It’s good to be the dungeon master! Not only do you get to tell fantastic stories about heroes, villains, monsters, and magic, but you also get to create the world in which these stories live. Whether you’re running a D&D game already or you think it’s something you want to try, this book is for you.
The Dungeon Master’s Guide assumes that you know the basics of how to play the D&D tabletop roleplaying game. If you haven’t played before, the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set is a great starting point for new players and DMs.
This book has two important companions: the Player’s Handbook, which contains the rules your players need to create characters and the rules you need to run the game, and the Monster Manual, which contains ready-to use monsters to populate your D&D world.
The Dungeon Master
The Dungeon Master (DM) is the creative force behind a D&D game. The DM creates a world for the other players to explore, and also creates and runs adventures that drive the story. An adventure typically hinges on the successful completion of a quest, and can be as short as a single game session. Longer adventures might embroil players in great conflicts that require multiple game sessions to resolve. When strung together, these adventures form an ongoing campaign. A D&D campaign can include dozens of adventures and last for months or years.
A Dungeon Master gets to wear many hats. As the architect of a campaign, the DM creates adventures by placing monsters, traps, and treasures for the other players' characters (the adventurers) to discover. As a storyteller, the DM helps the other players visualize what’s happening around them, improvising when the adventurers do something or go somewhere unexpected. As an actor, the DM plays the roles of the monsters and supporting characters, breathing life into them. And as a referee, the DM interprets the rules and decides when to abide by them and when to change them.
Inventing, writing, storytelling, improvising, acting, refereeing-every DM handles these roles differently, and you’ll probably enjoy some more than others. It helps to remember that Dungeons & Dragons is a hobby, and being the DM should be fun. Focus on the aspects you enjoy and downplay the rest. For example, if you don’t like creating your own adventures, you can use published ones. You can also lean on the other players to help you with rules mastery and world-building.
The D&D rules help you and the other players have a good time, but the rules aren’t in charge. You’re the DM, and you are in charge of the game. That said, your goal isn’t to slaughter the adventurers but to create a campaign world that revolves around their actions and decisions, and to keep your players coming back for more! If you’re lucky, the events of your campaign will echo in the memories of your players long after the final game session is concluded.
How to Use This Book
This book is organized in three parts. The first part helps you decide what kind of campaign you’d like to run. The second part helps you create the adventures-the stories-that will compose the campaign and keep the players entertained from one game session to the next. The last part helps you adjudicate the rules of the game and modify them to suit the style of your campaign.
Part 1: Master of Worlds
Every DM is the creator of his or her own campaign world. Whether you invent a world, adapt a world from a favorite movie or novel, or use a published setting for the D&D game, you make that world your own over the course of a campaign.
The world where you set your campaign is one of countless worlds that make up the D&D multiverse, a vast array of planes and worlds where adventures happen. Even if you’re using an established world such as the Forgotten Realms, your campaign takes place in a sort of mirror universe of the official setting where Forgotten Realms novels, game products, and digital games are assumed to take place. The world is yours to change as you see fit and yours to modify as you explore the consequences of the players' actions.
Your world is more than just a backdrop for adventures. Like Middle Earth, Westeros, and countless other fantasy worlds out there, it’s a place to which you can escape and witness fantastic stories unfold. A well-designed and well-run world seems to flow around the adventurers, so that they feel part of something, instead of apart from it.
Consistency is a key to a believable fictional world. When the adventurers go back into town for supplies, they should encounter the same nonplayer characters (NPCs) they met before. Soon, they’ll learn the barkeep’s name, and he or she will remember theirs as well. Once you have achieved this degree of consistency, you can provide an occasional change. If the adventurers come back to buy more horses at the stables, they might discover that the man who ran the place went back home to the large city over the hills, and now his niece runs the family business. That sort of change-one that has nothing to do with the adventurers directly, but one that they’ll notice-makes the players feel as though their characters are part of a living world that changes and grows along with them.
Part 1 of this book is all about inventing your world. Chapter 1 asks what type of game you want to run, and helps you nail down a few important details about your world and its overarching conflicts. Chapter 2 helps you put your world in the greater context of the multiverse, expanding on the information presented in the Player’s Handbook to discuss the planes of existence and the gods and how you can put them together to serve the needs of your campaign.
Part 2: Master of Adventures
Whether you write your own adventures or use published ones, expect to invest preparation time beyond the hours you spend at the gaming table. You’ll need to carve out some free time to exercise your creativity as you invent compelling plots, create new NPCs, craft encounters, and think of clever ways to foreshadow story events yet to come.
Part 2 of this book is devoted to helping you create and run great adventures. Chapter 3 covers the basic elements of a D&D adventure, and chapter 4 helps you create memorable NPCs. Chapter 5 presents guidelines and advice for running adventures set in dungeons, the wilderness, and other locales, and chapter 6 covers the time between adventures. Chapter 7 is all about treasure, magic items, and special rewards that help keep the players invested in your campaign.
Part 3: Master of Rules
Dungeons & Dragons isn’t a head-to-head competition, but it needs someone who is impartial yet involved in the game to guarantee that everyone at the table plays by the rules. As the player who creates the game world and the adventures that take place within it, the DM is a natural fit to take on the referee role.
As a referee, the DM acts as a mediator between the rules and the players. A player tells the DM what he or she wants to do, and the DM determines whether it is successful or not, in some cases asking the player to make a die roll to determine success. For example, if a player wants his or her character to take a swing at an orc, you say, “Make an attack roll” while looking up the orc’s Armor Class.
The rules don’t account for every possible situation that might arise during a typical D&D session. For example, a player might want his or her character to hurl a brazier full of hot coals into a monster’s face. How you determine the outcome of this action is up to you. You might tell the player to make a Strength check, while mentally setting the Difficulty Class (DC) at 15. If the Strength check is successful, you then determine how a face full of hot coals affects the monster. You might decide that it deals
Sometimes mediating the rules means setting limits. If a player tells you, “I want to run up and attack the orc,” but the character doesn’t have enough movement to reach the orc, you say, “It’s too far away to move up and still attack. What would you like to do instead?” The player takes the information and comes up with a different plan.
To referee the rules, you need to know them. You don’t have to memorize this book or the Player’s Handbook, but you should have a clear idea of their contents so that, when a situation requires a ruling, you know where to find the proper reference.
The Player’s Handbook contains the main rules you need to play the game. Part 3 of this book offers a wealth of information to help you adjudicate the rules in a wide variety of situations. Chapter 8 presents advice for using attack rolls, ability checks, and saving throws. It also includes options appropriate for certain play styles and campaigns, including guidelines for using miniatures, a system for handling chase scenes, and rules for madness. If you like to create your own stuff, such as new monsters, races, and character backgrounds, chapter 9 shows you how. That chapter also contains optional rules for unusual situations or play styles, such as the use of firearms in a fantasy setting.
Know Your Players
The success of a D&D game hinges on your ability to entertain the other players at the game table. Whereas their role is to create characters (the protagonists of the campaign), breathe life into them, and help steer the campaign through their characters' actions, your role is to keep the players (and yourself) interested and immersed in the world you’ve created, and to let their characters do awesome things.
Knowing what your players enjoy most about the D&D game helps you create and run adventures that they will enjoy and remember. Once you know which of the following activities each player in your group enjoys the most, you can tailor adventures that satisfy your players' preferences as much as possible, thus keeping them engaged.
Acting
Players who enjoy acting like getting into character and speaking in their characters' voices. Roleplayers at heart, they enjoy social interactions with NPCs, monsters, and their fellow party members.
Engage players who like acting by…
- giving them opportunities to develop their characters' personalities and backgrounds.
- allowing them to interact regularly with NPCs.
- adding roleplaying elements to combat encounters.
- incorporating elements from their characters' backgrounds into your adventures.
Exploring
Players who desire exploration want to experience the wonders that a fantasy world has to offer. They want to know what’s around the next corner or hill. They also like to find hidden clues and treasure.
Engage players who like exploration by…
- dropping clues that hint at things yet to come.
- letting them find things when they take the time to explore.
- providing rich descriptions of exciting environments, and using interesting maps and props.
- giving monsters secrets to uncover or cultural details to learn.
Instigating
Players who like to instigate action are eager to make things happen, even if that means taking perilous risks. They would rather rush headlong into danger and face the consequences than face boredom.
Engage players who like to instigate by…
- allowing them to affect their surroundings.
- including things in your adventures to tempt them.
- letting their actions put the characters in a tight spot.
- including encounters with NPCs who are as feisty and unpredictable as they are.
Fighting
Players who enjoy fantasy combat like kicking the tar out of villains and monsters. They look for any excuse to start a fight, favoring bold action over careful deliberation.
Engage players who like fighting by…
- springing unexpected combat encounters on them.
- vividly describing the havoc their characters wreak with their attacks and spells.
- including combat encounters with large numbers of weak monsters.
- interrupting social interaction and exploration with combat.
Optimizing
Players who enjoy optimizing their characters' capabilities like to fine-tune their characters for peak combat performance by gaining levels, new features, and magic items. They welcome any opportunity to demonstrate their characters' superiority.
Engage players who like optimization by…
- ensuring steady access to new abilities and spells.
- using desired magic items as adventure hooks.
- including encounters that let their characters shine.
- providing quantifiable rewards, like experience points, for noncombat encounters.
Problem Solving
Players who want to solve problems like to scrutinize NPC motivations, untangle a villain’s machinations, solve puzzles, and come up with plans.
Engage players who like to solve problems by…
- including encounters that emphasize problem-solving.
- rewarding planning and tactics with in-game benefits.
- occasionally allowing a smart plan to grant an easy win for the players.
- creating NPCs with complex motives.
Storytelling
Players who love storytelling want to contribute to a narrative. They like it when their characters are heavily invested in an unfolding story, and they enjoy encounters that are tied to and expand an overarching plot.
Engage players who like storytelling by…
- using their characters' backgrounds to help shape the stories of the campaign.
- making sure an encounter advances the story in some way.
- making their characters' actions help steer future events.
- giving NPCs ideals, bonds, and flaws that the adventurers can exploit.