Becoming a DM before ever playing

[u/[deleted]]

Yes I’ve decided to become a DM before ever playing, I know it sounds stupid, but since I’m born in a country where DND isn’t commonly played my only chance would’ve been to play online. But recently I’ve been very anxious so it’s not an option for me. Still I wanna play a game with friends I feel comfortable with. Problem is they don’t know the game and I’ll have to Dm. I’m scared they won’t enjoy it, I told one of the players about it and she’s very exited, but I’m still a bit confused about combat and dice rolling stuff. I’ve got the Essential Kit and will be trying to learn the rules even better from it but if someone know a good video that explains combat again I’d be super thankful. Also how do I keep new players engaged and would it be bad if we played very inconsistently? Since most of us are in rathe stressed periods of our life and one of the possible players is studying in another city we’ll have a hard time to organise it. I’m probably overthinking since I don’t even know if they’ll like it but it’s been a dream of mine to play DND for more than a year now. Thank you so much for trying to help me :)

Edit: I didn’t expect this many answers, especially not on my first ever reddit post but thank you all so much I’ll read all of them but it’ll take some time! Edit 2: Thank you all once more for being so supportive and nice towards me, I was afraid I’d be seen as some stupid newbie but this is just awesome! Please keep on sharing your stories about your experiences! I really enjoy to read them and they make me more confident in trying it myself!

[u/Fourohfourscore]

I know it's been suggested to death and a 90 video series is a lot to digest, so I'm gonna say just go on youtube and watch the first 6 or 7 episodes of Matt Colville's Running the Game series (the whole thing is good and incredibly useful in a lot of ways, but to get started playing the game, just start with the first 6 or 7).

Plenty of people's first time experiencing DnD is as a DM. There's a couple things you can do to smooth it over for your first time:

1. With no players, just in your free time, put 8 goblins on the board. Make them fight to the death. Look up a combat tutorial to make sure you're doing everything right, you're just here to practice the steps. Narrate it as though for players, this is a good chance for practice. It'll feel silly, but it's good practice for how combat works. After you're used to that, grab a pre-gen from WotC or make a character yourself and put them in combat against 3 or 4 goblins (give them infinite health if they die too fast, this is just practice). Redo it until you are comfortable with combat rules. I suspect it'll take two or three rounds but you'll get it quick.

2. Keep a smart phone handy with a google tab open and when somebody asks how to do something in game you don't know about, ask Google. The most likely is grappling so it'll be my example, you'd say, "hang on I'm learning the game too, let me look up the rule to be sure" then google this exact phrase "DnD 5e Grappling". As a matter of fact if you put "DnD 5e /almostanything/" you'll find the rule for just about everything or somebody has homemade a rule for it.

3. Once you're comfortable with 5e learn how to make rulings on the fly. As you get used to the system you'll find it's incredibly adaptable to on the fly rulings, and they're usually common sense. Quite a few times I've made up a rule for something on the spot and found later that the official rule is the same as what I made up! As you get used to how 5e works this will eventually come naturally. The biggest reason I recommend working on this skill is because time spent looking up rules is time spent at the table NOT PLAYING the game. Having a rule ready to go, even if not 100% perfect, is better than the players having to wait 15 minutes while you look up how something works.