Dungeon Master Advice; Your Survival Guide for Running the Game

Cover image credit: https://www.deviantart.com/ralphhorsley/art/The-Dungeon-Master-307893770 

So dear adventurer, the mantle has fallen to you, and finally it is time to test your mettle against your greatest challenge yet… It's time to become a Dungeon Master! Your own Dungeon Master has passed the title over - whether after ending a campaign or fleeing the realm under mysterious circumstances. Or perhaps, you’ve come to the hobby and donned the title first bravely opening a world of wonder and excitement, adventure and heartache to all your friends.

Within this article is the emboldening advice of your fellow DM’s (a friendly sort of community, you’ll find - especially if you hit up our Discord server!) and a few tips to start you crafting your own worlds and adventures! With more and more actual-play casts available of games across the globe, the stakes have never seemed higher for Game Masters - but we want to reassure you that creating a world and playing with friends is totally within your reach - whether or not you have a fancy game table, tricked out minis, or dice crafted from the purest obsidian.

Rowan’s Top Tips - Keep Important Points Flexible

So you’ve set out your meticulously written campaign, bread crumbing a trail of hints and clues to the barons murder in the forest where his carriage was attacked through to a dark and dingy cave where an encounter lurks with razor sharp fangs ready for the adventuring party.

Instead, your players are intent on heading into town to scout for more evidence, and to talk to the town guard. Your throw up your hands, adventure and evening of planning ruined. But wait, dear Dungeon Master, all hope is not lost!

Your surreptitiously placed breadcrumbs can be moved, so rather than a blood soaked scrap of cloak caught in a tree branch, it’s found by one of the guardsman in town, who points your party in the right direction. Keeping important information mobile rather than tied to a single location or non-player character helps  to keep momentum in your game, and ensure that your players and yourself don’t throw your hands up in frustration. A book with secrets can as easily be found in a library as a junk store, a tree hollow or a treasure chest, and that lurking band of goblins can just as easily become a gaggle of kobolds, or giant bats or gnolls if the location differs drastically.

But by keeping the important parts of your world reactive and within reach of your players, you reward them for hunting for information and remembering clues, regardless of where they traverse in your world - leading to a more rewarding experience for both player and DM! 

Dylan’s Top Tips - Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

There are small moments as Dungeon Master’s we look back on and cringe at - perhaps you said the wrong armour class for that monster, or gave that NPC the wrong name, linking two otherwise unlinked occurrences within your world.

Sometimes you think of a ruling you made - a grapple check gone wrong, a spell save unmet, and wish you could change your decision on it. But ultimately, what you players will remember is they bested an owlbear against impossible odds, or the mythical underwater city they rediscovered, once sunk and lost, now reunited with the rest of the continent.

While small errors may haunt you as a Dungeon Master, and keep you up at night - rest assured, you are probably the only one thinking on them! Its where you go from these small trips that informs the kind of Dungeon Master you will become. Working with unpredictable odds is a part of the role - and sometimes the most impromptu decisions or rulings are the ones that work best for your table.

Trent’s Top Tip - D&D is as hard or as easy as you want it to be!

As the Dungeon Master, you set the tone and stakes of your adventure, its enemies and its encumbrances. You also get to decide how much time, energy and leg work you want to do! 

If you don’t feel comfortable and confident running a politically minded game of 4D chess where each non-player character’s opinion of the party has huge ramifications and every detail must be recorded in excruciating detail, you don’t have to! Or if you get overwhelmed by the thought of juggling a 20 monster encounter with widely differing armour classes, spell saves and the resulting death saving throws your part would have to make, you don’t have to!

Play to your strengths and what excites you, and draw your players into a world that you would want to play in.  And remember, ultimately Dungeons and Dragons is an excuse to get your friends around a table for a few hours, spend time and make good memories. You can make as much of that as you like - and you can always rely on your players to do some of the heavy lifting too! Leaning on your team and working together to make a cohesive and fun story is a class everyone must learn to play. 

We hope these tips have helped lightened the load of worries new potential Dungeon Masters may have - our friendly team at Vault are always happy to share good advice, great starting adventures, or to simply commiserate on how your last adventure went down.

And if you are looking for marvelous minis, delightful dice, or any number of adventuring tomes, be sure to come in store and check out our new stock!