DM201 discussion notes

Below the notes to the best of my recollection from a wide-ranging 2hr discussion I pitched as an Ask Me Anything session to those who come to our local games session. I thought I'd get a bunch of new folk but half the attendees were familiar faces who've played at my tables - and regularly run their own - so this was a little past the basics and more talked about progressing from good to great.

Prepping for one shots

I lay out the chunks of what will be done in the session and be prepared to snap-out some bits if time is getting tight. The “Five Room Dungeon” model is a good one for laying out sessions - a combat, a puzzle, a roleplay opportunity, the big boss and the reward. If you set it up so one or more of those elements can be skipped if time gets tight, then you can manage the session length that way. Dysons Dodecahedron goes into this a bit more and is a great source for maps.

People will bring their characters, DMs bring situations. It is good to have some ideas of how the players might solve it but players will go off in all sorts of directions or get incredibly lucky or have brilliant creative ideas so be ready for any given obstacle to get solved/eliminated more quickly than you thought.

Generally as set up, prepare a mystery (dungeon to explore, mystery to solve) have some folk in there to interact with and be prepared for people to lean combat or roleplay as they prefer. People say they prefer roleplay in surveys online 1 so be ready for things to get talked at

Prepping a session I try to have all my notes on a single-sheet so everything is in one place for a single glance.

Written adventures will usually have things laid out along these line but it is always worth reading through it and making your own one-sheet reference as they often scatter critical information around in a way that makes it easy to read, not putting it where you need it when you run at the table (major NPC name is in the intro, not at the place where the PCs encounter them, etc.)

General game-running

To make combat more interesting - Terrain, Terrain, Terrain. The same half dozen goblins in a flat arena, in a forest or in a trap filled ruin are very different experiences.

Without terrain, it is monster stat block vs character sheet, maybe some tactical movement. With static terrain, line of sight is a factor, cover comes into play, things get more interesting. With hazardous terrain - pits, fire, quicksand, hidden ambushers - there are lots more factors to work with and the same fight against six goblins has more to it. Frog Factory blog has a great set of terrain hazard generators

As a DM I suggest terrain hazards that trigger when the players act, e.g. fire burns those within it, rocky slopes need Dex checks to travers are better than those you need to remember to set off - pendulum-blades that swing at the bottom of the initiative tracker. You will already have lots of things to remember, ease your own load.

Managing combat duration - your legitimate dial is HP - any monster has xd10+y in its stat block, the range between the lowest possible dice roll and the highest is perfectly legitimate to use. My preference is to set the number just as the fight starts then stick to it - sometimes the monster will survive one more round on just that last hp and that is fine and fun.

DMs have lots of different styles, players come in lots of different types. Tell people what kind of game you like to run so folk have the chance to opt out if that is not what they want. The D&D pillars of Combat, Exploration, Roleplay is a decent model.

* Combat - tactical fighting
* Exploration - includes both puzzles to solve and mysteries to investigate
* Roleplay - interacting with NPCs (or maybe other players)

Those three pillars are what gets referenced a lot and I think they are more helpful as thinking about modes of play: Combat is more individual, working your character sheet, in initiative order Exploration is more free-form, collaborative but player-to-player-to-DM discussing the world, some character sheet use but less Roleplay is PC-to-PC-to-NPC, being in the world a bit more

Different players enjoy different things so try and figure out who you have at your table and where possible give them things to do that they will like. A good list of player types is here.