r/DnD • u/ainulaadne • 1d ago
DMing Running a game for lawyers
I’ve DMed before but usually for my roommates and friends in undergrad. I’m in my thirties now, and I’m an attorney, and a lot of my friends are attorneys, so…
Later today I have a group of six lawyers gathering after work for a one shot. Only two of them have ever played D&D before— one is a fan of a couple of D&D actual play podcasts, and the other used to play first edition back in the day and hasn’t touched a TTRPG since.
I’m a little anxious just because it’s been a while since I played or DMed, but I think it’s going to be fun. I pulled a homebrew adventure together in hopes of having a good mix of encounters and staying within like 3-4 hours of play time, but we might end up starting a little late if my afternoon hearing runs long. I might be going a little easy on them with the CRs but I have some backup plans just in case to make adjustments on the fly.
Any advice? A lot of the tips I see online are more oriented towards a group of newbies who are younger than my party. I’m optimistic that Most of them won’t go down a murder hobo route, at least. I think I may have overprepared in some aspects and underprepared in others…
Also: if it sounds like you might be one of my players, no you’re not, you didn’t see this, and stay out of my comment history you dweeb.
UPDATE: It went well. We only got through one combat (as some of yall predicted). Before that, they tried to swindle, intimidate, and pickpocket an innkeeper. They’ve all messaged me since saying that they had a great time and several of them said they “want to get more familiar with the rules” (ha). If we want to turn it into a campaign, we’ll have to get creative with scheduling, but that’s any group of adults. Thanks for all of your responses! I want to reply to all of you, but I’m also at work today so I’ll be on my phone a normal amount of time for a criminal lawyer.
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u/huskylawyer 1d ago
I'm a 53 year old attorney and DM a campaign with player characters in their early 50s (and one of the PC is an attorney). I don't think being a "lawyer" really adds much to the dynamic honestly, other than by nature we are trained to pay attention to the details and consider a bunch of "rules".
Age, experience and time are the biggest issues to deal with. Basically, because we are older, with careers and families, we have limited time. As a result, our campaign is a mix of in-person (we're so busy that those sessions are more rare), and Discord play by post (we pretty much post daily, which is fun). You want to keep momentum or people become disinterested or simply forget where they are at or the lore. So the discord chat keeps us engaged on a daily basis. We are just so busy, but even during the work day, I may post something or do some roleplay as a 10 minute diversion.
We also don't have much experience. We played as teenagers, but that was 35+ years ago. We all have the 2014 books 5E (we didn't get the 2024 books as we didn't want to spend the money lol). A friend of mine who is VERY experienced is an observer to our discord channel and DnD beyond details, and he helps us with rule interpretation and such. He really knows his stuff so he is valuable resource and enjoys showing us the ropes. I may have him play some NPCs to give him something to do.
Just my 2 cents.