Best D&D setting for a "beginner DM" ?

>>54230945
Wilderlands of High Fantasy.

>>54230945
Greyhawk
Kingdoms of Kalamar
Points of Light

Probably.

Greyhawk isn't a heavily covered clusterfuck of lore compared to DL and FR, with less intrusive iconic characters, and flavour for the demonic, undead, and Cosmic horror esque BBEGs, with at least care to vampires as foes, not too many "Ported in from earth" human cultures, and deities that aren't massively intrusive, if only in times of need such as Pelor, St Cuthbert and Murlynd. On that note, it's the only setting where it's okay to have a Gun wielding paladin to boot, the the Drow of the underdark aren't nearly as common a threat and there's no Drizzt to speak of.

Pick up Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide for Forgotten Realms. That's enough to get a beginner campaign started. Of course, if you want to put a little more effort in and get a much better FR experience, pick up (or download the pdfs) of either the 1e or 2e boxed Campaign Settings. Not much is given in the way of number or mechanics in these books, so you don't have to convert anything. Also, they take place at a different point in time and place in FR; most of the 3rd edition and later D&D players tend to be unfamiliar with the Dalelands, Sembia, Cormyr, the Moonsea, etc.

>>54230945

Bizarre, contradictory answer follows:

Either Forgotten Realms or Points of Light/Nentir Vale.

Forgotten Realms is the best-supported RPG setting in history with something on the order of 460 books written for it so far, and a huge, huge fanbase spanning decades. It's natively supported in all the existing 5e materials (although Curse of Strahd is debateable) and if you need any help with pretty much anything there's an answer somewhere out there and people who can point you to it.

Alternately, Points of Light was intended to be a huge break from that, essentially re-creating Greyhawk with a fresh start, a few deities excepted, with the intention that they would deliberately build a framework to build on but leave clearly marked areas in geography in lore for each DM to add to as needed. Because it was only mentioned in passing throughout the 4e books and there were comparatively few of them the result is a much more buildable and robust but much less supported setting.

Finally, you might wish to treat 5e as a setting in its own right, working only with the new published materials and treating the earlier versions as apocryphal. This is what I do but it's definitely "talk it over with your table" territory. They like retaining broad stroke locations like Neverwinter and Waterdeep and some of the big-name NPCs around but not necessarily treating almost 500 books as all required canon. We have the agreement that if they mention something and get back "I can see why you'd believe that rumor" or "I bet I know who told you to say that" IC or OOC that it's been deliberately changed for a reason and is different now so they don't have to be afraid of bringing things up, but if they really want to rely on something bring it up to me OOC.

It takes a lot of communication and a *lot* of trust but we've been playing together long enough to have it and it's working out really well for us. (cont)

>>54230945
>>54231141

(cont)

The biggest piece of advice I can give, though, is that the Capitalized Proper Names don't matter as much as the underlying things. The more a game is based around sending them into Adventure Zones to explore, kill things, and find loot the better the game plays. That's not to say that you can't and shouldn't sprinkle memorable NPCs and intriguing plot arcs around, you certainly should, but keeping the focus on killing the "dragon" and looting the "dungeon" for whatever value of dungeon and dragon is critical to making the system work regardless of what the planet is called.

>>54231169

This. Keep your adventure based around adventuring and it'll be fun regardless of the setting.

I'd personally avoid specific settings as a new GM because you'll have enough on your plate just running the game. If you use a big, famous setting with lots of published material then you'll get things wrong at the end of the day, because you'll never read and remember it all. Best to stay away from specifics and find your own little area to play in.

Starting my current campaign for LotFP I told my players "it's the year 1639, Europe's fucked because of the massive religious wars going on and England's starting to have its own serious problems. Money and food are getting short and you heard rumours of a strange deserted tower outside of Norwich, so you got together what supplies you could and headed for it."

Basic setting is established, the players know that things aren't going to quite match the (historical) setting material and that they're not big shots to play with the big names right now, there are events outside them but they don't know or need to know all the details, and there's an immediate adventuring problem to solve in the short and medium term. Very little prep involved for session 1 and I can add detail as I see fit as the game goes on.

Forgotten Realms is probably easiest to steal stuff from

>>54230945
The easiest beginner D&D setting is "where the fuck are we", the setting where anything not immediately critical is nebulous and immaterial until a player's background fleshes out their homeland a little, a new territory pops up, or you need some history and politics to make something sound cool.

>>54230945
The one you invent. Better to just swing things yourself.

>>54232515
This is effective in many ways.

Whenever you need a place for a thing, declare that it exists and describe it. Allow your players to make up their own places that aren't here, and to talk about them and how they are different from this current location.

For example, I'm currently playing in a bounty-hunting wild-west style desert area.

My character is a priest of a god of deserts. However, because reasons, I'm not from this particular desert. I'm from the Arabia-flavored desert that's across the sea. So are most of my companions. They don't have scorpions here, which upsets me, but they do have giant "land lobsters" which taste even better, so I'm thrilled by this turn of events.

There isn't a world map, but there doesn't need to be one. There isn't even a local area map yet, but that's just because we have only explored a very small portion of the desert.

Homelands and other territories are a great place to let players fill in the world, so don't even bother with them unless you've got a plan to make them immediately relevant.