How to be a Better Dungeon Master

What has thousands of hours playing Dungeons & Dragons, experiencing both great and awful dungeon masters, and being myself both and awful and great dungeon master at times taught me? Everything! Being a dungeon master is hard, but we can make you a better dungeon master by rethinking your approach to the game and running the group.

Being a better Dungeon Master often boils down to one thing: ensuring everyone at the table is having fun. Your number one job as a Dungeon Master (or Game Master, or Storyteller depending on the flavor of game you are playing) is to ensure everyone at the table is having a good time. This should be the cornerstone of your philosophy for running a game.

So how do we ensure everyone at the table is having a good time? First, I’d like to tell you an instructive tale to help frame this conversation.

A Tale of Two Dungeon Masters

I was part of a regular game group for a long time. A newer player joined us and he was great. Larry was very creative, experienced player. He made interesting characters, had good ideas, was good at coming up with unique and fun solutions as a player. Generally, Larry was just a lot of fun to have at the table. After our campaign ended he asked if he could DM a game. He sold us on his extensive experience as a Dungeon Master. He carefully explained to the group how he created this immersive world that he had been building for nearly 20 years and he had numerous groups participating in this world.

Sounds great. We were all very excited, especially me who gets a break from DMing. To Larry’s credit, he was right. His world was immersive. It was evident he had spent an amazing amount of time and energy creating a Tolkien-like world with an expansive history, beautiful lore, a detailed chronology of the monarchy, legends, heroes, complex and intertwining plots, etc. He had even written songs and poems about the great battles and events of history and often had minstrels sing them in-game. Larry described the rich tapestries adorning the halls of kings which described past glories of crown. Larry also did amazing character voices and accents.

What a brilliant setting. And his campaign was an absolutely horrible playing experience. We quit his game before our players hit level 3. We will get into why in a bit.

Now let’s talk about Billy. Billy is a guy who had been part of our game group for a few years. Definitely a good player, but not as experienced as the rest of us. That did not make him a bad player, but sometimes it meant he tended to doubt his choices or was not always confident in taking the lead in a situation since he was still newish to role playing. We had asked Billy if he wanted to try his hand at DMing and he always told us “no way.” He asserted he did not have the creativity or experience to do that.

We kept encouraging him to give it a shot and he finally agreed. Billy got to work building a world and a plot. He sketched out a small section of a corner of a world and created a digital version of it in Photoshop, which was a fairly simple map. Billy threw something together in a few weeks and we were off, playing in his very first game. He did not have a deep history fleshed out. He did not have thousands of years of lore recorded and memorized. He did not do character voices or accents when talking with NPCs. Everyone in his world sounded exactly like Billy.

We absolutely loved it. We took our characters all the way to level 20, and in the final adventure my character had completed such an amazing story arc, I actually shed some tears at the table.

Billy, in his very first game gave us one of the most profound player experiences, and he did it having never been a DM before. And Larry, with 20+ years of experience DMing made our experience absolutely miserable. How in the world did this happen?

Billy observed the primary role of a Dungeon Master and Larry did not. Billy came to the table each game night with one goal: ensuring of all of us had a good time. Larry also came to the table each night with one goal: impressing us with how amazing the world he built was.

“Billy came to the table each game night with one goal: ensuring of all of us had a good time.”

Don’t Be a Larry

Larry fell into some common traps Dungeon Masters can fall into. Larry had built such an impressive world and such impressive plots, he wanted us to experience everything he prepared. What ended up happening was our agency as players was completely removed. Larry railroaded us into going exactly where he wanted us to go and we did exactly what he wanted us to do. And we hated it.

I am not saying this to be hyperbolic, by the way. In one adventure our group had a discussion about where we wanted to go and we told Larry, “ok we are heading to this place.” He literally responded, “nah, you don’t want to go there. You want to go here.” No. We want to go here.

Larry argued with us about every decision that strayed from his plan. We actually had a sit-down chat with him out-of-game and explained to him we were not having a good in his campaign. We expressed our concerns to him and explained what the problems were and how they could be improved. His response to our criticism about not having fun was, “well, that’s a you-problem, not a me-problem.”

Larry had put so much effort and energy into his rich, immersive world he could not possibly conceive that him leading the game was problematic, or there were some things he could do to improve as a Dungeon Master. Larry’s campaign was not a story or world we interacted with, it was a slow-moving fair ride that we were strapped into. We were not participants in his story, we were spectators. And it was awful.

“We were not participants in his story, we were spectators.”

Like I stated earlier, we quit his game before hitting level 3. And I know what you’re probably thinking, maybe we did not give him a fair chance. After all, being second level is barely getting into the story. Despite all of the problems stated, there was another problem; he was very stingy with XP. For our first session at level 1, he awarded us 25 XP. I’m not kidding. Our second adventure, he was generous and gave us 50 XP. We were four sessions in and still had not hit level 2, and still had not participated in a single combat. Larry was attempting to guide us through an intricate political plot in which we were not able to make any real decisions.

Finally after session 5, I had amassed 305 XP and was able to hit level 2. We had hit our first combat, hit level 2 and we thought maybe the story and action will pick up from here. Not so. Another 3 sessions went by with no combat and barely handing out anything. It was at this point we brought our concerns to him. We had played 8 sessions. We are level two and had seen one combat. We are not able to make any real decisions about the direction of the story. We just sat through 8 four-hour sessions of Larry telling his story to us. When he blew off our concerns, we kind of checked out at that point. We played another 2 or 3 sessions until one of our PC’s (Billy’s character, in fact) literally committed suicide in-game. The game nights became fewer and further between until it kind of just faded out.

The game was bad. In fact, the worst I had ever experienced. His inflexibility, unwillingness to listen, refusal to allow us to participate in the game made it the single-worst player experience in my 25+ years of playing D&D. Because he was obstinate that we were the problem and his game was great, he was not invited back to our group. We reformed, and Billy agreed to run our next game.

Be Like Billy

As I’ve already touched on, Billy didn’t have any of the things going for him that Larry did. He lacked the experience, the immersive world, the intricate plots, the well-fleshed-out history, the ability to do character voices, etc. But his game was fantastic, and we loved it. We already touched on what Larry did wrong, so let’s dive into what Billy did right.

The most important thing Billy got right was his focus was correct. He wanted us to have a great time every game night. And that desire for us to have a great time drove every decision he made. Even before the game began, Billy was very hospitable. He provided ample snacks and food for the players. And let me be clear, you are not required to do that! I’m merely bringing it up to illustrate how committed he was to our enjoyment.

The best thing Billy did was let us be active participants in the story. The players got to shape what happened. We made decisions which were completely not in the direction Billy had planned for us to go. But he did what every Dungeon Master has to do; he shelved something he had worked hours on because we decided to go a different way. He did so without complaint or even us knowing about it. Billy revealed to us after the game he was mesmerized that every single thing he planned for us, we did not do. And honestly, the players were never the wiser. We had no idea we passed up on so much planned material, because Billy never let on that was the case. Every decision we made, he went with it and made it work.

Billy discovered something it takes many Dungeon Masters years to discover: the power of “yes.” Hey we want to go explore that temple, can we do that? Yes! I want to try a bold play by bluffing the king instead of being obsequious to him. Go ahead! Forming the ability to say yes as a Dungeon Master means being able to let go of your precious story and material. Let go of your ideas, because sometimes your players have better ones!

“Billy discovered something it takes many Dungeon Masters years to discover: the power of ‘yes.'”

Once I was running a campaign and had written a villain who was a young noble. This teenager was a sociopath who had not quite come into power yet, but he was well on his way. I had an entire story and plan written out for him to be the quintessential BBEG. Then something amazing happened, one of my players casually dropped while making a joke. “This jerk is acting like he’s demon-possessed.”

Wow what a fantastic idea! A player, on-the-spot, making an off-the-cuff remark came up with an amazing plot twist I had not even considered. Later that night I fleshed out the idea a little more. What were to happen if he got into power and suddenly was not a jerk any longer? What if he began helping people and being benevolent instead while maintaining being possessed by a demon? Could I make that work?

I determined yes. I wrote in that he was the son of the Lord of the Abyss who was rebelling against his father. And what better way to make your demon father angry than to spread prosperity? So the story transformed from a spoiled noble who was a sociopath, to a demon rebelling against his father which had profound effects in the material plane. So much cooler of an idea simply because I listened to my players, because sometimes they come up with better ideas than me!

Billy also did this. After each game night he would call me on my way home and ask for feedback about how he was doing as a Dungeon Master. What could he do differently or better? What did I think of this idea, or that? As opposed to Larry, Billy did not shun feedback and criticism; he welcomed it!

So how can you be a better Dungeon Master? You can always build better, more immersive worlds. You can take acting or improv classes. You can practice character voices. You can build visuals, write tomes of deep history, or set the mood and music right. You can create beautiful maps. But all of that effort is for absolutely nothing if you are not focused on ensuring everyone at the table is having a good time!