Five DM Do's & Don'ts in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

TIME STAMPS
00:00 - Intro
00:32 - Do: Want to prepare
04:04 - Do: Know the core rules
08:05 - Do: Listen to your players
10:57 - Do: Set boundaries
13:22 - Do: Learn from your mistakes
17:09 - Don't: Overwhelm yourself with details
21:34 - Don't: Railroad or antagonize players
24:47 - Don't: Neglect the session zero
27:40 - Don't: Be afraid to use "yes, but"
31:05 - Don't: Forget to have fun yourself
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[the.jamie.turner]

20:10 - I once had a player with a PhD in geology start asking excited questions about some rock formations. After winging my way through the first two, I literally just paused and said “Look, I’m going to run out of geology knowledge way faster than you’re going to run out of questions. How about you tell me what you’re looking for in broad terms, I’ll give an equally broad answer with a more narrative focus, and you can fill in the technical details to your heart’s content.”

[roger]

On a tangential point about railroading: try and avoid presenting *too many* options to the party. I DM for an extremely chaotic group of people and create multiple strands they can potentially follow to reach the same major plot section. They love having freedom to make choices, but sometimes run into the problem of "wtf do we do now" because everyone has the attention span of a goldfish.

[somebodyoncetoldme]

Take it from someone who experienced this… Don’t: Let your games spiral out of control with players in a party who are polar opposites. A friend group of 10 years got destroyed because I as a DM didn’t reign in some of my more aggressive players. It isn’t fun when your final session ends with a physical altercation that ruins the friend group 😔

[mikecarson]

DO: Enjoy Dungeon Dudes videos with fun and friendly advice . . . DON"T: forget to hit the "thumbs up"

[Dumledaj]

This is not only excellent advise for new DMs, it also serves as great reminders for seasoned DMs.

[filipmastilovic]

Sometimes I’ll run one shots for our party to give our DM a break, and one thing I noticed in our most recent one shot that worked really well was creating a challenge on my end, but not creating a solution. In my case, they needed to cross a pool of acid to get to a shortcut. I didn’t have any solution in mind, and they ended up just creating one for me after scheming for several minutes. It was silly and everyone had a blast.

[ritchier]

Honestly the biggest thing I had to learn as a new dungeon master is that it’s okay to say no. It doesn’t need to be said often, but the DM is there for a reason

[jlajr]

As a DM with 30+ yrs of experience, Improv is one of the Best tools in a DMs kit.
If you can always "Look" like you are prepared and adjust to what the group/campaign needs.
You will be a great DM. Sometimes just make it up on the fly. Rule of Cool!

[HeroesBosses]

I have a problem I never thought I'd have. My new D&D group is all teachers. Every single one of them wants to be the DM - so we're running multiple campaigns at once and it's hard to keep track of all my characters' personalities when we switch back and forth.

[cherylrosbak]

Thank you for that clear delineation between railroading and sticking to the plot. When you're a new DM with a published adventure it's difficult to know how to get them back on track subtly.

[kapnkerf]

A Grimdark 'My Little Pony' adventure sounds awesome. We should call the Dimension 20 people.

[trombonegamer]

Good video! I'm going to very gently push back against the idea that one should strive to make every game better than the last. I've known a lot of potential DMs who ran a fantastic great few sessions, with well prepared story lines, great world building, voices, battle maps and so on, and then they eventually stop running games because its just too much work. I had to come to terms with the facts: my group and I want to play every week, and I can't put hours into prepping every session. So some sessions are inherently "worse" than others. That's okay! What matters is we had a good time and the story continued. There's always varying levels of polish beyond that, but don't feel pressured to measure up to what past you might have pulled off. Cheers!

[kwobbleguy]

I’m doing my session zero for my first campaign TONIGHT!!! So this is such wonderful timing for a video :) . Thank you as always, dungeon dudes!

[snowtsukasa]

Coming to the end of Curse of Strahd, my first module I've ran. Tried a few homebrews prior to that, that just fell apart.

To your first point, prep work. I think it's important to understand the story, when and how important npc enter, and have basic plans for which direction they go. You don't need every possibility, but having a couple paths forward will help a lot when having to change plans.

The biggest thing I've learned from CoS is that I did not fully understand Barovia. I did not introduce things properly. The players didn't care about Ireena at all, and completely ignored a plot in Vallaki that was ment to be important, and their first major game changing decision.

My biggest advice for new dms. Keep things small, and take your time to understand the world and consequences. Don't rush to introduce all the npc in a zone. Let the players find them naturally. At the minimum you should know the npc's short term goal, and relevance to the story. What is their purpose for interacting with the player?

[Ishstalla]

During my first session as DM, I expected them to speak to the bartender and the patrons, then head out on their way to their first boss. Instead they spent three hours robbing the barkeep blind and trying to convince the whole town that the disguised warlock was actually the barkeep and the barkeep was an imposter...

[gengar]

My roommate got into D&D because of me and she is planning on running something for a discord friend group soon. She said this to me “I think I will also have a character to play with them, my own little NPC character that travels with them” I cannot describe the sheer sense of horror that filled me when I had to explain to her about what DMPC’s are and why they’re hated

[scottwarren]

Thank you very much for this video. It helped me tremendously!!!! I’ve been playing D&D for a little over three years and started DMing a year ago. As my wife tells me all the time, I am my own worst enemy. I am very hard on myself and come down on myself harshly when I mess up. HOWEVER, over the past three or four months that is changing and am learning to prep less, give the players freedom to change things from my pre scripted plans, etc, and I am finding, self more relaxed, enjoying the game more, and being way more lenient with myself. I’ve ached many of your videos and it’s nice to hear you guys share your mess ups and realize that it happens to everyone. Thanks again.

[tylerlabombard]

Kelly’s point at 14:03 is completely me….I feel so bad about getting some things wrong, or not remembering a rule. My biggest thing that I’m hard on myself with is tryin to see if everyone had fun or not. I asked them, and they said yes. But I just feel like I could do more for them. Idk. I’ve been DM’ing for only a year and a half, and I feel like I’m losing my touch.

[majorcosmos]

Talking about encounter balance, my dm just did a homebrew Christmas one shot. He realized that he over tuned the first encounter, so he just had some of the enemies run away after getting fireballed. There are many ways you can retune an encounter if you realize it's too hard or too easy.

[coranbaker]

I started running Princes of the Apocalypse a while back. When meeting all the various characters in Red Larch, I accidentally mispronounced a name when discussing the marketplace. "Grund" became "Grung", and the entire party got extremely excited.

"Oh my gosh, are we about to meet a Grung named Grung!?"

I had no choice but to roll with it.