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The 10% Rule: Run Better D&D Games on the Fly

Planning and prepping is fun for a lot of DMs, and I’ll be honest, I’m one of them. But here’s something I’ve come to believe after being a DM for more than four decades: winging it might actually be the better way to run the game.

Before the prep enthusiasts reading this click away, hear me out. I’m not saying throw your notes in the trash. I’m saying that running your game on the fly is a skill worth developing, and in this article I’ll show you a simple rule that makes it easier for any DM, even if you’ve never thought of yourself as a naturally creative person.

I came to this conclusion the same way I come to most conclusions about running D&D: by looking back at what actually happened at my table and identifying what works and what doesn’t. When I think about my most memorable sessions, the ones my players still talk about, a lot of them weren’t heavily prepped. A lot of them were sessions where I was winging most of it and something unexpected yet really cool happened. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

As with most things, there’s a catch.

The Problem With Pure Winging It

Winging it sounds great in theory. There’s no prep stress, just you and your players creating something together in real time. The problem is that when you’re making things up completely off the top of your head, you can easily paint yourself into a corner. And getting yourself out of that corner requires even more mental energy in the moment, which is what you want to avoid.

Random or disjointed creativity can make things go really wonky, really fast.

Let’s say an NPC makes a promise you can’t keep, or a dungeon layout stops making physical sense. Maybe a plot detail from an hour ago contradicts something you established in a previous session, and the players call you on it. Let’s face it, DMs who wing it need good memories, even if they keep good notes. I’ve been there.

When those moments happen, you’re not running a game anymore. You’re doing damage control while also trying to keep the session interesting, all in your head.

Some DMs are naturally spontaneous and have the ability to hold it all together. I’ve met one who was genuinely airtight at keeping track of everything they invented on the spot, but even they have their limits. For most of us, pure unanchored winging it tends to produce adventures that feel scattered rather than alive.

The goal is to make it up as you go along in a way that the players think you had it prepped all in advance.

The 10% Rule

Here’s the thing: when winging it works well, there’s usually a reason why you pull it off. You likely didn’t grab something out of thin air. What you most likely did, maybe without even realizing it, is you started with something that already existed and you tweaked it just enough to make it feel both new and intentional. What you did was edit something rather than invent it. That’s the principle underneath every good improv moment at the table, and once you see it, you can learn how to do it on purpose.

I call it the 10% Rule.

Here’s how it works. Start with something. Anything. Roll on a random encounter table or think of a scenario you’ve seen in a movie. It doesn’t matter where the seed comes from. What matters is that you have something in front of you to react to.

Then change it by 10 percent. Nudge it in a new direction or give it a slight twist. Add one detail that makes it yours. That’s it.

The reason this works comes down to a truth I’ve talked about for years: it’s easier to edit than to create. When you have something in front of you, even something rough or random or borrowed, you enter more comfortable and confident territory. You’re no longer staring at a blank page. You’re reacting, adjusting, and maybe even improving something that already exists. That’s a completely different cognitive task, and it’s one most people can do quickly and do fairly well.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let’s say you roll on a random encounter table and you get “2 bandits on the road.” That’s not very exciting on its own, is it? But now apply the 10 percent rule. What if one of them is clearly nervous and the other is doing all the talking? What if they’re not actually trying to rob the party, but are pretending to, because someone is watching from the tree line? What if they’ve been hired by someone the party already knows?

You haven’t invented the wheel from scratch. You’ve taken something generic and added one layer that makes it feel new to the players. That’s the 10 percent.

The same thing works for locations. Let’s say you need a tavern on short notice. Every tavern has a bar, a fireplace, and a suspicious stranger in the corner, right? Fine, start there. Now change one thing. The barkeep is mute and communicates by writing on a small chalkboard. The suspicious stranger is a child. There’s a scruffy dog sitting in front of the fireplace, it’s got a severed hand in its mouth, and yet everyone is pretending not to notice. One detail changes the whole feel of the scene, and that detail took you about four seconds to invent because you started with something that already existed and you changed it by 10%.

NPCs Are Where This Really Pays Off

Roleplaying NPCs is probably the purest form of improv in D&D. The party walks into a shop, or gets stopped by a guard, or stumbles into a conversation you hadn’t planned, and suddenly you’re on stage with no script.

The 10% Rule works here too, and it’s especially powerful because you can draw from people and characters you already know.

Pick a real person in your life, someone you know well enough to predict how they’d react in a given situation. Think of a coworker, a neighbor, or your uncle Frank. Now put them behind the counter of a blacksmith shop and see what happens. You already know how they talk, whether they’re friendly or gruff or long-winded, what gets under their skin, etc. That’s your NPC. You’ve done zero work and you’ve got a character with genuine personality.

You can also do this with fictional characters.

Can you play a city guard as if he has the personality of Joey from Friends?

He’s confident and friendly, but not always the sharpest sword in the armory. That’s a fully realized character, and he’ll likely feel more alive to your players than someone you spent an hour inventing on paper.

Maybe you’ve got a young shopkeeper’s assistant. Portray them with the anxious, well-meaning energy of Peter Parker. The players will think you rehearsed the character for hours the night before.

This method means you’re not doing creative work in the traditional sense. You’re borrowing an existing structure and applying it to a new situation. That’s the 10 percent rule at work.

This Is a Skill, and Winging It Gets Better

Spontaneous creativity isn’t just a talent some people are born with and others aren’t. It’s a skill, and like any skill, I believe you can improve it with practice.

The 10% Rule is a training tool as much as it’s a technique. The more you use it, the faster your brain starts making those connections on its own. You’ll find yourself automatically looking for the twist, the detail you can adjust, or the personality you can borrow in a pinch. After a while, winging it stops feeling like a risk and starts feeling like the best part of your session.

Building Memorable Sessions

I think back to those memorable sessions I mentioned at the start. What made them work wasn’t that I got lucky. It was that I had enough experience to grab something quickly and shape it into something that felt alive. That’s what the 10% Rule builds over time. You’re not just getting through the session. You’re getting better at the thing that makes D&D genuinely fun to run.

So the real secret to winging it well is simple: steal from other sources and change them by 10 percent to make them yours. Start with something, react to it, and adjust it just enough to make it fit. That’s all you need.

I believe this method can help you make your D&D game even better than if you prepped it all in advance.

What DM Guides Leave Out (And How I Filled the Gap)

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.

What Makes a D&D Adventure Feel Real (Even When It’s Fantasy)

If you want your players to truly become invested in your story, make it make sense. In this article, I’ll explain why this matters and how it makes your adventures more enjoyable for both the players and for you as the dungeon master.

This is fantasy, so I’m not suggesting everything has to follow the laws of physics and realism. What I am saying is that if the party comes across a talking mushroom, there needs to be a reason for that mushroom to have so much to say.

Don’t be Random

There’s a difference between possible, probable, and plausible, and there’s a reason why this matters in your D&D game beyond mere semantics.

First of all, this is fantasy which means anything goes. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it should. Or if it does, it shouldn’t be ‘just because’.

If you’ve got goblins living peacefully as servants of a sentient, hyper-intelligent gelatinous cube and its manticore concubine, find a plausible explanation for that bizarre arrangement.

Don’t be random just for randomness sake. If you do something ‘out there’, come up with a reason for it that makes sense.

Dungeons Without Reason

When I started off as a dungeon master back in the early 80s when dirt was young, I’d start designing adventures by drawing maps. The maps rarely made any sense. They’d be a series of rooms, most often square or rectangular with the only variation being their relative size, and then I’d connect them with a series of also seemingly random corridors.

There was no rational explanation for why the rooms were there, why they were shaped that way, who made them, or who spent those countless goblin-hours carving the corridors from the living rock to connect them.

Then, I’d stock the dungeon with a bunch of random items that seemed interesting, but like the layout of the dungeon, they had no logical reason for why they were there.

Example: Against the Giants

When I bought my copy of Gary Gygax’s mega-module, Against the Giants, my mind was blown. It was dense, the scale and scope was huge, and nearly everything had a reason for being there.

It was all still fantastical (since when do giants collaborate with drow elves?) but there was an explanation for it all.

I think that cohesiveness is what took the comprehensiveness and scope of that adventure and made it successful. I think that’s why it was such a joy to play, and a joy to run as a dungeon master.

Players Need to Plan

This matters because players will start to lose interest if what happens in the adventure and what they find in your world is too random. They can’t wrap their head around it, and that quickly inhibits their ability to plan.

If the players can’t plan, or at least have a sense for the ‘why’ behind things, they start to feel like they could have just stayed at home and rolled a bunch of dice on random encounter tables to get the same experience.

Random, disjointed, or implausible people, places and things within a D&D adventure starts to feel like someone’s changing the radio station every few seconds. As soon as you pick up on the beat and start tapping your foot, the music changes and you lose your connection.

Why Is The Mushroom Talking?

If this is fantasy and anything goes, isn’t “making it make sense” counterproductive to the fun? I argue that giving it plausibility makes it even more fun. Here’s why.

When the players come across a talking mushroom, and the mushroom hints that a mad druid is wandering the woods, the players get this “Ah ha!” moment where they have a plausible explanation for the fungal lecture, and more importantly, they have a vector for what to do next: find—or avoid—the druid.

You now have the players invested and enthused about an otherwise bizarre and nonsensical discovery.

What To Watch Out For

Here’s the one thing to watch out for when you create an adventure. Whenever you add something, be it an NPC or an encounter or an object or a place on your map, if it has no ties to other things in your adventure, give some thought to whether it belongs at all.

Are you adding that thing just because it’s fun? Okay, that may be reason enough. But think about also including some sort of reason for it to be there. Does that NPC have an odd accent, different from the others in the area? Maybe they were smacked in the jaw by a mad druid after stumbling upon their sacred grove, thus giving them a permanent change to how they speak.

See what we did there? We added a small yet sort of random element … an NPC that talks kind of funny … we came up with a plausible reason for it … and we tied it to another element we already established earlier, the presence of a mad druid wandering the nearby forest. We also established that it can be dangerous if you go near that mad druid’s sacred grove.

D&D is Fantastical

D&D is fantasy, and it needs to have fantastical people, places, and things. The point of this article is you can’t just add the fantastical purely because it’s fantastical. Give those cool and creative people, places and things an explanation for why they’re there. This is the glue that gives your players a reason to become more emotionally interested in what’s happening.

Much of this article, and similar videos on my YouTube channel, are designed to add to your perspective. When you create encounters, adventures, and campaigns for your D&D group, don’t just focus on the what and how. Give thought to the why as well.

Adding that level of thought to what you create will add something even more important: your players’ enthusiasm and motivation to keep enjoying your game.

How to Make Your D&D World Feel Alive Between Sessions

One of the coolest things you can do as a Dungeon Master is make your players feel like they exist inside a living, breathing world. When you pull that off, your players stop treating the game like a series of static encounters and start treating it like a life their characters are actually living.

The goal is to get your players thinking about your world and what’s going on inside it even when they’re away from the gaming table. Here’s how.

The “Static Syndrome”

Let’s name the problem first, because I think most DMs instinctively know when their world feels flat, even if they can’t quite put a finger on why.

When a party leaves a town and comes back three sessions later, what do they find? In a lot of campaigns, the answer is: exactly what was there when they left. The innkeeper is standing in the same spot. The merchant’s prices haven’t changed. The quest board has the same three notices pinned to it. The farmer whose chickens were eaten by kobolds is still panicked about the same chickens.

Players pick up on this, even if they don’t say it out loud. The world starts to feel like a theme park, where every ride resets the moment you walk away. That kind of world is fine for a one-shot, but for a long-running campaign, it slowly drains the sense of investment and reality.

This ‘static syndrome’ also doesn’t do anything to keep your players motivated to show up to the next session.

The fix is to make your world keep moving, even when the players aren’t there.

Real-world Inspiration

Think about how the real world functions. While you’re at work, things are happening at home. While you’re on vacation, stuff keeps occurring back in your home town. Life keeps going, and we don’t have to check the news feed to be reminded of this.

Your game world can operate the same way. When the party heads into the wilderness for two weeks to find a dungeon, life in the town they left doesn’t freeze. It can be little things like bandits attacking a supply caravan that was bringing in stock for the local merchant, or big things like the thieve’s guild negotiating a territorial dispute with a rival faction.

None of that requires the party to be present. It just requires you, as the DM, to let it happen in the background.

Keeping your in-game world feeling like it’s alive between sessions isn’t as hard as it seems. You don’t need to keep detailed notes of what’s happening, and it doesn’t require some complex system or database or anything like that.

I suggest three simple steps that are super easy to implement.

Step 1: In-game Notes

First, take notes during the game. They don’t have to be elaborate or long-winded, just quick bits of info about key events that take place. I write down names of NPCs the party meets, key monsters fought or encountered, and major items or treasure obtained. It’s just enough to jog your memory when you get into step two. That’s it.

Step 2: Session Notes

The second step is to take those notes you jotted down during the game and write up a session summary. I suggest doing this within 24 hours of the game session so things are still fresh in your brain. Most of my session notes are a single typed page.

These session notes are valuable because they give you a way to find out where you left off before you start your next session. We have busy lives and it’s easy to forget details between games.

Step 3: What Changed?

The third and final step is to review your session notes from the previous game, and figure out what changed in the interim. Did the merchant find out who attacked their supplies caravan? Did the local lord change something about how treasure is taxed? Did the thieves’ guild finalize their negotiation with a rival faction, either through back-room diplomacy or through more aggressive action?

The final part of that third step is to decide how those updates are going to be conveyed to the players at your next session. Think about it from their characters’ point of view … how would they learn about these changes? Do they hear rumors at the tavern? Was a new sign-post put up at the town’s edge? Is everybody talking about it, so it’s essentially impossible to miss?

Simple Decisions, Simple Process

Taking quick notes during the game, summarizing them afterward, and reviewing your session write-up before the next session is a good idea anyway, and one I highly recommend to DMs.

The only difference here is you’re making some simple decisions about what changed between sessions and then finding a way for the characters to discover those updates in-game. That’s all there is to it.

The benefit of this is the players start paying attention to things they’d previously ignored, because they understand now that things can change. They ask more questions and take a quicker interest in the state of things. They might even try to influence outcomes before they leave a place, because they’ve learned that the situation might look different when they get back.

Start Small

Start small. Pick two or three things in your current adventure location that feel like they have momentum. For each one, ask yourself a simple question: if the party comes back, what would happen there while they’re gone? Write down one or two sentences. That’s your background trajectory. Then, when time passes in the game, move that situation one step down its natural path.

You don’t need to plan everything and you don’t need to know every twist. You just need to know enough to answer the question, “What happened while the players were gone?”

The World Reacts to Player Actions

There’s another layer to this that’s worth mentioning. The world shouldn’t just change randomly. Not only should the changes make sense, but it should also react to the players actions and choices.

If the party helped a local lord reclaim their stolen taxes, that lord now has money and influence they didn’t have before and the party will be on their good side. Maybe the lord starts a road improvement project that makes travel easier in the region. Maybe they start hiring mercenaries, which means there are more armed strangers in town when the party returns … who might actually be competition for new adventure gigs. Maybe they become a bit arrogant with their newly restored power, and the people who liked them before are starting to grumble.

No Static Dungeons

If the party cleared out a dungeon that had been terrorizing a village for years, the village is going to change in response to that security. People will move in or a merchant might set up shop.

In that dungeon the party cleared out during the previous session, scavengers might consume the bodies. Weaker factions might come in and clear out the remaining monsters, now that their odds have improved. Even dungeons have a life of sorts, so don’t hesitate to represent that if the party returns.

This feedback loop is enormously satisfying. Players feel like they matter, because they actually do. Their actions have consequences that play out over time, and sometimes those consequences are things they didn’t anticipate. That’s storytelling at its best, and the beauty of it is that a lot of it writes itself once you’ve set up the right conditions.

The Big Reveal? Not So Fast

Here’s one thing I want to be clear about: you don’t need to reveal all of this to your players the moment they walk back into town. In fact, the most effective way to use background changes is to roll them out organically through play.

And sometimes, of course, one of your background developments becomes something much bigger. When your living world produces organic and natural-seeming hooks, you know it’s working.

However, it’s still the DM’s discretion to summarize at the beginning of a session all that happened while the party was gone. This can be like your introduction to a new campaign, except you’re orienting the players to what transpired in an area they’ve already visited. That’s your call.

Smart Work, Not Hard Work

I want to close with something that took me a while to fully appreciate. A living world isn’t about doing more work. It’s about doing the right kind of work.

Instead of spending all your prep time on encounter maps and monster stat blocks, spend a little of it on the human and political and environmental texture of the world your players are moving through. Give your major factions goals and timelines. Give your notable NPCs lives that don’t revolve around the party. Let your world have weather and seasons and economics and rumors that have nothing to do with the current quest.

I’m especially fond of using weather and other natural events to give the campaign the sense that it’s a living world.

Your players will feel the difference. They won’t necessarily be able to explain why the campaign feels more immersive than others they’ve played in, but they’ll definitely appreciate it. They’ll show that appreciation by coming back, session after session, because they’re genuinely curious about what’s changed.

Did You Miss Me?

That’s the goal, in the end, a game that the players think about even when they’re not at the gaming table. You can create a world your players are invested in because it feels like it exists on its own terms, not just as a backdrop for their adventures.

The Best Introductory D&D Adventure to Run for New Players

introductory D&D adventure module for new players — Graduation Day (5e) D&D adventure for 1-4th level characters.

Running D&D for a table full of brand new players is one of the most rewarding things you can do as a Dungeon Master. It’s also one of the easiest ways to completely overwhelm people who showed up excited and willing to try something new. The wrong adventure at the wrong time can turn a table of enthusiastic beginners into a group that decides D&D isn’t for them after one bad session.

I’ve been running D&D since 1980, and over that time I’ve introduced a lot of people to the game, including my own family. What I’ve learned from all of those sessions is that a beginner adventure lives or dies based on a very specific set of qualities. Not all of them are obvious.

In this article I’ll walk you through what those qualities are, why they matter, and what to look for when you’re choosing an introductory adventure for your table.

Want to jump ahead and buy "Graduation Day", a downloadable and printer-friendly 5e adventure (PDF format) that combines all the advice from this article into a fun and ready-to run adventure? It costs less than $5, too. It's great for new DMs as well.

Buy Graduation Day

New Players and New DMs Have Different Needs, But They Overlap

It’s worth separating the needs of D&D players from dungeon masters, because the challenges they face are different.

New players are learning the rules, the vocabulary, how combat works, what their character can and can’t do, and how to make decisions in a world that exists only in their mind. That’s a lot of cognitive load for a first session. An adventure that throws them into complex moral dilemmas, intricate political plots, or large numbers of enemies can be overwhelming.

New Dungeon Masters are dealing with all of that PLUS they’re managing the table, interpreting rules on the fly, reading descriptions aloud, tracking initiative, adjudicating edge cases, and desperately trying not to look like they have no idea what they’re doing. An adventure that requires deep improvisation, dense NPC interaction, or heavily branching narrative paths is going to make a new DM’s life miserable.

The sweet spot for an introductory adventure is one that keeps both players and the DM in mind at the same time. They have clear objectives, manageable scope, yet enough structure to guide a new DM without boxing them in completely. Even experienced DMs enjoy running an adventure for new players that was designed with new players in mind. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Be sure to check out this related article, “Top 5 DM Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them” for ideas and pointers.

What Makes an Introductory Adventure Actually Work

A Simple, Clear Goal

New players should never have to wonder what they’re supposed to be doing or what their available options are. The objective needs to be stated plainly and early. Rescue the mentor. Investigate the abandoned mine. Get out of the dungeon alive. Whatever it is, the party should be able to state their goal out loud, in one sentence. This isn’t dumbing the game down. It’s giving people who are new to D&D a stable foundation to stand on while they learn everything else.

New players still learn the how as they go, but at least they have a clear idea of what they’re trying to accomplish.

Graduated Difficulty

The first encounter in a beginner adventure should not be the hardest one. The best introductory adventures ease players into combat, starting with something they can handle confidently, then gradually introduce more complex situations as the session progresses. By the time they face a serious threat, they’ve had enough experience to avoid panicking.

Clear DM Guidance

A good introductory adventure tells the DM what each encounter is supposed to accomplish, what the monsters are likely to do, and how to handle the most common situations that might come up. This is different from a railroad. You’re not removing the DM’s agency, you’re giving them enough information to run the encounter confidently and improvise intelligently when the players inevitably do something unexpected. New players can be even more unpredictable than experienced ones, and that’s the last thing a newbie DM needs.

Boxed Read-Aloud Text

New DMs are not yet comfortable describing environments and situations off the top of their head. Well-written boxed text gives them something to read aloud that sets the scene, establishes atmosphere, and moves things forward without requiring them to improvise from nothing. It’s a training wheel that most DMs eventually stop needing, but in that first session it’s invaluable.

Pre-Made Characters (Optional but Valuable)

Character creation in 5e is not a beginner-friendly process. For a first session especially, having a set of pre-rolled characters that are already configured and ready to play within that particular adventure means you can get into the action without spending the first two hours staring at the Player’s Handbook. Players can always create their own characters once they’ve decided they love the game. For their first game of D&D, get them playing as quickly as possible by providing pre-made characters.

A Word About Scope

Introductory adventures should be completable in a session or two. One of the worst things you can do to new players is drop them into a sprawling 200-page campaign with dozens of factions, a 20-year backstory, and a cast of NPCs the size of a small novel. They don’t have the context to care about any of that yet.

A “win” is when the players finish the first session enthusiastically asking, “How soon can we play again?”

Start small. Let them have a complete experience with a beginning, middle, and end. When they reach the end of the adventure feeling like they accomplished something rewarding and want more, that’s when you expand the world. Earning their investment in a bigger campaign is much easier after a satisfying introductory adventure than before one.

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Graduation Day Is Built Around These Principles

I wrote Graduation Day specifically for new players and first-time DMs, and I designed it around every lesson I’ve learned from introducing people to D&D. The first time I ran it was at a family gathering in 2012. Everyone at the table was new to D&D, and by the end of the session they were planning their next adventure together.

Graduation Day (5e) D&D adventure for 1-4th level characters.

The adventure gives the party a clear, immediate objective: after graduating from an adventurer’s academy, their mentor has gone missing and needs to be rescued. They know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and the action starts right away.

It has a two-level dungeon, and starts with manageable encounters, then builds toward a genuine threat that feels engaging by the time they reach it. There’s boxed read-aloud text throughout, full monster stat blocks, sensible encounter logic, and enough DM guidance to keep a first-timer confident without scripting every moment.

I’ve included eight pre-rolled characters covering four classes, all configured specifically for this adventure, so you can hand them out and start playing within minutes. It’s a printable 49-page PDF with no watermarks, and is formatted for easy reference at the table. The party can reach 3rd level by the time it’s done, which means they’ll have enough experience with the game to step into a bigger campaign with real enthusiasm.

It’s $4.95, costs less than a cup of coffee, and contains everything you need to run a complete first session of D&D. You can pick it up at the Ruckerworks shop.

Additional Recommendations

If you’re a new DM prepping for your first session, you might also want to read Stop Lore Dumping in D&D: Let Players Discover Your World. It covers one of the most common mistakes new DMs make and how to avoid it.

The right introductory adventure won’t make you a perfect DM overnight, and it won’t guarantee every player at your table becomes a lifelong D&D fan. But it gives everyone the best possible chance of leaving that first session wanting to do it again. That’s the whole goal.

D&D Ideas: 3 Campaigns. 3 Adventures. 3 Encounters.

If you’re a Dungeon Master who has ever stared at a blank page wondering where to start your next D&D campaign, this article is for you. I’m going to share three campaign ideas, three adventure ideas, and three encounter ideas that you can use right out of the box or adapt to fit your own world.

But before I get into all that, let me take a quick second to explain the difference between all three, because some newer DMs may not know how they concentrically relate to each other.

A campaign is the big picture, the overall story that ties everything together. It’s made up of one or more adventures. Each adventure is a somewhat self-contained story that fits within the campaign’s broader theme, kind of like an individual movie within a franchise. Finally, adventures are made up of one or more encounters. These are the specific scenes where combat and social interaction and other events occur within that adventure.

Campaign Ideas

Here are three campaign ideas to get your creative wheels turning.

Campaign Idea 1: Werewolf Vendetta

The first one is a werewolf vendetta. A cabal of werewolves is conspiring to destroy the duchy. This sounds straightforward, right? Well, here’s the twist: the head werewolf has a deeply personal reason for wanting this because the Duke is his brother and they’ve never gotten along.

This is the kind of campaign hook that gives you so much to work with. You’ve got political intrigue, family betrayal, a monstrous threat with a very human motivation, and a built-in ticking clock as the lycanthropes work toward their destructive goal. The players don’t have to know right away that the werewolves and the Duke are connected. In fact, it’s better if they don’t. Let them think it’s a standard “monster problem” at first, and then watch their jaws drop when the truth comes out.

Campaign Idea 2: Grave Robbers

The second campaign idea deals with something even darker: someone is robbing graves, and a powerful necromancer is behind it. On the surface, that might sound familiar, but here’s where you as the DM get to put your stamp on it. Why is the necromancer doing this? What do they want with the bodies? Are they building an army, or perhaps trying to resurrect someone they loved? Maybe they’re conducting some kind of terrible experiment? The grave robbing is just the symptom, whereas the campaign is about uncovering the reason. That journey can take your players through catacombs, rival factions, ancient lore, and some unsettling moral territory.

Campaign Idea 3: Encroaching Desert

The third campaign idea is more epic in scope: a large desert is getting larger and it is swallowing the surrounding land at a rapid pace. Farmland is turning to dust and ancient forests are dying at a rate that has people genuinely frightened. This kind of environmental catastrophe is a great campaign backbone because it affects everyone, not just a specific town or faction, and it creates a sense of urgency and desperation that keeps players invested. It also points toward something ancient and powerful as the root cause, perhaps an evil and ancient blue dragon, which means by the time your players find the answer, they’re going to feel like they’ve really earned it.

Adventure Ideas

Now let’s zoom in and look at three adventures within each of those campaigns.

Adventure Idea 1: Duke’s Assassination

For the werewolf campaign, here’s an adventure that kicks things off nicely. The Duke hires the party to investigate a rumor that someone is planning his assassination at an upcoming royal ball. The players go undercover, posing as servants and guests, trying to suss out the threat before it happens. As they dig into the clues, suspicion falls on the Duchess herself. Is she behind the plot? Or is she just a pawn being maneuvered by someone else? I’ll give you a hint: it’s the Duke’s own brother, who is the head of a group of werewolves. This adventure has everything you want: social intrigue, disguises, moral ambiguity, and a reveal that changes the direction of the entire situation.

Adventure Idea 2: Disappearing Villagers

For the necromancer campaign, here’s your opening adventure. The residents of a small village have been dying at an alarming rate, and as if that weren’t troubling enough, the day after each burial the grave turns up empty. The party investigates the disappearances and eventually follows clues that lead them into a nearby forest. There, they discover a conclave of zombies quietly gathering in the dark. This adventure works on multiple levels, opening as a mystery, shifting into something that feels like a horror story, and eventually becomes a likely combat situation against a bunch of undead. It also immediately tells the players that whatever or whomever is doing this has a plan, and that’s scarier than any single monster.

Adventure Idea 3: Traveling Druid

For the desert campaign, here’s an early adventure that sets the tone. A traveling druid meets the party at a tavern and asks for their help. A sacred forest near the desert’s edge is being destroyed at a rate of one hundred yards a day. Something is causing this, it’s not natural, and signs point to a set of ruins deep in the desert as the source, so the party sets out to find learn why. This is a great adventure because it establishes the scale of the problem without overwhelming the players too soon, since at this point they’re not saving the world yet, just trying to figure out what’s wrong with one desert. The world-saving part comes later.

Encounter Ideas

Let’s get granular and talk about specific encounters within those adventures.

Encounter Idea 1: Ballroom Blitz!

For the royal ball adventure, here’s a great opening encounter. The party members playing the role of guards are stationed at the entrance when a group of guests who are not on the list show up. One of the player characters working the door notices something off about them, starting with the fact that their arms are unusually hairy and one of them has a unibrow that would impress even the most dedicated facial hair enthusiast. When the player challenges the group, one of them transforms and attacks right there in the doorway. Suddenly there’s a brawl at the entrance, and the party has to contain the situation before the violence ruins everything. It’s chaotic, it’s fun, and it puts the players immediately on the back foot in a social environment where subtlety was supposed to be the order of the day. It can also expand by being a ruse while the real attack comes from the kitchen — because one or two of the cooks were werewolves in disguise.

Encounter Idea 2: Zombie Conclave

For the zombie village adventure, here’s an encounter that has a good chance of unsettling your players. The party pulls a night watch near the village cemetery, everything is quiet, and then the dead come out of the ground. That’s unsettling on its own, but what makes it worse is that several of the zombies are people the party may have met earlier in the adventure. These are villagers who died just in the past week, people the players spoke with, ate with, maybe even shared a drink with. There’s something far more disturbing about recognizing a zombie as someone you were talking to just a few days ago, compared to fighting a nameless monster you’ve never seen before, and that’s the kind of encounter that makes an adventure personal.

Encounter Idea 2: Death Above, Death Below

And finally, for the encroaching desert adventure, here’s an encounter for day one of the journey that establishes right away that this desert is not an ordinary place. The party is trekking across the sand when they spot a dragon flying high overhead, and they’re either admiring it or nervously watching it when all of a sudden a cluster of small sandworms burst up from the ground and attack, giving them two threats at the same moment, one in the sky and one under their feet. Do they run? Do they fight the worms and hope the dragon doesn’t notice them? Do they try to use the dragon’s presence to their advantage somehow? This encounter doesn’t have an obvious solution, and those are often the most memorable ones.

Summary

There you have it: three campaigns, three adventures, and three encounters, all designed to work together. You can use any of them exactly as I’ve described, mix and match, or just take inspiration from the core idea and build your own world around it. The beauty of D&D is that none of this is carved in stone (maybe it is?) and all of it is just raw material waiting for you to shape it into something your players will remember.

The 30% Rule Every DM Should Know (and How to Use It)

Over my career as a DM, dating back to 1980, I’ve noticed a difference between how much I prep in my campaigns versus how much the party actually explores. Give or take, the players at my table usually only discover about 30% of the world I create and the things within it.

So why prep the other 70%? It’s because you can’t tell which people, places and things they’ll discover and which ones they won’t.

In this article, I’ll cover how to prep in a flexible way, I’ll give you a specific example showing how, and I’ve added some hard-earned advice at the end that can save you tons of time.

The Hard Truth About Prep

If you think I’m going to say, “Stop prepping the other 70%”, that would be the easy but incorrect approach.

Here’s the hard truth: Go ahead and prep all of it, but do it in a way that stays flexible no matter what the party explores or ignores.

However, if you’re running a true sandbox campaign, where there is no connecting plot tying everything together, or there’s no plot at all, much of the advice I share in this video won’t apply to your style of running the game. If that’s you, go watch some cat videos or better yet see what Ginny Di is up to. She makes great content.

D&D Players Are as Predictable Cats on Crack

When I wrote that only about 30% of my adventure prep ever gets consumed by the players, how did that make you feel? Was that intimidating or dispiriting? Could you imagine buying and wrapping ten gifts for someone’s birthday, and they only open three of them and completely ignore the other seven?

The advice in this article would be pointless if you knew ahead of time which 30% of your adventure would get attention and which 70% would be ignored. That never happens, though. Come on, these are D&D players. They’re as predictable as cats on crack.

This means you still have to wrap all those adventuring presents without any requirement they be opened in any particular order. And, the campaign can survive even if the majority never get unwrapped at all.

Prep, Don’t Plan

Go ahead and prep it all. That’s the reality. Even if it’s to the most minimalist level of detail, such as a single line in your notes, prep it all. At least it will pass through your brain that there’s a hobgoblin hiding behind that tree; it’s there. It exists.

The not-so-secret secret is, prepare it but don’t PLAN it.

Don’t require that hobgoblin hiding behind the tree to be encountered or fought or parlayed with or anything in order for the campaign to go forward.

If you think about it, a lot of the stuff DMs put into their adventure designs isn’t required for the core of the campaign to move forward anyway. Much of it is set dressing, sometimes to give the adventure flavor, and other times to give the party something to do or a challenge they face to make it interesting. But if you pulled it out, the main plot would still continue.

Clear Quest Directions

Here’s two important points. Don’t make the players guess what their high-level objective is, but at the same time, don’t lore dump on them, or give them a laundry list of what they have to accomplish, with the location and order all spelled out.

Whether they need to slay the dragon, or steal the royal scepter, or rescue the ogre from the princess … whatever it is, the party should have a pretty clear idea what their goal is.

How they go about doing it is where the adventuring fun comes into play. You can give hints without them being obvious. You can adjust at the table in numerous ways to reveal pieces of the plot without it being a lore dump. Talking magpies, scraps of parchment, murmuring hermits, you get the point.

Be sure to check out, “See also “Stop Lore Dumping in D&D: Let Players Discover Your World” at https://ruckerworks.com/2025/12/stop-lore-dumping-dnd/

Skip the Plan

If you have it in your plan that a wandering minstrel on the Queen’s Road gives them a hint in their song, but the party never travels on that road and therefore never meets the minstrel (perhaps they instead follow a path through the mountains) adapt and let the party find song lyrics scrawled upon a scrap of parchment tucked in the pack of a trapper they find dead along the trail, killed by a mountain lion so recently their mauled body is still warm.

What I did there was convey information based on prep instead of a plan. The prep was the information found in the song lyrics. Planning was requiring it to be conveyed in a particular place and manner. That’s the difference. Prep is what, plan is where, when, and how.

Include the what, then let the rest happen organically.

Recycle Your Unused Prep

At the top of this article, I promised some hard-earned advice that can save you time. I’m a DM of my word, so here it is.

Keep track of what’s been discovered and what hasn’t. Take that 70% of stuff that the party never finds or explores and reuse it later in the same adventure, or in other adventures entirely.

This is especially valuable as a time-saver when it comes to maps and all they contain. There’s no reason why that unexplored dungeon beneath the ruined monastery you created for Campaign X can’t be available for use in Campaign Y.

Or, if you have that dungeon located under a monastery in hex A4, but the party never goes to that sector, just relocate it to be in hex C5. As long as the underlying reason for that dungeon to be there, or the reason why it’s filled with zombies, can be adapted on the fly for the new location, you’re golden.

Re-use

Prep is a terrible thing to waste.

You’ve now utilized a bunch of prep that you spent valuable time creating, and kept it from being wasted. The players should have no reason to suspect that what you designed has been repurposed or relocated.

I do this all the time when running different groups of players. In fact, it’s not uncommon for me to get at least two runs of every adventure I design by using them with different groups of players.

How to Build a D&D Campaign Using One-Shots

Introduction

Should all D&D campaigns start out as a one-shot adventure?

If a one shot becomes a campaign, great
If a planned campaign becomes a one-shot, not-so-great

Grand D&D campaigns often get started in one of two ways: they are designed and planned by the Dungeon Master from an original concept and long-term vision; or, they are a series of stand-alone one-shots that they somehow find a way to tie together and the players are none the wiser.

In this article, I’m going to talk about that second option and will present some perspectives that show how one-shots just might be a better way to create your D&D campaign.

Prep Is Fun, But…

To be clear, this isn’t about a right way or wrong way to create a campaign in D&D. On the one hand you’ve got the classic pre-planned approach. I’ve always enjoyed the prep side of being a dungeon master even more than running the game, and planning things out ahead of time, to me and to a lot of other dungeon masters, is a lot of fun.

But, I’ve noticed in recent years that running one-shots is also a viable method to create campaigns in a more organic way. This method has some benefits, with flexibility being the biggest. So, I’m going to talk about the pros and cons of planning your campaign the traditional way, then I’ll describe how organically building a campaign through one-shots can be another approach worth considering.

What About Planning?

To start, there’s the question about planning. By their nature, don’t campaigns need a coherent and deliberate plan from the start? It can be argued that, yes, they do.

By definition, a campaign is a series of adventures that tie together with a common theme or broad objective. This implies that the common theme or broad objective must be known to the DM, and maybe even the players.

But there are some risks associated with all that planning. In the military, they say, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy” and fantasy gaming is no different; every DM knows that no campaign goes completely as they planned. As I’ve talked about before, there’s a difference between planning and preparing.

See my video “Preparing vs Planning Your D&D Campaign” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlDIwC2KGJk

Why is Planning Risky?

So what’s all this talk about planning got to do with one-shots, and why is too much planning risky?

Planning implies you pre-decide not just what CAN happen, but to a certain extent what SHOULD happen and when. That’s dangerous because the players, and the dice, can go one way when your plan assumed they should go another way.

Instead of planning, prepare instead. It’s largely a matter of perspective, but it matters. Prepare by creating locations and monsters and NPCs but not requiring them to be discovered in a particular order, or handled in a particular manner, in order for the campaign to proceed. That’s the key difference.

If you create a one-shot adventure, where it can stand alone and there’s nothing bad if the party decides to do something completely different, then that’s cool. You can still create it with a mind for where it COULD go or what COULD happen, but if none of that comes to pass, it’s no big deal.

The Ultimate Muse

Here’s another advantage: a one-shot adventure is the ultimate muse for subsequent creativity. One of the best ways to create an adventure is to use the events of the one-shot you just ran as the foundational inspiration for where the next one will go.

You take where you left off in the last session as the starting point for the next. And so on.

You also have the flexibility to change directions for the next session based on how the previous session ended.

Forever DMs

There are many forever DMs who started off by being asked if they’d “volunteer” to run a single D&D game for a group of players, and for whatever reason they discover they either really love being a DM and want to do it again and again, or the players really love the job they did and kept begging for more.

In those situations, especially ad hoc or short-notice D&D games, it starts off as a one-shot. There’s no intention or expectation of it going any further than that one session. The DM may even start the game session without any sense for how they’ll finish it.

Somehow they do it the old fashioned way, by making it up as they go along or by bastardizing someone else’s adventure, or even taking inspiration from a completely non-fantasy source and throwing some swords and goblins at it.

Where to Go From Here

The session is a big success. The players have a great time and come away convinced you had everything planned all along. After you get home and your heart rate comes down to a reasonable level, you have two realizations: That was crazy-stressful and I don’t know how I got through it … and, that went better than I thought it would and I already have ideas for where to take it from there.

There’s some common wisdom that a lot of teachers are only one chapter ahead of the class, and there may be some truth to that. There’s also some wisdom in it for Dungeon Masters, in that you really only have to be one session, or even one encounter, ahead of the adventurers.

Build a Campaign One Session at a Time

When building a campaign a single session at a time, the two things you should strive for are: to the best of your ability, make everything look as if it was intended; and, do what you can to take that random encounter you discretely rolled for behind the DM screen and connect it to the organically growing theme of what is slowly looking like an ongoing campaign.

Can you imagine the look on your players faces if, after running dozens or even hundreds of sessions in what they assumed was some grand campaign you planned and plotted to Tolkienesque proportions, you admit, “I was making it up as I went along the entire time.”

I’ve done that, and it’s an amazing experience to see the players’ reactions.

Even though I’ve been doing this since 1980, I’m still learning something new with every game I run. It’s through sharing, “This worked for me” or “I tried this and it didn’t go so well” that we all get better at running the game, and at being better players, too.

How to Write a D&D Adventure From Scratch (Step-by-Step)

Free Basic Adventure

Want to see how a complete D&D adventure comes together from start to finish? In this video, I walk you through my 7-step process for writing an adventure and you’ll watch it unfold in near-real time.

Download the adventure here. ZIP file, contains printable PDF, editable .docx file, and maps. It’s completely free.

Referenced Links and Tools

Worlds:

Anna Meyer’s Greyhawk: https://greyhawkonline.com/ghmaps/
Original Greyhawk map: https://greyhawk-map.com
Faerun Interactive map: https://www.aidedd.org/atlas/

Character and NPC Generators:

Fast Character Generator: https://fastcharacter.com
OSE Character generator: https://dndcharacter.com
Donjon Generator (many generator types): https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/name/

Map Generators and Drawing Utilities:

One Page Dungeon Generator: https://watabou.github.io/one-page-dungeon/
Village Generator: https://watabou.itch.io/village-generator
Dungeon Scrawl: https://www.dungeonscrawl.com/
Hextml: https://hextml.playest.net/

Want a complete adventure?

If you’re interested in a more complete adventure, check out Graduation Day. It’s a complete first-level 5e D&D adventure that begins where every hero’s story starts — at graduation. Your party of new adventurers must rescue their mentor from an orc stronghold, uncover a deeper plot, and confront a dark secret buried beneath the hills. Perfect for new players. It’s also a great D&D module for beginning Dungeon Masters because it has a sensible layout, walks the DM through the process, and is a complete adventure with maps and even pre-rolled characters.

How to Find D&D Adventure Ideas in the Real World

I often speak of gaining inspiration for your D&D campaigns by observing the real world as a starting point for your creativity. I decided to demonstrate that with a little field trip to various locations, all within a 5 mile radius of my suburban home east of Portland, Oregon in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

I’ll discuss each location and the ideas that can be inspired by them.

Tickle Creek Trail

Perhaps the most common place where I get inspired is a local walking trail. I live in a temperate rain forest so I won’t be getting any desert-inspired ideas, but for forest or even jungle themes, it’s great.

As I walk this path, I put myself into the mind set of an adventuring party moving through the wilderness. Perhaps they’re looking for the entrance to a rumored dungeon, or are escaping monsters that are pursuing them.

Sandy River, Revenue Bridge

Looking at this rugged river, I think of wilderness and the mysteries and dangers that can lie within. I am the dungeon master for a teens D&D group through my local library. Based on this real river, I wrote one into my current campaign that has rumored magical power.

Any deceased creature placed into the river at midnight and set to float away into the darkness will emerge from the frigid water somewhere downstream, resurrected. Of course, this has led to the wilderness becoming filled with the undead, but who’s counting?

Jonsrud Viewpoint/Mt. Hood

Here’s a view from the cliffs high above the same river I just visited. As you can see, there’s the lonely mountain in the distance. Here and there in the wilderness are homesteads of hearty souls who brave the dangers of the forest and deep river valleys to make a life of their own.

Should it be no surprise that many of these pioneering souls are rumored to be werebears and even a few werewolves? That’s just a rumor, of course. Speaking of rumors, the next place on my field trip is a great place to hear some.

Paola’s Pizza

Shifting away from the wilderness and back into my small town, I think about the inns and taverns where adventurers go for food, drink, and rumors. There’s an old pizza restaurant near me that had been in business for about 50 years or so before finally closing down.

I can’t show you the interior, but it’s like someone took an old barn and made it homey. There’s a large open area in the middle with a huge stone fireplace, and on the left side ground floor is the kitchen, and above it is a dining area. On the right side ground floor is the bar and above that is more dining.

I take inspiration from actual buildings, and just from memory I could easily draw a map for a busy tavern within my campaign based on the floor plan of this historical establishment.

Strip Mall

Getting even more into modern society, you can get inspiration from a suburban strip mall. Take a guess what those ideas might be? As I look at this, I think of a row of vendor stalls within the protective ramparts of a large keep or city. You can hear the sounds of vendors hocking their wares and the smells of those selling dilectables and edibles.

Not those kind of edibles.

Sandy High School Athletic Field

We move now to the athletic field of our local high school. What does this have to do with D&D you might ask? Think gladiator games. Perhaps the party is visiting a strange city and their thief gets caught picking the pocket of a local luminary.

The whole party gets arrested and are given a choice. The regional competition of warriors and spell-casters is taking place in a day or two and the party can either compete, or the thief in their group gets their hands cut off.

This would be a good way to introduce PvP to your group. I do that twice a year with my teen’s D&D group, usually just before the summer break and again just before they kiddos return to school.

Look Around You

As you move around your community, look at the natural features such as hills, forests, grasslands, rivers, what have you, and let those places color your perspective with a fantastical hue.

Give consideration to buildings and local landmarks, or even the people in your community. I once took inspiration from a scandalous mayor of a local town and made him the bad guy during one particular session of my campaign. I changed the name to protect the guilty, but their mannerisms, way of speaking, and even the way they dress influenced the evil NPC I created in the game.

Get Started

It’s easier to edit than to create, so take the real world as a starting point, then edit that source of inspiration to suit your campaign.

I hope this perspective helps you out.