How To Run A D&D Game

Some quick advice for the inexperienced runners of Dungeons & Dragons

I spent a solid chunk of my leisure time over the past half decade trying to come up with new and exciting ways to run a D&D game for my players. It’s a hobby of mine that I take a little too seriously, but I have some good advice for players who are just getting into the game, and maybe some advice that could help longtime players adjust their expectations and goals to create a more compelling narrative.

First off — if you’re new to the game, don’t expect to understand what’s going on at any point in your first session. A good DM is supposed to describe basically everything that happens to the players and all the contextual information necessary for them to make informed decisions. A good explanation of the world around the players can involve explaining what kinds of smells are in the air, the colors of clothing or trees or buildings or even the eyes of NPCs, the pallor and movement of the hustle and bustle within the city or the languid pace of the farmer’s stroll. The overall vibe of the experience that’s being captured by the essence of the game is what the players need to play. Are you running a 1920s noir fiction game? Maybe it’s best to describe the sleazy alleyways and the backroom deals that go on at the fringes of the player characters’ perception, the smell of cheap cigarettes, the dark and dreary fog that creeps in as the pitter patter of raindrops lands on the veranda of a street vendor’s stall. Are you running a pirate adventure? Maybe it’s best to describe the galleon and the seafoam washing over the deck in the middle of a powerful storm lists the hull back and forth as the party tries to gather their strength and return the sails to form. Are you running a by the book standard fantasy affair? Maybe the dimly lit tavern holds an old adventuring party that’s planning their next big adventure, the map to a dragon’s lair illuminated by dripping candlelight, as the wizened old fighter points to half a dozen points of interest that could carry almost as much treasure as the dragon’s hoard. There’s endless possibilities in a game like D&D, which is part of its potential not just as a storytelling medium, but as a fun game for people to mess around in.

This is the best way I can describe the act of running the game — being the dungeon master requires a kind of mastery with words and an imagination that most people lack — but not because their imaginations are stunted. It’s because they haven’t practiced. Running a game like D&D takes a lot of time and effort, even for the people who run it casually for friends, because it requires a lot of different kinds of disciplines combining to create a multidisciplinary experience. Not only do you need to understand how to describe an imaginary situation to a group of people, but you need to understand how to convince those people to buy in to your situation, get them to contribute to your world in a way that builds it up, and play a game at the same time. It requires mathematics and judgment calls and improvisation that most people have never done before, especially not in tandem. That’s why it’s important to practice these things ahead of time, and why having a good base of operations from which to establish the game world is instrumental to running it smoothly.

That leads us to running a session zero. A session zero is the first thing every DM should plan for at the start of a game — a literal planning session where everyone establishes their characters, their backstories, their motivations, and their reason for joining together as a team. I didn’t take a session zero seriously the first few times I played because feeling out what my players did and didn’t want to do within the game world felt like something that should be explored through the realm of play and not through the realm of introspection. It was a pretty classic mistake, one that basically every new dungeon master makes — failing to establish the stakes of the story or the background of the characters makes it impossible for people who are inexperienced with roleplaying to take on the role of their characters. For my last session zero, I had some help from a friendly redditor about the kinds of questions worth asking to players, and there’s lots of advice for how to run a session zero available online, so I won’t extend that knowledge here. All I’ll say is that a session zero is a pivotal aspect of roleplaying for the player characters, even if it’s not something the DM in particular needs to establish the game world.

In addition to understanding the cadence with which you run a game, understanding the game’s mechanics is tantamount to success. Coming into a game without system mastery makes it difficult for your players to trust your judgment when making judgment calls about the rules of the game. The more you understand about the rules, the better and smoother the game is going to run, so it’s best to either use a simple system — something that’s not D&D, something like kids on bikes — or simplify an already existing system to help the engine run more silently. Put simply, the less you and your players have to think about the rules, the better. Disagreements at the table interrupt the flow of the game, and while most people aren’t going to start arguments over a ruling they find unfair, there’s always the possibility that the game slows to a crawl when too many difficult rolls or too many difficult challenges present themselves in sequence.

Also, try taking an improv class. You’ll be surprised at just how far yes anding can take a campaign, especially when your player characters want to do something that’s not established on the board. When player characters aren’t engaged properly by the narrative — and sometimes even when they are! — they have a tendency to run off the rails in an attempt to find something interesting to do within the game world. It’s possible to put them back on track without much effort, i.e. forcing whatever it is they’re looking for to appear within a dragon’s lair that you’ve painstakingly designed ahead of time, but there’s something to be said for the DM who can improvise a setting and a resolution to an interesting plot point. It makes the game more dynamic and a hell of a lot more fun.

Once you’ve gotten through all the basics, it’s time to start your first session — and the first session is a series of introductory paragraphs and tone setting exercises that are meant to establish the narrative and the background. Your introductory paragraphs explain the backstory of a series of events that will lead the player characters together. Before any of them get together, though, there should always be an explanation of what the character does on their own — their own introduction — which includes a physical description of the characters. Knowing what people look like will affect how they choose to interact with the game world around them, and can have deleterious effects on their ability to accomplish their goals. Maybe they’re an orc or a troll with large tusks that repulse some people, or maybe they’re a drow with dark skin that are seen as evil spider worshipers. Either way, establishing this as part of the narrative is an important step in a first session. Once that’s out of the way, you can start down the road towards whatever goal the characters have in mind and begin a new adventure.

Obviously all this advice is meant to be taken with a grain of salt, as there’s no one right way to run a D&D campaign, but there’s definitely a way to craft a positive experience for everyone at the table. Creating the best possible campaign should always be the goal, regardless of what system is being used or how much experience everyone at the table has.