Hehe, don't worry, you're not the first person to join the forum asking for help about being a DM. In fact, the last time someone did that, they only made one post then never came back. However, that thread sort of mutated into a general talk about tabletop RPing and out of it I ended up finding a gaming club close to where I live, and another member on here (Beowuuf) started running a PbP game using DnD rules sort of combined with those of the game, DM, to which this forum is dedicated. Another game is due to start after that one finishes. I've also fairly recently (like, a couple of months ago) started running a game myself over Skype which is turning out pretty fun
. I don't think I could do it over tabletop though
.
Don't feel like you have to bugger off back where you came from just because this forum isn't quite what you thought it was - some of us here do play tabletop RPGs, including DnD. Not everyone here likes 4th edition but I certainly do and in fact have played a bit of the Shadowfell campaign you mention - my dad was running it for a few of us at home but we didn't get very far (due to certain circumstances coming up). I can remember entering a dungeon and (as I played a Rogue, my usual character choice) sneak-attacking a goblin standing on guard - I think I critted but I'm not sure, anyway the gobby ran away and it turned out after we killed some other gobbies and then found the first one hiding round the corner and finished him off that I'd managed to reduce him to
1hp in that single shot!
Anyway, last thing I can remember doing in that campaign is meeting a goblin called Splug. And that's as far as we got
.
I like 4th edition 'cause it's nice and simple and you don't have to make loads of calculations and remember tons of stuff every time you want to do something (ever played any of the Warhammer 40k games? Aarrgh). Those people who aren't so keen on it tend to be of the opinion that it's "dumbed down", and one person I know says it's apparently good for dungeon crawls but no good for anything else. In the game I'm running at the moment (which has only one player but who plays two characters, and I play two more to give a bigger party so I can throw more stuff at them
) we haven't been in any dungeons yet. I think we've had 17 sessions so far (something like that), ranging from about two hours to more like seven per session, and only had four fights. There's been looooads of dialogue and hanging around in a village sorting stuff out and stuff, but we're having fun and it's going fine - I'm not forcing the party to stay where they are or anything, it's just sort of turned out that way with them deciding to speak to certain NPCs and stuff. Game might well speed up a bit soon once they leave this village - they're still in "newbie land" atm really
. I'm not using a pre-written adventure, or anything - it's one I'm entirely making up myself. If you want to get some indication as to how I run my games, feel free to check out the OP page for it (game is called "The Nature of Things" and my username on there is the same as it is here) if you should feel so inclined to do so
.
And feel free to stick around the forum if you want - I'm happy to talk 4th edition with you for as long as you want
. Do you have the character builder? I don't like the new version - it's online-only so you have to have a paid subscription in order to activate it, as you do with the new version of the Adventure Tools - I have the old versions of both and though they're not updated any more they're still perfectly fine for what I want to do
.