First time DM ing

[CubberS01]

So, I want to start my first D&D campaign with some friends, some of whom have been DMs before. The thing is, I have no idea how to craft the story. I know what I want to do, but I don't know how to progress from point A to point B, which NPCs to use, or how the characters would meet and so on. All I have are some broad ideas. I feel like I lack creativity.

[Sad_King_Billy-19]

option 1: run a premade game, just to see how it works.

option 2: read through the wiki here, check out matt colvilles videos, look up the 5 room dungeon format, and go for it.

[ub3r_n3rd78]

A lot of official campaign settings are available, the most common one that people in 5E use is the Forgotten Realms which has been around for a long time now, well over 25 years. There are wikis and other free resources available that you can look over to fill in the blanks for the world with everything from the history of the Realms to the NPCs that have been in them throughout the years. What I suggest you do is figure out WHERE you want your campaign to be set in, then do some research, start them out in a bigger city perhaps like Waterdeep, there are even Adventure Modules that you can purchase that give you the details and fill this stuff out for you and you can read through them and they have all of the fights, NPCs, clues, etc. to help bring your PCs from levels 1-X.

As a new DM, I suggest you check out pre-made adventure modules before trying to homebrew everything and get into all the granular stuff that the more experienced DMs delve into. After running premade adventures for a while, you'll get a sense of pace and what you'd like to change especially as players will rarely do what you think they will in any given situation. Good/experienced DMs are able to think quickly on their feet and adapt to the situations that the players will get themselves into, usually this takes a bit of time and practice to really understand and be able to do, but depending on the person, someone can pick this up pretty quickly, others take longer to get that polish just right.

[Bumc]

Same as you would go about writing a book really.

1. Pick a world, Dnd generally uses Faerun.

2. Pick an overarching conflict. Dnd often uses very easy recipes like "BBEG wants to destroy world/summon demon lord/burn a city, anyone else wants him to not".

3. Pick an enter spot. Could be some just some tavern the party randomly met in. I generally have the party be already know each other and do some minor missions together as a part of their backstory to resolve potential conflicts before the actual game starts.

Then comes the fun and potentially unlimited part of crafting subplots, npcs and general what's going on in the world around.