Starting as a new DM ain’t easy. There’s a lot to learn, but I’ve got your back! Check out some of my biggest tips for a new DM below.
Table of Contents
Don’t be afraid to fudge your numbers
Your job as DM is to facilitate the story. Sometimes you need the plot to be hard and heavy, and sometimes you need it to be light and easy. The dice you roll won’t always give you those plot points! So, if you needed a 20 when you got a 1, or you needed a 1 when you got a 20 – just make it up. Fudge the number and pretend you got the result you required.
- Note: You’ll need to make sure your players can’t see your dice, either by rolling behind a DM screen or using digital dice.
Let players use their environment
Quite often you’re going to get into situations in combat (or even roleplay) where one or more players can’t really do anything – maybe they’re stuck somewhere without a good ranged weapon, or the boss is resistant to their attacks. Whatever.
Ask yourself: What else can they do? What have you given them? Interacting with the environment could be a great way to add diversity to the scene. Is there something that can be toppled over? Something broken, dismantled, pulled, blasted, flipped?
You can drop elements like these into the scene when you first describe it, and then either let players figure out what to do with them later, or drop some hints if you think they’re stuck. Or if you didn’t describe elements earlier but they could realistically be in the scene, you could fudge it a bit by asking them to ‘roll for perception’ and drop it in later. That’s up to you.
Ask your players for a break if you need one
Nobody wants to be the person that pauses play, but sometimes as a DM you might find you need to.
It’s very common for players in DnD to go, err, ‘off-script’. Sometimes it’s easy to keep track of all the new developments, and occasionally it gets to a point where you’re so far off the beaten path you really do need to sit down and have a think.
So, don’t be afraid to say, hey, can I get five minutes, 10 minutes, hell, maybe a few days or weeks, to consider the new developments and write some new content. Nine times out of 10 your players will be OK with this, because ultimately it’s better for them too.
Give players character development moments
Genuine character development – that is, their personal growth (not leveling up, which we’ll come to later) – can be one of the most rewarding aspects of DnD roleplaying. It’s that time you realise the character someone initially wrote has changed and developed, perhaps without their realising.
But, not everyone is a natural roleplayer. Some people just don’t think in terms of growth and arcs, they think in levels and mechanics. And that’s OK! Everyone plays differently. But you can encourage even non-roleplayers to consider the growth of their character by taking a moment, every so often, to ask simple questions.
How does your character feel about that?
What is your character thinking?
These little prompt questions will encourage someone to think about it, then answer. And they may realise that the character they started is no longer the character they’re playing – and that’s plot development.
Do you need to know all the rules?
Nope!
That said, to be a successful DM you’ll definitely need to know at least the Basic Rules, which can be accessed for free online. While you’ll still have a lot left to learn, these will enable you to start to DM very basic pre-made campaigns – but probably no homebrew for now.
So if you want to start getting into homebrew or you just want to feel more confident as a DM, that’s when you’ll need to start to learn more. But you don’t need to study all at once. In fact, one of the best ways to learn DnD’s nitty-gritties is to Google them at the time they are relevant. Players suddenly want to know how dynamite works, or swimming, tracking? Or you want to learn more about building encounters, making dungeons more interesting, adding loot, and all the gamut of tiny little things that make up a campaign? Crack open Google and figure it out there and then. Of course, the more source books you own, the more you can crack those open too. But in all honestly, there’s a LOT on Google.
You’ll also want to have 5e Tools open at all times. I never DM without it. This repository of items, beasts, spells and more is just…there are no words. It’s amazing. Learn to use it. It’s magical.
- NOTE: Homebrew is a type of game design. It feels easy to whip stuff up but chances are the less you know the rules and the less experience you have, the more likely you are to be whipping up stuff that’s horrendously broken (like trying to make a game with no prior experience). To get better at homebrewing things, you need to:
- Get more comfortable with the rules.
- Play lots of DnD, including DMing premade adventures to get a feel for how they’re meant to run. There’s nothing wrong with premades – don’t let homebrew fanatics put you off them.
- Get good at adjusting on the fly – that way if you make a thing that is broken, you can try to fix it as you go without the players noticing.
- Practice. Go get it wrong. Find players that don’t mind testing homebrew ideas and YOLO. Practice makes perfect.
Check in with quiet players
In every DnD game there will be players who naturally start to steal the spotlight a little and those who are much more quiet. People are different! This is OK.
But it can become a problem if there are players who are particularly quiet, who are starting to be genuinely ignored. In these contexts their characters may no longer have much impact on the story, which means you’re leaving someone behind.
So, check in with players you think are being quite quiet. Just every so often, ask them a question:
- What do you want to do?
- How does your character feel about that?
- What do you think about the situation we’re in?
Even if you only do it occasionally, you’re still including them in the game and making sure that their character matters.
Talk to players about the future of their character
Your players will probably have an idea of where they want to take their character, whether that’s subclass, multiclass, particular feats or abilities – whatever. If you can get that information from them, you can start to weave it into the plot.
- To use an example: Imagine if you know your paladin is going to want to take oath of vengeance. Well, what if you can put an encounter into your next session that gives them something – in roleplay – to swear vengeance against?
These little narrative nods add more story weight to the decisions made by players on their character sheet. Instead of randomly learning a new skill, they can think back on a genuine, real moment where they were taught it.
Should you be Matt Mercer?
…no.
The ‘Matt Mercer Effect’ is very real and if you haven’t heard of it, it’s basically an expectation among some players that their real-life DnD games will be identical to what you can see on “Critical Role”. The issue is, of course, this doesn’t happen – it’s unrealistic.
You cannot be Matt Mercer because you are not Matt Mercer. In the same way, Matt Mercer cannot be you because he is not you. Only you are you.
The best thing you can do as a new DM is to not try to be someone else, but to be the best you that you can be. You can definitely look to other DMs for inspiration and ideas, and actually Adventurer’s Leagues are a great place to do that as you’ll be surrounded by real DMs, not watching actors on a webseries, but ultimately the only person you should be is yourself.
Every DM naturally finds their own ‘style’. The more you practice DMing by playing the game, the more yours will develop.
Use the five senses
Looking to build a little more vibrancy and diversity into each scene? Don’t just focus on what players can see – think about their other senses.
What can they see, touch, smell, hear or taste? And if you’re being generous, what can they ‘feel’ from a sixth-sense point of view? Does their spine tingle as if they are being watched? Is the street quiet, too quiet?
The more you tap into all five senses when describing new scenes, the more options you’ll give players for actions to take or respond to, the more their characters might develop (perhaps someone’s sight is poor but hearing is great), and the more you can build your world.
Prepare to go off-script
As a DM, it’s not your job to write a story – it’s your job to guess what the story might be. Typically, players will ruin anything you try to do.
To be a truly great, responsive, engaging DM, you must be prepared to go wildly off-script. Of course your adventure may have a general idea of the sequence of plot points but how players get from A to B and where they stop along the way should be up to them as much as the adventure itself. Their decisions should have meaning and consequence and you may strip both if you try to keep railroading players back on track at every moment. If this happens, you might find players drop out of your game as what’s the point in playing an open-world RPG if you can’t explore the open world?
So, the key to remember: Prepare for a plot, even if it’s not…the plot.