A set of general purpose tokens more easily serves the game than crates of pre-painted miniatures. A blank dry-erase poster map is far more useful than one with a map printed on it. The tips, tricks, and tools that best serve us are the ones most easily used to help us improvise during the game. Use tools and techniques that help you prepare to improvise. Treat characters as the heroic experienced adventurers they are. Remember that and help players avoid doing clearly stupid things because they don't grab the whole situation. Players only understand about half of what we're describing and the characters are much more aware of what's going on than the players are. It's our job to help the characters look awesome. Ensure there are multiple possible ways the characters can deal with the situation and don't let the whole situation hang on a single ability check.īe on the characters' side. The situation changes as the characters choose their path and engage with the situation in whatever way they choose. There's a location, there's a goal, and there are inhabitants at the location. Instead of developing plots for our games, with directions we expect the characters to follow, develop situations in which the characters get involved. Set up situations and let the characters navigate them. Instead, remember that the story unfolds at the table, and not before. Expecting the game to go a certain way is the most common mistake DMs make and have made for nearly four decades. DMs bring the world, the situation, the quests, and the non-player characters to the table and then watch and react as the characters crash into them. The tales of our games don't happen when we prepare them but at the table itself. Some DMs no doubt run great games either ignoring these suggestions or going directly against them. They're also one level deeper than the surface-level advice of the "relax and have fun" variety. This article contains my top advice to DMs for running great D&D games. I've spent much of this time collecting as much good advice as I could from the far reaches of the hobby. I've spent the past decade running D&D games, talking to other DMs, writing articles, shooting videos, writing books, and designing adventures for both publication and running in my own games. Also helps with my recap at the beginning of each session.New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! How to Be a Great D&D Dungeon Master In the overview, I also keep "minutes" of each session, so I know what happened during that time. I also keep notes on each of the PCs in their own respective pages (my plans, and my notes of their character development thus far). And in that page, I detail this NPC's backstory, fears, goals, abilities, etc. If I have an important NPC that's part of that quest, I link to that NPC's page. So if I have a quest take place in a specific city, I link to that City's entry in "Locations" and in that page, I flesh out all the details of that city. I then link to pages in the other sections for lore. With details about who it's coming from, the background of the quest, the rewards, consequences, etc. In Oveview, I have an entry for each quest. So each page in each section is an entry. The Party - I keep individual notes on each PC Items (I created this, but it's currently blank, I'm not sure why I created it) Locations - Each city, town, or location the party could go to Overview - I segment my campaign into different quests, so I have an entry for each quest here The first thing I do is create different sections: So I DM with a laptop open to OneNote during the session. Here's a copy/paste of a comment I made on the same topic, but for your specific issue, I would just create the maps elsewhere, and then import them into OneNote: I mainly use OneNote to write/organiez my campaigns.
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