The 6 Step Guide to Designing the Perfect First Dungeons & Dragons Session for New Players

How to ensure the very first game experience for brand new players is magical, memorable, and fun

First things first: The Elephant in the Room, and convincing new players to join that first session…

Let’s talk about Dungeons and Dragons and first-time players for a second. We need to first understand this from the point of view of the outsider looking in.

Dungeons & Dragons has a lot of rules. It has a lot of abstract gaming concepts that many people aren’t familiar with. Role-playing and theater of the mind are difficult to grasp without having experienced them before. Also, unlike most tabletop games, D&D has no clear way of ‘winning.’

One of the most common questions people who have not played before ask is “so how do you win?” Well, there is no way of winning, we just sit around a table, tell a collaborative story together, eat snacks and have fun. For a lot of people, that is a very strange concept.

So what do you do? If you are an experienced DM, an aspiring DM, or even a D&D player willing to try DMing for a new group of players because you’ve been itching to play it again so badly! The best advice I can give you is to first find like-minded people you already know, and then try to convince them. I’d always recommend playing with people you know rather than strangers just for the simple fact that you know you already get along, and you know what the group dynamic is. This is especially important when you’re running the game. So friends or family who you know enjoy board games is a great place to start. Then, start with a small group, say 2 or 3 players, and ask them:

“Do you want to try a game of D&D? I’d love to run a game for you. I’ll set everything up, we can do it one afternoon or evening, get some drinks and food in, and at the end of it you can decide if you want to play again. Whatever happens, it will be a bit of fun, and all you need to do is to take a few minutes to create a basic character online.”

Hopefully, that’s enough to convince a few people to give it a shot. Then, once you have those 2 or 3 players, and have the first session in the diary, you can get stuck into designing your first session, and your story.

Here is my step-by-step guide to designing, writing, and running that perfect first session for first-time Dungeons & Dragons players.

Step 1: Create a simple and contained setting to start from.

To start out your planning for a new campaign, I often find it best to start with an idea, or a feeling of how you want your session to play. But don’t be afraid to ask your new players what kind of setting or adventure they’d like to play through as well.

Start from a concept, or a feeling, of how you want your world to be, and follow it up with something that makes that location interesting. Something like:

• An arid desert, filled with tombs, oasis’, and secrets. Where sleepy, walled merchant outposts shelter themselves from relentless sandstorms, as a suspicious religion begins to take hold of the people…
• A fishing village set on the frigid coastline of an icy region in the north, where the fishing has all but dried up, and the residents have been getting slowly more and more ill…
• A series of jungle-covered islands set against the backdrop of blue lagoons and lawless ports and coves, where a mysterious disappearance has everyone talking…

Once you’ve got that, it’s time to think of a starting location. This should be the place that your characters meet. Somewhere contained, in a place of relative safety. And don’t be afraid to avoid the traditional fantasy tavern…

Some ideas:

• A campsite where travellers have come together for the night
• An abandoned location, which each party member has come to explore for their own reasons
• A village or town meeting, led by a member of the community, which each party member is attending (or even running or speaking at)

Now onto the characters themselves…

Step 2: Get your players to set up a character on D&D Beyond using the quick creation tool, but ask them for two particular details…

One of the best things about Dungeons & Dragons is creating a shared story together, but one where everyone feels like they are on their own adventure.

A lot of the time for new campaigns with experienced players, everyone will create elaborate backstories with incredible depth and detail, but for a new campaign, with new players, you don’t need that. You just need two details about each person’s character, something simple enough to ask over a text message.

All you need to ask is WHAT does your character want, and WHY do they want it.

My tip here is just to keep it simple, and guide them with suggestions if they need. Something like this:

• My character wants to find her long lost sister, because she was supposed to return home years ago, but never came back.
• My character wants to go on a grand adventure, because he has always been protected by his parents, and wants to finally explore the world for himself
• My character wants to find a vast amount of wealth and fame, because they were always bullied as a child and want to prove they are more than their past

Help your players or provide examples if you need to, but ideally your players should think of this themselves. If they do they’ll feel more attached to this goal, and they’ll feel more motivated to achieve it. Once you’ve got that from each player, you’ve got the keys to creating the story of your first session…

Step 3: Create an inciting incident, that fits your character's motivations, and creates a CLEAR goal for everyone.

So you’ve got your setting and starting location, you’ve got your characters and their basic motivations.

Now is the fun part. Now you get to screw things up for your players…

The next part of the planning is to create the inciting incident. This is the thing that goes wrong, the event that forces the players to react, and ideally ties into some of the characters motivations.

Here is an example based on one of the previous settings and character motivations:

• The players bump into each other inside the entrance chamber of a recently abandoned temple in the desert. They introduce themselves to each other but after exchanging pleasantries the lit sconces around the edge of the room slowly start to go out one by one, until they are left in pitch darkness. As the characters explore the now dark room they hear something from the darkness that sounds like a woman in pain. They light a torch and then one of the players finds a broken necklace and some blood on the floor by the wall where one of the now unlit sconces is. You tell another player they recognise the necklace, it belonged to their sister, the same sister they havn’t seen in years. The last player clocks that it looks expensive. Maybe they can find this person and make some money. The player who recognised the necklace now wants to find this person as it might be their long lost sister, and the other player wants to explore to finally have his own adventure.

This incident should ideally bring the players together, tie into each of their motivations, and put them in a situation where they, at least for this session, have to work together.

Next up, how to direct them through the session…

Step 4: Create one NPC that starts with the players, that you play

This is another fun bit. The bit where you get to play a character as the DM alongside your players.

As a side note, if you’re nervous about being the Dungeon Master for the first time or think that playing a character as the DM will make you forget notes or story, then I would potentially recommend skipping this step. But, if you can, stick with it, I’d highly recommend it, and it’ll make that session all the more fun!

For me, creating an NPC to play alongside the players as a DM for the first session serves two key purposes:

1. It gets new players familiar with the role-playing aspects of the game, and you can tailor how heavy you go with the role-playing based on how your players react to you engaging them in-game with this non-player character
2. It allows you to showcase high stakes to your characters without them having to take the brunt of it. The key one here being death. If this character dies, or comes close to death, no big deal for you, but for you characters it will be an emotional rollercoaster, and hopefully one that sticks with them in a really positive way! Remember that time we saved Jorrick’s life in the first session. Of course you do! It was EPIC.

So what should your story actually consist of? Well…

Step 5: Design a mostly linear story, where you introduce one key D&D concept at a time through planned encounters.

The key here is to design a few small encounters, that introduce most of the mechanics of the game through your players playing, as opposed to just being told rules.

Ideally I would recommend creating something like:

• One combat encounter that is trivial, but long enough for each player to have at least one turn, to teach the mechanics of combat
• One social encounter that has multiple routes to success, and has some reliance on skill checks
• One puzzle encounter that has multiple routes to success, and has some reliance on skill checks or character abilities
• One trap or unexpected event that can be disarmed, spotted or revealed in multiple ways

Each of these encounters gives the players an overview of how something in the game functions, its mechanics, but does so in a way where the players are engaged in the act of playing.

Keep the encounters snappy, imagine you’re designing for a 3 or 4 hour session, so each encounter should be about 30–60 minutes worth of time. Aim for the lower end of that scale as invariably players will chat amongst themselves, or something you thought would be quick will take a much longer amount of time. There’s no harm in ending a session earlier than planned, but one that drags on is not going to leave a positive taste in the first-time player’s mouth!

Then, for the grand finale…

Step 6: Write a mini-boss encounter for the end of your first session, and write the end of that encounter as a plot twist or something unexpected.

Here’s an example based on the previous story we had created, where the players found themselves in a darkened temple, looking for what could potentially be the wealthy long lost sister of one of the players.

• The players come face to face with a demonic, possessed woman. A woman who is the long lost sister one of them was looking for, but is being controlled by a demonic force beyond her control. During the fight the players exorcise the demon from the players character’s sister, but the demon then turns on the party, trying to possess the NPC you are playing alongside the players. Then, instead of helping them like they’d expect from their long lost sister, she instead flees the battle, running for the exit.

Create a final encounter that is the following:

1. Challenging for the players! This is the first real challenging fight in-game, where the stakes are higher. Make sure it’s difficult enough to feel like a challenge. Use CR of at least the players level for this, and if you choose to push it up a little more, just don’t go too high.
2. Ties in with one of the players stories! Use something from their motivations or goals to create a boss that is intrinsically linked to one of the characters
3. Allows you to throw a curved ball at the final hour! The final climax of any story, or session, or even encounter can be very emotional, so heighten that experience by throwing in a curved ball or unexpected twist at the final moments. Just make sure it is properly balanced. It should not throw everything the players have worked for out the window, but it should be just enough change for the players to question what they know.

Bonus Step! Write a session introduction which helps introduce each of the player’s characters to everyone

One of my favourite things to do to start a campaign is to write a great story introduction that covers a few things off. This really gets the players into the story, and ready to start playing, rather than having the beginning of the session go slowly whilst everyone tries to get to grips with things!

I usually like to write an introduction that covers:

• A brief overview of the world the characters inhabit with relevant details (try not to write reams of world background here! Nobody needs to know that yet)
• A detailed description of the specific place in the world that the characters inhabit right now. This is the location that they start
• A quick intro to what each character is doing. One that allows you to lead into the question ‘so [character name], could you introduce yourself to everyone?’

This firstly allows you to give the players context about the world they inhabit, and fill in general information about it that everyone would know. It also allows you to get everyone’s senses going about the starting location. What it looks like, smells like, what atmosphere the environment gives off and how each of the characters feel or are behaving within that space.

But secondly, and most importantly, it allows you to give each player space to talk about themselves to everyone else through their character, rather than as themselves, introducing themselves as someone would if you were first meeting them. If you need to you can guide the players a bit here. Say “just some rough information about what you’re doing and what your character looks like along with your character name.” Or something else depending on what your players get stuck on!

And there you have it! The (hopefully) ‘perfect’ first D&D session for new players. Have fun, and let me know how yours have gone below! I’d love to hear from other DMs about how you run sessions for first time players!