Anonymous User asked: What do you do to plan a D&D campaign?
Oh gosh. A lot! I tend to do a lot of modules and campaign books. My skills as a DM are more in facilitation than creating worlds or campaigns. So I like having some basic framework to start with. You can ALWAYS change stuff you don't like. But having locations and maps and NPCs and setpiece encounters really helps reduce the burden on me.
So, assuming you're going to run an adventure, first things first: read reviews of it. There are some really fantastic blogs and forums and youtube videos for just about every D&D book that comes out. The point of reading multiple reviews is to familiarize yourself with the strengths and weaknesses of the adventure. You want to elevate and promote the strengths and either shore up the weaknesses or find ways to replace the weak parts.
Take, for example, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. You're going to find a lot of online folk saying "this adventure, as written, is garbage, BUT it works as an excellent start to a Waterdeep city sandbox campaign." You'll also find people recommending The Alexandrian Remix of W:DH, which keeps the plot of the book but rearranges things and makes the whole adventure actually a really special and cool experience! You would never know about these things without reading reviews.
Second: read the actual book itself! You will never actually know if you like something until you try it out. I try to focus on what parts I think are really cool or interesting and what parts drag or feel weird. Since YOU are the one running the game, if there are parts that feel weird, you get to modify them. I'd recommend against reading every single dungeon room entry or trying to memorize stuff. You're looking for really surface level, big picture stuff on your first read through. How a puzzle or trap works or how many candles are in a bedroom is the kind of info you can refer to when it's relevant.
A lot of these books are broken up into chapters. If the book is really good, you will only have to refer to that one chapter while you're in that chapter. In those cases, a couple of sessions before you think the party will reach this new chapter, I recommend re-reading it. This is your last chance to make major changes or figure out how to best flow the game from area to area.
Third: decide on a time and place to play. This is the third in the list, but actually it is the most important. The group has to actually meet up in order to play D&D. No meetup, no D&D. You might have to prep a calendar going over the best dates for availability and there can be a lot of back and forth depending on the group. My personal recommendation is to just pick a day (tuesdays every week, fridays every other week, saturday once a month, etc) to play and stick with it. Some people are literally unable to play D&D because scheduling doesn't work for them. In those cases, it's unfortunate, but you're better off with a consistent game that generally always fires than a game that you never play because two people never commit.
If someone just can't make time consistently, you just tell them that you're going to schedule for them to not show up for the foreseeable future and that if their schedule changes you'd love to have them rejoin the group. REMEMBER: you are putting a lot of fucking time, energy, and possibly money into this. If they can't make time for you or they treat it like an occasional thing that means that they are not respecting that.
The minimum number of players I would go with is 3 and the max is 5. The game system really struggles with more or less than that and with a ton of people in the game, you run into problems where people don't get screen time. My group is 5 players and my motto is "as long as we have at least three players, I'm down to play". This means I don't have to cancel everything if someone has an event come up or gets sick. Obviously if something super plot relevant is going on, we can postpone.
I really cannot overemphasize enough how fucking important scheduling is. Even though my group meets every tuesday and has been for four years, I STILL message our group chat to remind them because it's THAT important.