Mike Wilhelm

Dungeons & Dragons

3 min read

Dungeon Master (DM)

  1. Players don’t really care about the story you’ve created. Keep it simple and easy to follow.
  2. Adventure books are written for DMs, not players. It’s more important that the DM get satisfaction out of them than players, so they’re not guaranteed to be fun.
  3. Most individual monsters aren’t suited for combat alone. The action economy makes encounters like this trivial until they become deadly (i.e., HP is never an issue, but big attacks that kill everyone, like dragon’s breath, is). Every encounter should have lots of minions.
  4. Players like to do awesome things. They like to break the game. Let them. Follow rule of cool. 1
  5. Combat encounters need an interactive environment. Wide open spaces are rarely as fun as space with obstacles and dynamic elements. Even trees and rocks can be enough.
  6. Social encounters can rely on rolls. You don’t have to do everything with dialog alone.
  7. Players love it when the story involves their character’s background or personal quest they themselves came up with.
  8. Customzie your adventure’s loot table for your party. If you use the loot recommended by an adventure book too strictly, most of the items that drop will be of little interest to your party. E.g., a defense fighter using a magic shield probably wants a longsword not a greatsword. Rogues often want rapiers rather than shortswords.

Player

  1. Consider your DM’s style before choosing a class and character. DMs often lean toward combat or intrigue. Playing an intrigue-oriented character in a game run by a combat-oriented DM is no fun.
    1. Also consider the style of each. Some intrigue DMs want to work things out through dialog and table talk rather than dice rolling Charisma and Intelligence checks. This can be a challenge uncharismatic players roleplaying high-charisma characters. Likewise, some combat oriented DMs run encounters with interest monsters but boring or empty environments. This can be a challenge for characters that need to use the environment, like rogues who need to hide between attacks.
  2. Come up with one or more short-term personal quests. This will give your character something to do between dungeon crawls. An example could be training a pet crow or making a set of explosive-tipped arrows.
  3. Long-term personal quests can be fun for you and your DM. Collaborate with them. They don’t typically work without collaboration.
  4. An extensive backstory is just for you. Your DM probably won’t use any of it.

Footnotes

  1. The “rule of cool” is a narrative principle that prioritizes creating exciting, memorable, and awesome moments over strict adherence to established logic, physics, or game rules. ↩

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