This is an idea that I first heard about from Scott Rehm, The Angry GM. You can find a link to his blog over there on the right in my sidebar.
You have heard how cool this odd little game is, a game that has been around for decades, and so you set out to play. Okay, so the game needs players, and you have friends who have said they will play, but you also need a Dungeon Master, but no one else is available to do this. Your friends point out that this is your idea, you should be the DM, so you buckle down and take over the role. Or, as is more likely, you find a local gaming group that is already playing D&D, and begin playing. After a while, the original DM of the group starts feeling burnout and you get the itch to take over. Either way, you now want (need/have to/told your buddies that you will and now you're stuck) to run a game of D&D, so how do you do it?
As a conscientious gamer, you immediately go to the 5e core books to see what needs be done. The Player's Handbook is for players, obviously, and while necessary to the DM as well, not at all helpful in creating a dungeon/campaign. Likewise, the Monster Manual is full of nasty things to throw at your players, and even ideas of how better to use said monsters, but no great help on how to create a campaign. Ah, of course, the Dungeon Master's Guide, that's what you need! But wait - other than some very broad, general information that will be useful later on in your fledgling campaign, there's really nothing concrete here to teach you how to create a campaign, much less a basic dungeon. Even the starting box, the basic adventure Lost Mine of Phandelver, while it does give you a starting dungeon and adventure plot to run, still fails to teach you how to make your own dungeon.
Back in the early, early days of our little hobby, even when I was a wee little sprout, TSR (the creators/publishers of D&D at the time) redid their beginning box for Basic D&D, something that had been out for most of a decade at that point, and had a gentleman named Frank Mentzer do the heavy lifting on the rewrite. This is important because in the Dungeon Masters Rulebook side of the Set 1 Basic Rules (TSR 1011B, published 1983), Mr Mentzer gives you a 3-level dungeon for your first game. But he doesn't just give it to you, he makes you earn it. "Here's the first level," he writes, "this is what to say, here's the map, and these are the monsters." That's when the hand holding stops and the learning begins. "Okay," he continues, "you've got the first level, here's the map for the 2nd level and here's a list of monsters, you need to put them around the map and come up with your own descriptions." The training wheels have come fully off, and now he puts you right out there in traffic. "Great, now that you know all that, here's the bad guy for the 3rd and last level. Create a map for this level, don't forget to draw in the lair of said bad guy, come up with the treasure, the other monsters on the level, and all the descriptions." Isn't that better than just throwing you into the deep end?
I have to admit that even though I started playing D&D after this particular edition of the Red Box came out, I did not see it until the Angry GM pointed it out in the past couple of years. For the longest time I had 2nd hand, hand-me-down leftover random books, none of them from this printing, and by the time I got around to buying my own books, D&D had moved on to 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and so had I. And I also have to admit that while I've called out 5th Edition specifically in this rant blog post, D&D has never done anything like this since 1983. At least 5e is still being published, so they could easily rectify this and update the DMG or Lost Mine of Phandelver. The more I think about it, with the resources in the DMG to create encounters based on Challenge Rating, rewriting Phandelver to more resemble Mentzer's intro dungeon teaching lesson would be the best way to go, and wouldn't cost WotC all that much to develop and reprint.
{hmmm} That gives me an idea. Part of the creation of this blog was I wanted to share the 3.5 to 5e adventure conversions I have been doing for my current 5e game. Stay tuned for those, in addition to the game reports you've already seen me post up, and maybe I'll also start toying around with how I'd rewrite Phandelver to be more of a teaching tool than it currently is.
Until Wizards of the Coast steps up and does it themselves (or I finally get around to it), I cannot recommend enough this series of videos from another online, old gamer like me, Mr Matt Colville:
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