 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy, and I've been a DM for a very long time. So long in fact that I was on a panel for Bars for Bards where I answered DM questions and interrupted my co-panelists a bunch of times. You should check it out. But it got me thinking I've never made a video where I just lay it out for all of the new people that want to go about stripping people naked and choking them with leather. So here's my guide on how to be a good Dungeon Master. As always keep in mind that a lot of this is just my opinion, so if you feel like your safe words are not being respected, feel free to play your games however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So being a Dungeon Master is hard. Even after a decade, I still go into sessions wondering if I'm going to screw up, and I still come out of them wondering if I screwed up. The story, the mechanics, the players' happiness, you have to account for all of that. And that last bit is the thing that matters most. Players have to have a good time. If they aren't, you're doing something wrong. But if they are, then it doesn't matter what you don't know or what you didn't do right because they're going to think you're great. More than anyone else, you're the performer entertaining an audience of nerds. And that's why my golden rule, more important than anything else, is to make sure the players are having fun. And you might notice that I didn't include you in that rule for largely semantic reasons. Your players should be uplifting you. The whole reason why you, DM, should be to get the satisfaction of being a source of happiness for your players. So seeing them accomplish goals, tell stories, make jokes, all those things that are packaged into the role of the DM when you take the job. Those things don't drive you, then you're probably not going to enjoy the responsibility that also comes with it. My first time playing D&D was technically playing Pathfinder at my high school D&D club. I started as a freshman and by the time that I became a senior, nobody else was around or on the club because all the DMs had graduated, so it was left to me to figure out how it all worked. Now, I was not the type of student to study before a test, and I wasn't about to change that, so my first session consisted of me getting a group together to play Pathfinder, a game that I still wasn't sure about whether it was just a spin-off or not. Coming up with a random story set in Eberron, a world not in the Pathfinder universe, although that didn't really matter because I was literally only using it for a map, unrolling that blank tan battle map that every tabletop group owned, and making up some bullshit about a god stealing the city of Sharn, and now the players have to go save it. The monsters were nonsense with made-up stats, the places they went would make the current me cry with all of the lowering consistencies, and the players had a great time. I consider the whole thing a success because even with that trainwreck of a session that didn't get better by the way, my players were into it, and if you asked me a single thing about Pathfinder, I wouldn't be able to tell you it, which brings me to the point of this anecdote, you don't need to know how to play D&D to run D&D. I personally have a rule for myself, I won't be the DM for any system that I have not played in before. That is because I know that the only thing you truly need to understand about a system is how the characters operate within that system, and the easiest way to learn that is to play a session or two, poke around with all the features to see what inputs the character has to affect the game, and then boom, just remember what the characters can do, and you can probably make up anything. I ran a lot of Star Wars games, did not understand a lick of space combat, just made some bullshit up and the players were like, bet. Now that's not to say that your players won't notice that you're making things up as you go along, but as long as you're internally consistent, nobody's gonna complain, and you can slowly swap out your nonsense homebrew with the actual rules of the game as you get used to the waters of DMing. Of course, this only counts with friends. Don't go to your local game store and ask a bunch of strangers to run a game of D&D and then present them with Michael's magnificent made-up game. But your friends are your friends, and your friends should be happy to see you succeed, and if any of them have played the game before, then they can help build you up as you go along. And as much as they build you up, you should be working to build them up. Your first few games, you don't have to worry too much about backstories. Just come up with a plot, however basic on your own, and prioritize pretending to be the NPCs. The players may not remember the plot so much, but they'll remember the people if they have a good interaction with them. You can just give each important NPC a quirk, like one of my fan favorites is Cultist Carl, a cult member captured by the good guys who spoke nonsense, but knew the world would end any day now, until he said, today's the day, and the world didn't. I don't even remember how, but everybody remembers Cultist Carl. Your story is just a long string of interactions with NPCs, so if you can play up the characters, you'll do fine. Once you've got that down, you can break into bigger things, like implementing character backstories. Once again, the story doesn't have to be the most important thing in the world, but having your players tell you their backstory, and writing the important bits down to use later, means that the players will be more invested when something comes up that has to do with them. Again, the actual campaign story doesn't have to be important, although it can be, but the little interactions that the players have session to session are the things that make it great, so don't sweat not being an RR fantasy writer. Finally, I know I've talked about this before, but I cannot stress enough the importance of shaping the game to your party. Let me ask you a quick question. When you're making your encounters, which of these encounters is more difficult? An encounter of five cobalts or an encounter of ten cobalts? The answer is that neither of these is more difficult on their own. Alone, they have no difficulty at all, because alone, the world that you build has no meaning. It only gains meaning when you add your players into the equation. For instance, five cobalts against a party of level ones might be a bit challenging, but ten cobalts against a party of level fives would be a cakewalk. This is because difficulty is subjective, and while the players should never know it, everything you create should be in reaction to the players. And to a point, we all know this. It's awfully coincidental that the main villain seems to throw out problems that your party is just capable enough to handle, steadily growing in difficulty until they happen to be strong enough to risk taking on the boss. If the party weren't capable of taking on some challenge in the world, then the campaign would grind to a halt. That's just basic game mechanics. So it's your responsibility as the dungeon master to write the game to make that possible. If ten cobalts aren't enough for a level five party, change the cobalts into orcs, or better yet, if it's cobalts that you want, increase their stats and surprise the party with enemies they didn't expect to worry about. After all, if the party can level up, why can't the monsters? This logic can be used to increase difficulty, but it can be reversed just as easily to lower it too. If no one in your party wants to be a healer, then there just isn't going to be a healer in the party, and you should be compensating for that as a DM, just like if the party was getting too strong for the encounters. Your knee-jerk reaction to this might be to punish the players for not playing viably, but why? The player's voice that they didn't want a healer because it wouldn't be fun for them, and it isn't the mark of a good DM to respond by purposefully making the game less fun for them in other ways. As we just went over, difficulty is relative, so the only way that they can be hurt by not taking a healer or a tank or a rogue is if you go out of your way to hurt them. Always make the game engaging, but never reprimand the players for not giving in to video game logic. Oftentimes, I'm reminded of a show on YouTube called LARPs. Obviously, by the title, it's about LARPing, but the show tackles the concept of role-playing games in the most realistic and dissected way that I've seen any show do it. It breaks down every type of player that you'll find at a table. The danger of falling into those extremes, the relationship between the players and the DM, it really has it all, and you can make a one-for-one comparison between LARPing and D&D in almost every episode. That, and they totally shit on the mind's eye society, so... If you want your eyes open to the highs and lows of every part of TTRPG life and really have a characterized dungeon master explain to you the truth of the game, I would definitely recommend LARPs. You can look it up right now. Overall, whenever somebody comes to me because they're worried about their first game, they're worried about the first time they'll DM, and what if it's bad, what if it doesn't work? Your first game is probably going to be bad, but if your players have fun, then it's gonna be the best game ever. And if your players don't have fun, then figure out what went wrong and work on it next time. There's nothing saying that if you fail once, you have to stop. We're conditioned to believe that first impressions are everything, and to a point, that's true, but if you're at home playing at a table with your friends, then your friends should be helping you along the journey, and part of that journey is messing up. So mess up, forget the rules, don't read the book, and have the best game ever. But that about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, check out all my social media in the description below, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can keep inspiring the masses to get out of their comfort zone. But yeah, Dabby out.