Setting Proper Expectations as a DM: Boundaries, Isekai Campaigns, and More

In this solo episode of TableTalk Friday, we land in the chaotic sweet spot of beginning DMing—setting boundaries, managing player expectations, and embracing creativity. Seth dives into everything from tackling isekai-style campaigns and reining in chaotic groups, to balancing 3D printing prep with player agency. Whether you're about to run your first session or just want tips on smoother table dynamics, this one's got practical advice and real talk.

🎲 Topics Covered:

• Setting clear boundaries at character creation and during play
• Isekai campaign ideas: what works and what doesn’t
• Strategies for improvising when your players derail your prep
• 3D-printing session prep versus empowering player agency
• Choosing beginner-friendly adventures (e.g., Lost Mine of Phandelver, Dragon of Icespire Peak)
• Running D&D in high school or limited-time environments

Whether you're a veteran DM or about to run your first session, this episode is packed with honest advice and entertaining D&D stories.

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Transcript

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Welcome to Table Talk Friday, your weekly dose of D&D banter between three men in a bedroom. If you like their style, come back every Friday for another upload. Now, back to the boys. large questions of D&D advice, and I'm just going to try to give the best advice I can based on my DMing experience and my D&D player experience. So number one is, is it wrong to request that players keep their characters, for lack of a better word, normal? A player has some character ideas that I'm uncomfortable with as the DM, and want to know if I just shouldn't DM if it's an issue for me, or if it's alright to request they choose something a bit more simple. So, it's my first time playing D&D, and I'm jumping into DMing. I've got a campaign planned, and so far have three players, one of which has had an interesting idea for their character. First, they want to be Freddy Fazbear. Hold there, hold there. Is the setting... Five Nights at Freddy's. Okay, we'll continue. Then changed it to just a bear named Frederick. There we go. Okay, that's a little more clarification. Now they've gone and jumped into an entire different body of water saying they want to be a vampire based off the folklore from the movie Sinners. You know, in another episode where I gave more unsolicited D&D advice, I did say that basing... a lot of your stuff off of things that you have seen before is a good idea. Let's continue. When they asked about Freddy, I told them something along the lines of, bro, I ain't comfortable with that right now. I can't even begin to grasp how exactly Freddy Fazbear could be a playable character in D&D and how that'd work. And then they requested to just be a bear named Frederick. Okay. I told them that the issue is is that it's a bear. They said they'll just make a bear named Frederick, as in the, I don't want to say this word, slang, to describe a certain body type in men. Okay, I see what they mean. I said that was fine. Now, they want a sinner's vampire. I really just want a campaign with characters that everyone can understand well enough without having to dig online about folklore or how a GD animatronic works. would go about his life in a D&D campaign. It also just doesn't make sense to me seeing as the campaign is Isekai-themed, and they've all been trucked into the campaign, and the main goal is to get back to where they came from. Hold the phone. You're doing an Isekai campaign. So, okay, I'm not gonna go too hard into this person exactly, but you're doing an Isekai campaign. They can be from wherever, and I think it would make sense. They could be Luke Skywalker getting thrown into this world and having to make it back to the Star War. They could be Naruto needing to return to the Leaf Village. Because as far as I'm concerned, this is an isekai. Sorry for the long post and rantish quality to it. Just a bit frustrated. I just want to know if it's alright to request more simple characters or if I should just not DM if it's an issue for me. Thanks for reading. Okay, I am not going to bust this person's balls too much because they said... I think they said at the beginning, right? First time playing D&D, they're jumping into DMing. That's amazing, dude. When I first started DMing, so first of all, I'm going to say just do it. Just DM it no matter what you DM. But whenever I first started D&D, I also picked up DMing very quick, and I DMed a 11 to 13. I really can't remember how many it was. I think it was 11. I'm going to stick with the number 11 from now on because this is the third time I've said this in a row. 11 session campaign and it was all homebrew I wrote a one city a couple of like landmarks and that was that was the extent of it I really wanted to make my own setting that everything took place in but I ran into the roadblock that everything was on me to make up as opposed to like you know reading one single lore book that a lot of people have read so like sword coast as my setting or eberron a lot of people know those settings maybe not if they're first timers but a lot of people know those settings and it can be helpful to have a pre-established place that they're going to now if your isekai is taking place on the sword coast that's interesting i think as far as dnd lore is concerned all the planes walking and jumping around and stuff it's not out of the realm of possibility that these characters would be thrown here for some we've reasoned like honestly it's not the weirdest thing i've heard so in you're actually giving me an idea for an isekai one-off now and that's gonna have to happen at some point in the near future so what i'm gonna say is i do think you should dm this session and see how the experience goes but I think your player is just really excited. They have a lot of ideas. They're still playing make-believe. And if you listen to the episode where Patrick and I talk about his first time DMing or his first time playing, they're probably not taking it as seriously as you are because you're jumping right into DMing. Maybe you've watched some YouTube videos. You have a little more experience with it. This person might be a little annoying to you because they're outside your realm of expectation. Those expectations have not been properly set for them. You're listening and you're coming and... asking this question to other people who are also just as interested in dnd but this person might just be not taking it seriously and i have had players like that before we in our first campaign ended up having to drop someone because they were not taking the game seriously there was originally six players and me as the dm and we had to drop the sixth player because in almost every session they would they were a rogue and they would just give the shadow the hedgehog like nah I don't want to do that kind of response. Like go against the party all the time. And then finally, like they were on their phone every single session, pretty much the whole time. And that's just, that doesn't make for good role play, good D and D. It really doesn't. So we dropped a person for that reason. So I do think let this person make a character, set the expectations that you want. This is why we have session zeros, set the expectations and go from there. If this person doesn't respect your expectations and or doesn't want to play because they can't play Freddy Fazbear because you're not comfortable with DMing Freddy Fazbear in the Isekai campaign, then, you know, props. Just push them to the side and tell them, hey, I think maybe we're not the group for you. Those are the two solutions I've got for you based on however it goes. But I mean, I feel like this does come down to proper DM to player communication. Let's jump on to topic number two. You ever just inform the party that they are going to the dungeon you prepped? I like this one. I spent all week 3D printing scenery and monsters for an upcoming dungeon, then hand painting slash airbrushing them. I had a grand reveal all planned. I had the dungeon hidden under a cloth ready for its grand reveal. Then one guy tried convincing the party that they shouldn't go in, that they needed to go off and do this side garbage first. I literally stopped the game and just flat out said, guys, I have nothing else planned here. I've spent all week on building this, prep this, and getting ready. And if you go and wander off to do this side stuff, we'll have to end it here because I'm not ready. And frankly, I'm a little annoyed. Can we please just do the dungeon as planned? Thankfully, they got the very unsubtle hint. You ever just flat out make the party do what you had planned rather than wander off? I do think... I am a big fan of player agency, but big, big, but it sounds like you did set the expectation before in your quote where you said, can we just do the dungeon as planned? Now, my question is, was that planned by you or was that like you asked them at the end of last session? Hey, what are you guys planning to do next week? We're going to do the dungeon. Cool. I will make sure it's ready. It is not. It is not uncommon to have a player who Who's just like, yeah, no, I, I think we should go take care of this. And if they're a charismatic person or they're just annoying about it and everybody's more of like, okay, it's not uncommon to be derailed by people. My favorite story where I dealt with this was I had. the whole night, like the next main mission scheduled out, planned, ready to go. And it was going to be really good because Zach's character was off doing his own side stuff and Zach couldn't be there this week. So I was like, this is perfect. He doesn't need to be involved. His character's not here or he's not going to be here. So we're going to be all set. But Zach's character hadn't had the opportunity to leave yet before Drew said, I think it was Drew. Yeah, Drew was like, I want to go to the post office and check on that letter I sent. Now, probably five to 10 sessions prior, I had written a letter for the moment he was ready to go to the post office. I just wasn't expecting it to be today. So he goes to the post office and he checks on this letter and he finds out his mother has been captured.

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But that it's not urgent. They're waiting for him to get there. So I made sure to have that so it made sense. They're doing this to get to him. They're not doing this because they want to kill the people of Nightstone, which is where his family was from. So after this, of course, Drew, as his character, decides, I need to go right now. And that's very reasonable. If this was my mother, I would do the same thing. I'd say, I need to get a plane ticket. I'm not going to work. I'm going to save my mother. You know, it's like taken vibes. So very reasonable. I'm not mad about it at all. But I had no, I got a little bit lazy. I was in college. I had a lot of rehearsals going on. I had nothing planned. I was like, oh my God, I need to figure out how to solve this problem because I'm not ready. So I wasn't ready for this. And Luckily, I had been DMing long enough. I think we were like 20 sessions in this campaign. I had done a couple one-offs and then I had done the 11 session campaign before. So I've had like 30 to 40 sessions under my belt. I was ready to improv. I was like, I can do this. I remember what Nightstone looks like. I don't need to pull up maps and I have a dry erase board and I have markers and I can do this. So I got everything ready. I pulled out the map of Nightstone and everything. I was like, okay, great. You guys are going to travel to Nightstone. They do the whole travel. It takes maybe like 10 minutes of our time, like narrating all the travel. They get there. And it was the best session of D&D. We played that entire campaign. The best one. I know that all of your expectation and building it up and getting all this stuff ready is amazing. The fact that you 3D printed all your scenery and your monsters and you did all this painting and airbrushing, like... Props to you for going that far. I've never gone that far. I'm more of a dry erase marker and unpainted minis from WizKids kind of guy. Or Roll20 token stamp kind of guy. So, you know, props to you for doing all the extra work, going the extra mile for your players. But for this one... I we had the best session ever. They raided the city, did some like shenanigans with like going invisible and sneaking and picking some people off. And we had a super emotional scene where by the skin of their teeth, Ekanon shot a paralysis arrow. He had like some paralysis poison he had prepared before they left. He shot a paralysis arrow at the big bag. The big bad hit him. The big bad failed, let go of his mother because he was going to kill his mom on the next turn if he didn't hit this arrow. His mom got away in time and they triumphed. It was amazing. It was a great session. You can see the emotion in the players' faces like we have to solve this problem. And it ended up being a huge, a huge, huge, huge win for me as the DM improv-ing all of this and then them as the players getting through this in one session. So like I said, props to you for all the prep. But sometimes when your players send you off the rails, it is it's a reward because they're into something you want to do. Now, I do see the other side of this, though. Your player might have just been like the last guy been being annoying. I've been in the places where people are like, no, we should go. We should go drinking tonight and gambling. And they want to spend the whole time like just there. And we can do many games the whole time, but we're not going to make any progress on the story. I've had people want to go off on side tangents before in a more annoying way, but I've also had the side tangents that end up being the best session of the campaign. Up to you to decide which one this is, or if you're even comfortable improv-ing what you're going to do next. But yeah, I don't think there's much more to say on it because you have a pretty good read on the situation. And one more thing is, I think that... That what you would be able to say is what you said is a good thing. Like we can do this side tangent. We're just going to have to do it next week. Like if you don't want to do the dungeon, it's fine. We'll do it next time. But if you're going to do this other mission that I need, I need, I need time to prepare. That's not a big ask. Not everybody is going to be able to accidentally do the best session of the campaign. But at the same time, yeah. that's that's pretty much it well let's go on to the next one i think that was a really good prompt though because it's a good lesson to learn for both the players and the dm for the players they need to stick to their what they're planning to do because they shouldn't be expecting so much of the dm and for the dm like there are times that you should be a little more loose on things like that but this sounds like since you prepared so much they probably knew you were preparing this much they should respect that What's the easiest starter campaign to run for a fresh DM? This is one of my favorite topics because I have run three starter campaigns. So I'll get into it in a few seconds. But yeah, I love this. I currently run a UK high school D&D club. We meet regularly and have around 20 members, which is amazing for clubs at our school. But there's an issue. Not enough DMs. Everybody has that issue, except our group where everybody has something they want to DM right now. Everybody wants to DM right now. We can only play once a week. I'm in a situation where there are two groups of around five, which leaves me often with around eight players. That coupled with the fact that we often are only meeting in lunchtimes with around 20 minutes of play means that often in combat, not everyone gets a turn. For context, we meet three lunches and once after school. So over the week, we get roughly two hours of play. I love the group, and they are always patient, but we need to split the party. So what do you guys think is the easiest campaign slash setting for me to try to encourage a new DM to take half the group to do? I love this. It sounds like you guys are getting some popularity going for a school D&D club, which the fact that you have a school D&D club makes me so jealous. I wish I had stuff like that when I was in school or even had the courage to take part in it. So I'm glad that D&D... is getting to the popularity level where we can have these kinds of things and them actually be popular. So many players, not enough DMs, is a great and horrible problem to have. As far as where you should start, I think you need to gauge the interest and the style of your players and who you think your protege is, who you think is going to be the best person to actually take part of this group and run it. I think you can present a couple of options to them, maybe one or two of the starter kits, since those are very cheap and easy to get into, with a little book to go along with it. So bring up Lost Mines of Phandelver. That's where I started. I literally started level two, Lost Mines of Phandelver. They had already done the intro goblin dungeon, but they had not done the rest of the campaign. So I was a player in Lost Mines of Phandelver from my first experience with D&D. And I personally ran Waterdeep Dragon Heist, but I'll give it a little caveat. This is a$50 book with a lot of ins and outs and villains. So if you have an extremely excited player who really wants to try DMing and they want to go all out, I think Waterdeep Dragon Heist is the best starting point, but it's a lot more work. So if you're just trying to get someone to dip their toe into DMing, Dragon of Icespire Peak or Lost Mines of Phandelver would be where I would go. Dragon of Icespire Peak is a little more open-ended. They can find the quests that they like in there and drop them in wherever they want. Lost Mines of Phandelver, I think, is an overall more satisfying story depending on who's DMing it. Because it has a beginning, middle, end. And you... I think have a little more of an opportunity to meet the characters and spend time in Phandalin. And I do find the locations a little more interesting overall, too. I haven't played all of Dragon of Icespire Peak, but I did read through all of it. And while you are dealing with the same setting, I just think I would enjoy Phandelver more. And speaking of that, there is Phandelver and below the Shattered Obelisk. So if they do feel like running more Phandalin later off of one of these, I they can pick up that book and keep it going for the rest of the school year. Because I think it'll take 10-ish sessions, if they're a little bit slow, going through the entirety of Phandelver. But then if they're... Lost Mind of Phandelver. Yeah, I'm correct. I'm correct. I was freaking out for a second. I was like, what is it? So yeah, I think that that would be a pretty solid option for them. And then if they want to continue, that's when they pick up a module. Storm King's Thunder can go out of Phandelver. Phandelver and Below Shattered Obelisk can go out of it. Pretty much any of the modules, honestly, if they're deciding they want to take their players, you know, wherever. So those are all great options. Likewise, you can just brainstorm some ideas with them if you're not playing in Forgotten Realms setting and you don't want, like, official... D&D materials, then you can have them write up something in the setting that you guys are playing in. If you have a really cool setting that you've been working on, it's not a bad idea to have them homebrew off the start to get those creative juices flowing. I just find that the quality of writing isn't as good when you're also trying to learn all of the rules of a very complicated role-playing game on top of it. So that's kind of what I got for you on that one. You know, you can let me know in the comments if you're watching on YouTube or just send us an email at tabletalkfriday at gmail.com or go over to patreon.com slash tabletalkfriday. We have like a little community chat thing in there. Let me know if you think any of this is good advice. But yeah, guys, this is a little bit different of a format for what we do in Table Talk Friday, especially because everybody is so busy online. I end up being the one who has a little bit more free time and I enjoy sitting down and talking about this kind of stuff. So I hope you don't mind that every couple of weeks it is just me. But let me know if you like this format. I think that it kept my thoughts a little more, you know, right on target as opposed to like just letting me ramble about one topic the entire time. Me being able to kind of normally I'm just going to like forums and stuff, looking at questions like these anyways, and then thinking through like what I would like. you know, how I would actually solve this problem. So allowing me to get my thoughts out like this is honestly pretty satisfying, especially because I feel like if any of these people were to listen to the episode, they might actually get some good advice out of it. So yeah, love where the podcast is going again so far. If you like the show, please leave a like or comment down below. And yeah, You can find us over on patreon.com slash tabletalkfriday. If you want to support the show a little bit better, a little more financially, there's some extra perks that go in there like the post show that I will record right after this. Not sure what I'm going to talk about yet. Maybe fitness, maybe Magic the Gathering, maybe more D&D and how our group's been doing lately. But yeah, so there's a post show on patreon.com slash tabletalkfriday. And then you can find us on youtube.com slash tabletalkfriday where the entire podcast is uploaded. I honestly, like YouTube's my format of choice. I like seeing everything over on YouTube and seeing the views and being able to trap analytics over there. We're also on every podcast service under the globe. Everything that Buzzsprout offers is where we're at. And like I said before, if you have any questions, comments, concerns about the show, go to tabletalkfriday.com Send us an email really quick. I promise I'll answer because I've got it on my phone and I get notifications every time an email comes in. Thank you guys so much for listening this week and I'll catch you in the next episode. If you'd like to follow the boys anywhere or send them any inquiries, anything you'd like to say to them, you can do so at tabletalkfriday at gmail.com. Once again, thank you for listening to the show. Come back next Friday. Give us a follow. Rate us five stars and whatnot. Have a good one. See ya. Bye-bye.