Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition - 3 Tips for New Dungeon Masters

Your first few Dungeons & Dragons games might be intimidating, especially if you've chosen to be the Dungeon Master.

The DM will need to perform various roles at the table, including coach, referee, and narrative. The three suggestions below will help you get started running the game and guarantee that you and your players have an outstanding time playing the fifth edition of the world's finest roleplaying game.

Begin small. Many Dungeon Masters want to construct their own worlds and storylines, but creating sophisticated adventures and campaigns is a massive work early on, and a basic comprehension of the rules may stymie the momentum required to drive a complex plot, resulting in a discouraging first encounter.

Whether you're running the beginning adventure The Lost Mine of Phandelver from the 5th Edition Starter Set or your own creation, it's vital to start modest and give yourself plenty of leeway to make errors.

Read the Player's Handbook guidelines, select an environment, a setting, research one or two sorts of creatures, then send your adventurers on a short mission that needs them to travel this area in order to engage with these monsters in this setting. If they finish the task successfully, reward them with some money and one or two items of equipment.

Allow for improvisation. It's difficult to anticipate what your players may come up with. When your adventurers decide they don't want to travel to Daggerford and would rather camp in the woods on the outside of town, the time you spent fleshing out elaborate backgrounds for the nice folks of Daggerford is useless. To avoid wasting hours, if not days, of preparation time, avoid going into too much detail when constructing non-player characters, settings, monsters, and so on.

Give each non-player character a name and one or two distinguishing characteristics (such as a large scar on their right eye or six fingers on their left hand) so that players can readily recognize them, but let the finer details to emerge while you're playing the game. Once a character, place, monster, or other element has appeared in your game, keep an index card with their name and essential traits - as well as what happened to them in the game - on hand for future sessions.

Stop. Listen and collaborate. New Dungeon Masters often conflate their job as a litigator with that of a dictator, but Dungeons & Dragons is a collaborative storytelling experience in which both the DM and the players contribute to what happens in the tale. It's scary to be in charge of designing the whole world that your players inhabit, but remember that you're all here to play a game and have fun - even the Dungeon Master.

Make a practice of asking your players character-related questions, such as "Having been here previously, what's your opinion of Baldur's Gate?" and "Have you ever battled a bugbear? If so, how did you find it?" This puts players in the mentality of thinking about the world through the eyes of their character and enables them to contribute to world-building, relieving you of part of the burden.

If you're comfortable with your group, you may even answer questions like "What's a decent name for a frightened store owner?" You collaborate at the table to create the basis for a non-player character The more your gamers are immersed in your environment, the more involved they will become.

The amount of resources accessible to a DM is limitless, but keeping these three ideas in mind will make any novice Dungeon Master feel right at home.

If you want to learn more about how to be a great Dungeon Master, check out Matt Colville's YouTube video Running the Game.

Ellis Smith enjoys playing Wizards of the Coast's 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons and DMs a number of bi-weekly sessions locally and through Discord. He is willing to write on a variety of subjects, but games are his true love.

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