might be up to
- What’s their goal?
- What is directing the monster’s actions?
- What sort of environment does the monster live in?
- Pick a handful of allies for the monster
- Do they have a more powerful boss?
- Do they have bestial minions?
- Do they have any allies to help accomplish their goals?
- Develop three short quests based on the pillars of play
- One focused primarily on combat
- One focused primarily on exploration
- One focused primarily on social interaction
- Sprinkle elements of the other two pillars in each quest
- Keep the monster’s goals in mind, but let the players guide the story
- After a session, think about how the players’ actions affected the monsters goals
- Give the players options, even if limited
- Avoid railroading
- Point B can become Point A – players will never know!
Below are also some basic guidelines that could be useful at the moment of managing your adventure.
A post in the MadLair blog [2] explains a houserule to make exploration fun and challenging. The general idea is to prepare a chart with the possible encounters of that area and assume that something will happen unless the players prepare themselves to avoid that. The DM sets up the encounters and some possible solutions for them, then asks the players to prepare themselves.
The flow is as follows:
- First, define the objective of the exploration. For example: cross the Black Forest.
- Then build a chart (aka exploration chart) with the possible encounters during the crossing and the odds of facing
them according to a roll of 1d20 but considering only rolls from 2-16 since 1 and 17-20 are reserved for something else
(more details below).
- Now think about possible actions to avoid these encounters (ideally at least 1 action per player). Assume that something will happen unless the players prepare themselves to avoid these encounters.
- Ask the players to prepare themselves. One player at a time, in any order the players agree on, they will propose one and only one action to help the group avoid the mentioned scenarios above. Assign a DC (Difficulty Class) to each possible solution.
- After the preparations, each player rolls a skill check related to their action, with advantage if the action is a narrative follow-up of the previous player’s action. If the player uses a resource that they can recover with a rest (a rage, a channel divinity, a spell slot, etc) an automatic success is gained and no roll is required.
- Then roll 1d20 and follow the exploration chart. In other words:
- With a result of 1 – something bad happens and brings some damage (hp damage, exhaustion, HD loss). Then roll again
- With a result between 2 and 16 – one of the encounters happen if no one was successful in avoiding it.
- With a result between 17 and 19 – roll for a random encounter (which can still be avoided by clever thinking)
- With a result of 20 – everything goes better than as expected and no one gets hurt
- The challenge is completed after the players have faced whatever was indicated by the previous roll.
As Derek Myers mentions in their post [3] about social encounters, there are two main ways to design these encounters: a fast way (as fillers between fights) or a detailed one (with more opportunities to role-play and develop PC).
For social encounters that are going to be quick, there’s no need to go into much more detail.it's usually enough just providing each NPC with a name, and determining their sex and race. Anything else is kind of a wasted effort. After all, as soon as the PCs have whatever they’re looking for they’ll move on.
Encounters created the fast way are usually short skill challenges and only require a few successes (challenge level 1 or 2, so 4 or 6 successes respectively). Since it doesn’t take most parties very long to accumulate the required successes these encounters don’t need the same level of detail as more complex social interactions.
When the encounter is more detailed, you might need to paint all NPCs with the “equally important” brush, otherwise, the PCs would know if the NPC they were talking to is important or not just by how they are described. You need to come up with a baseline and work on more detail than just their name, sex, and race. You can work on a secondary details layer, that includes appearance, clothing, weapons, and a high-level overview of their personality.
It's absolutely not necessary to state out each NPC. You can just note which skills these NPCs are good at either because they’re trained or because they had a high score in the relevant ability and use your judgment to determine the appropriate DC based on the role-playing and the situation at hand.
For the more important NPCs (those that had more significant interactions with the PCs) you might need to stat out some details, especially if they might be engaged in a combat situation. In this case, you can determine their hit points, defenses and basic attacks.
In order to keep the NPCs straight, you can create cheat sheets. Build one power card for every NPC (similar to the character sheets) providing their basic information. Also include things this NPC would talk about, like what juicy tidbits they might reveal as well as some red herrings.
- Saving Throws: Are generally used when your character cannot prepare for something.
- Ability Check: Test a character’s or monster’s innate talent and training in an effort to overcome a challenge they initiate.
- Contests: Are ability checks used when one character's or monster's efforts are directly opposed to another's.
- Passive Checks: Used to save time by making anything a check of 10 + Skill Bonus (+5 advantage and -5 disadvantage).
- Helping: You can help someone perform a skill, if you have proficiency in it. It is just an advantage roll.
- Group Checks: Everyone gets to roll an ability check and if at least half succeed, the group succeeds.
Each ability covers a broad range of capabilities, including skills that a character or a monster can be proficient in. A skill represents a specific aspect of an ability score, and an individual's proficiency in a skill demonstrates a focus on that aspect.
- Strength
- Athletics
- Dexterity
- Acrobatics
- Sleight of Hand
- Stealth
- Intelligence
- Arcana
- History
- Investigation
- Nature
- Religion
- Wisdom
- Animal Handling
- Insight
- Medicine
- Perception
- Survival
- Charisma
- Deception
- Intimidation
- Performance
- Persuasion
| Task Difficulty | DC |
|---|---|
| Very easy | 0 |
| Easy | 5 |
| Average | 10 |
| Tough | 15 |
| Challenging | 20 |
| Formidable | 25 |
| Heroic | 30 |
| Nearly impossible | 40 |
Encounter calculators:
- http://dhmstark.co.uk/rpgs/encounter-calculator-5th/
- http://tools.goblinist.com/5enc
- https://donjon.bin.sh/5e/random/#type=Encounter
Random treasure generator:
Random dungeon generator:
D&D 5E Database/API
D&D Collection of traps and hazards