Becoming a Dungeon Master is intimidating. You’ve got a table full of players counting on you to run a good game, and no matter how much you’ve read, there’s a voice in the back of your head wondering if you actually know what you’re doing. Most new DMs feel that way. I did too. The question is where you go to close that gap.
Here’s why I think this is important.
A while back I met a D&D player who’d been playing the game for many years and wanted to become a DM. They’d sat at the table of some good DMs, and thought, I want to do that, too. They did the predictable thing and read the published dungeon master guide, but they still didn’t feel ready. So I mentored them for a while, and somewhere in that process I realized there was a gap between what’s published and what a new DM needs before they run their first game.
The published guides are adequate at telling you what to do, but they don’t tell you much about why things work and what happens when they don’t. Essentially, they give you knowledge but no wisdom.
Knowledge is what you get from the published DMGs. Wisdom is what you get from years of experience. So how does a newbie DM cover that gap and get the wisdom they need if they don’t have an experienced DM to mentor them?
That’s why I wrote a DMs guidebook that covers that gap.
→ Purchase it in my Shop, or if you prefer, you can get it at DriveThruRPG.
The Value of DMing Experience
If you’re a regular on my blog or YouTube channel, you’ve probably noticed that I spend a bit more time on the philosophical side of DMing than I do on the nuts and bolts. That’s deliberate, because the nuts and bolts are already covered pretty well in the published guides. What isn’t covered is the advice that comes from having made a bunch of mistakes and learning their lessons.
I’ve been DMing since 1980, and I mention that to make the point that it isn’t the number of years, it’s what those years of experience can produce.
Here’s what I mean by that. A published dungeon masters guide, if you’re lucky, might tell you to be flexible at the table, which is good advice. But it can’t tell you what it actually feels like the first time your carefully planned session falls apart in the opening ten minutes because your players decided to do something you never anticipated. It can’t tell you what to say or how to keep breathing through it, or how to recognize that what just happened might actually be better than what you planned.
That kind of understanding doesn’t come from reading something from a big-name publisher owned by a toy company. It comes from being there, and then being there again, and again, until it stops feeling like a crisis and starts feeling like a normal part the job.
If you’re new to DMing, or you’re thinking about it and feeling a little overwhelmed by everything you don’t know yet, that feeling is completely normal. Every DM started there. The question is just whether you have someone to help you through it, and most new DMs don’t.
Lessons Learned the Hard Way
I’ll give you an example of what I mean. Early in my DMing career I was running a campaign I was pretty proud of. It had a complex and interesting story, I knew the really cool places it would lead the players, and I was determined to get them there. Do you see where this is going?
The problem was that my players had other ideas. They went off in a direction I hadn’t planned for, making choices that didn’t fit the story I was trying to tell, and I freaked out trying to steer them back in some not-so-subtle ways.
What I was doing is called railroading, and I drove that campaign straight into a wall. The players got frustrated and I got frustrated and the campaign fell apart. What I learned from that experience is something no dungeon master guide ever spelled out for me: your job isn’t to tell a story, it’s to create the conditions for one to happen. The moment you start protecting your plot from your players, or driving them into it, you’ve already lost.
I could have benefited from someone teaching me that lesson before I learned it the hard way.
Managing Stress and Creative Energy
I also learned a lot from another DM named Ryan, who I played with for a few years. We were part of a group that played every Friday night after work, which is tough on its own because our brains were already fried by the time we sat down at the table. To handle the load, Ryan and I would trade places as DM every few months. While one of us ran the game, the other played. It kept us both from burning out, and it gave each of us a regular reminder of what it feels like to be on the other side of the screen. I was surprised at how much I learned about being a DM by being a player.
Neither of us read that solution in a book, though. We figured it out because we were paying attention to what the job was actually doing to us, and we had each other to get through it. Most DMs don’t have that benefit, either.
Why Create a DMs Guidebook?
Those two stories, along with a lot of others like them, are what my DM’s guidebook is built from. It’s organized around the three main things a DM actually does: prep your adventures, run the game, and manage everything that ties them together. This includes player dynamics, logistics like how to find a group and a location to play, and yes, how to keep yourself from burning out while doing it.
A guidebook can only go so far in replicating what it’s like to get mentored by someone who’s been there and done that. But that’s what I’ve tried to do here as best I can, to share not just what works but why it works, what the failures looked like, and what they were worth in the end. The goal was to put something in your hands that gets as close as possible to having a mentor in the room with you.
If you’re a new DM, or thinking about becoming one, you can get my guidebook in the Shop. There’s also a free ten-page sample available here.
