Tabletop RP: Newbie DM

I started playing D&D oh… three years ago, or close to it. My group has finished one campaign and has started several others. I don’t know why, but I thought it was a good time for me to start trying to DM a campaign myself. Part of it was because our usual DM needed the time for himself due to personal issues, and the other person who usually DMed needed more time to plan. But I had a story concept, and I thought I could manage it.

Of course, there’s layers of complexity to this that I was nervous about and really proved early on to be a problem. Almost every person sitting at the table has DMed before. It’s hard to give up control, and it’s also hard for me to sometimes handle them. They are used to being able to tell me as a player that I can’t do something, or telling me as a fellow player not to do something. I’ve already had one issue with one of the players, and I’m waiting to see if he does it again. Because if he does, I’m going to have to ask the other players if we want to just pause the game till he gets his attitude in check (yes, it got that bad). There’s the problem of them bringing up the monsters on the DnD wiki, something I never really did as a player, since it felt like cheating. That might just be me being sensitive, in fact I near guarantee that it is, but it’s a real blow to a DMs confidence, especially a new one.

Another problem is the fact that there are several classes in this campaign that I’m not familiar with. I went ahead and gave them a few levels to start with as well as making them gestalt. Part of this is because of where I’m taking the story, I needed them to have the power only being gestalted could give them. But some of these classes are outside of my knowledge range, and while I can conceivably figure them out, it’s hard here in the early stages to make sure I’m utilizing each of the classes to their full effect.

I’m also running out of side quests to send them on. It’s a merc style campaign with smaller quests to keep them busy rather than just traveling between the main areas. I’ve at least got solutions to this. I’m going hunting for my Zelda books and checking out WoW and Guild Wars websites for ideas.

Overall, I guess it’s going as well as it could for my first time campaigning. I’m hoping it smooths out the longer it runs…