How to Dungeon Master (DM) for New Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) Players

It’s time! You are the DM!

Whether you are brand new to D&D, been playing for a while but want to start running a game or simply want to enrich your own DMing, this article is going to help you out.

If you’re worried or nervous about being the Dungeon Master because it seems like a lot or work...well you’re right. Being the DM means putting it altogether, it can be stressful, but it is also the most rewarding place to sit at the table. At the end of the day, your players are experiencing everything through your lens, and that’s a lot of pressure. Don’t worry though, we are going to break it down for you, help you with some tips, and at the bottom of this article are a list of resources to fill you in on even more information! Let’s get started!

1. You Don’t Need to Know Every Rule

Biggest tip in the world right here, the Dungeon Master does not need a photographic memory of the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Monster Manual. That’s hundreds of pages to remember! Having the books at the table can certainly help you when you need to refer to them, and I highly recommend pages that you flip to a lot to have sticky notes on them, but don’t worry about always being right. Some of the best DMs out there make mistakes all time, watch Critical Role, High Rollers or Dimension 20 and you’ll see the players making an occasional correction to the DM. Roll with it! Sometimes if no one knows the rule it’s your decision to make a ruling in the moment, and tell your players that you’ll check it after the session and figure out what the official policy is. Doing this is much better than people opening books or pulling out phones in the middle of a session.

This isn’t to say that you don’t need to know the rules at all, and before you DM you should buff up on the basic rules and have an understanding of why they work the way they do. I also highly recommend going over your character’s character sheets and just making sure everything is in order before you play so that you and the player aren’t caught by any curveballs. I’ve had new players with 22 strength at level 1 before and we had to clear up exactly how that happened. In the end, the DM makes the decisions and referees the game, so when you make a decision, be confident in it, but don’t be a tyrant. If it turns out you are wrong after the game, make sure your players know and settle on how you’ll play going forward! Which brings us to #2!

2. The DM is Always Right

This might seem a bit backwards after what we just talked about above, so let’s iron this one out. You are the official referee of the game, and you make the world. Your world can have homebrew content in it, and you can technically bring up a dragon at any time...but that doesn’t mean that you should. As a DM, your job is NOT to oppose your players. The DM could kill the adventuring party with a blink of an eye, but that isn’t what D&D is about. Your job is to be a part of a cooperative storytelling game. You run the monsters, traps, and NPCs that your players will encounter. Some of those monsters might be opposing your players, as may some of the NPCs. But YOU do not.

The DM is Always Right means that you are the master of your own world. Sometimes a certain rule might not apply because of the way you are running an adventure. Sometimes you’ll make a refereeing error and figure out you were wrong later, and you should own up to that and set up the official ruling for future sessions. At the moment, however, you were right, no matter what decision you make. These decisions also apply to adventures that are pre-written. If you pick up an official module, you can change whatever you want. The official adventure is not set in stone, if you want to tweak it, you should! If a player has played it before and complains...well that’s just silly, they should be excited at the prospect of something brand new!

3. Homebrew Rules

Homebrew refers to anything that you make at home that isn’t ‘official’ content. Before you start playing with new people or if you take up the mantle of DM, you should talk about what kind of game you are going to run and if you have any homebrew rules that you use. This can also include talking about whether you are using any of the alternative rules found in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Furthermore, you should have a discussion about the rules of your table, whether this is a quick in person discussion or writing up a list, everyone should know what to expect before the first session. Let your players ask questions about what is and isn’t okay, and make sure everyone is on board.

Try to be inclusive! Everyone should feel like they want to be at the table each week. Some solid boundaries might include: No racism, homophobic, or prejudiced remarks, jokes or threats. No party in-fighting (as in no players attacking other player’s characters). No stealing from each other. You might also include no bullying, in or out of character! Or a no rules-lawyers rule. A rules-lawyer is someone who thinks they know all the rules and tries to correct everyone about what is best or how to play the game. Personally, I also like to include a rule about cellphones and electronics at the table. Decide what will work best for you, and talk it over with your players!

4. Start Simple!

A lot of people will suggest that you start by running a published adventure by Wizards of the Coast. And that is generally sound advice as it will help you get a feeling for how most adventures are written and laid out. However, a lot of published adventures are not as well laid out as they are often made out to be, and more so, a lot of them are very combat heavy for my taste. While I strongly recommend reading a couple of published adventures, don’t feel as if you are boxed into running one to start if none of the ideas fit how you want to play. Especially if you are someone who got into D&D because you like the idea of a lot of Role-playing, then most of the published adventures are not going to be conducive to your play style.

That being said, I do recommend starting with a very simple concept. Start small with your adventure or your world and let your players help you build it outwards. Pay attention to the backstories that your players have made and try to weave them into your storytelling, it can easily help you get a jump on your ideas. Don’t worry too much if you are brand new about being unique and special, everyone has run a dungeon with goblins or kobolds and that’s okay! They are staples of D&D for a reason! So start with something small and simple and get a handle on the rules, and then decide how you want to proceed!

5. NOTES!

I have google docs open during the session, I have paper notes behind my DM screen. I write notes before sessions, I write them after sessions. Notes are a Dungeon Master’s friend. Try your best to keep them organized, write down NPCs you made on the fly, anything important the players said they might want to investigate next, really anything that you might want to remember for later. You never know what is going to be important in the future. Personally I do a lot of DMing work on google drive, and I have folders on folders for NPCs, Adventures, Campaign Information, Different Towns, Dungeons, etc. So having an organized way to keep all your notes is very important.

6. Making/Running NPCs

As the DM you’re going to spend a lot of time running monsters and traps, describing dungeons and epic ruins. But, you’re also going to be spending a lot of time embodying other people that the players run into. This could be everyone from the blacksmith and village bartender, to the dark knight who serves as the villain for the campaign. Look over NPCs in your adventure ahead of time, make sure you know who they are, what they want, what their motivations are and decide what kind of person they might be. I also make a list of names for NPCs that might pop up just in case the characters talk to someone I don’t have an NPC designed for. If you want to get even more in depth, you can make a list of names and give each of them a couple unique characteristics like hair color, speech mannerisms or scars that will help them feel like real people.

More importantly still, remember that when you are playing an NPC in D&D that these are real people in your world. Unlike an online RPG, these NPCs don’t stand there saying the same two lines over and over again and giving the players a quest. They don’t necessarily stand in the same place forever! Treat your NPCs like they’re real people. If your players are rude to them, or steal from innocent villagers, your villagers might respond by getting the guards of the town. A ‘quest giver’ who is sneered at might simply not reward the players for helping out if they don’t feel like it. Your NPCs are real people, with real motivations and and feelings, or at least, that’s how they should feel to your players.

7. Voices

If you’ve watched Dimension 20, High Rollers or Critical Role you’ve likely been blown away by professional voice actors running their own campaigns at a professional level. Well...we aren’t all professionals, and we can’t all do professional level voices for our characters. So don’t strive for that, but that doesn’t mean you can’t add a little bit of fun to the characters you’re running. It doesn’t have to be a voice! You can focus on speech speed, mannerisms, or even bring out props to differentiate between characters! If you can change your voice a bit, even better. It doesn’t have to be complicated, just try doing a deeper voice, or a higher one. Try talking through your nose or adding breathiness to your voice. Even something as simple as trying to talk in a happy voice versus a sad voice or a slow one versus a fast one will change how your NPCs sound and make your players notice that different people are talking. It doesn’t hurt to simply say which character is talking at the time as well, and your player’s will appreciate the heads up.

8. Preparation

Being a good Dungeon Master is like being a good Wizard, the more prepared you are for what’s coming, the better you’re going to be at your job. It doesn’t matter if you are playing your own adventure or if you’re reading out of a book, you should be spending some time prepping your adventures. Make sure that you’ve read through the adventure, take a glance at your NPCs and even make some notes about things you might accomplish this session. More than that, make sure you know the monster’s abilities that might show up this session, make sure you know what that merchant wants to get out of the trade he’ll make with your party. Making sure you review everything, and making sure you know where everything is is really going to help you.

As a DM it’s pretty much impossible to prepare for everything. Again, unlike an online RPG there are no borders in your world. The players can (and will) try to do almost anything that they imagine. But, that being said, the more prep you put into your adventure and your world the better chance you’ll be able to improv some amazing moments. Above that, don’t shy away from doing just so, some of the best moments in campaigns the world over have come from some very quick thinking on the part of a sly DM. Roll with it and make up what you can! Your ability to think on your feet might shock you. And if you run into a real rut, it’s okay to call a short break and give yourself a few moments when your players spring something truly unexpected on you!

9. Combat

A lot of Dungeons and Dragons centers around combat. More than half the game is built for this moment, so putting some of your prep time into imagining how combat might play out, and making sure you understand most of the combat rules is probably one of the more important parts of the game. First and foremost, consider whether you’re going to go full in on tactical combat, with minis and a grid and checking distances for spells. Or, if you will elect to use what’s called ‘Theatre of the Mind’ where you describe what is happening and your players imagine it, but there isn’t a set visual aid. You can also use a mixture of these, describing the action and using tokens to set vague borders of where things are so your players can relate to the distances, but without using a battle map.

There is no right or wrong answer, and getting into maps and minis can be quite expensive. But, I will personally say that having a truly epic fight with strategies and terrain can be really fun. I find my group loves as many visual elements as I can give them, but every group is different. How much time you have to prepare before each session can also change what you are willing to do. If combat is infrequent in your campaign it might not make as much sense to go all in, whereas if you run a campaign that is mostly dungeon-crawl, having a better map might make more sense.

10. Have Fun!

This might seem like a dumb rule to include, but I’m going to expand on it a bit anyway. There are a lot of rules in D&D, there’s a lot going on, but at the end of the day, it is a game. Decide what is important to the game, whether the elements you add will make the game more fun for your group or less. And remember that while you create the world and the adventures, make sure what you are creating is going to be exciting to your players as well as yourself and vice versa. If you make a gothic horror style setting and your players hate it, then that’s not a good world to run for this group. Likewise, if you love to run more serious games, but one of your players makes a character who’s made of gingerbread and shoots cotton candy from their hands, that might not be fun for you either. Part of this is included in talking to your players in Homebrew Rules. You should have a discussion with your players about what everyone wants to get out of the game.

Furthermore, have a discussion about some of the more serious parts of the game. Such as, if a character dies, is that going to be fun for the players. My group loves the fact that there is danger in the adventures, and the possibility of truly losing adds a lot of excitement to the game that you don’t get in very many other games. However, for others, they don’t want any real chance of their beloved character going away forever, and you should decide what will happen if they encounter such a thing. Is there always a way to revive a dead character? Make sure whatever decisions you make, the fun of the game is always prioritized above all else. After all, that is why we play!

Resources:

Websites:

• Sly Flourish
• DMs Guild
• Official D&D Resources
• Reddit D&D 5e
• Donjon

Youtube:

• Roll 20
• D&D Channel
• Nerdarchy
• Matt Colville
• Dimension 20