Being a Dungeon Master is intimidating. At it’s biggest level it can seem like you are supposed to run an entire world, know all the rules to the game, spotlight every player-character equally and help everyone have fun.
There are many ways to make it simpler than that;
- Focus only on the world with which the PCs interact
- Skip rules that aren’t meaningful at the time
- Rotate the spotlight as appropriate to the table
- Get feedback from players in order to improve
There are other ways too. I’m a big fan of the Lazy GM series.
2024 Dungeons & Dragons helps make it easier in their Dungeon Masters Guide by incorporating some, but not all of SlyFlourish’s ideas. One notable thing is the tracking sheets — theirs and different from his, but that’s fine. Not everything needs to be the same.
The layout of the new book is much better for new DMs. It also has excellent examples on how to spiral out from the characters while building a world, using Greyhawks as an example. There are micro adventures, which may not give enough information, but they do show that one doesn’t need a lot of notes to run a session. My sessions are usually a single notecard for example.
Overall the ’24 DMG is a good to great book for Dungeon Masters early in their experience. It’s also handy that those tracking sheets are all available for free!
But, (sorry WotC), there is a flaw in how easy it is to be a DM in this modern era.
Those wonderful tracking sheets aren’t really part of DnDBeyond.com
They exist, but without integration.
What could make it easier to DM in the DnD Beyond era?
When you Create a Campaign on Beyond it should start with that Game Expectations sheet. The notes should be replaced with the Campaign Journal.
These are wonderful tools, and they are completely unsupported.
Adding the sheets or similar fields to the campaign page would help a DM as they introduce the players to the game-to-be. They’d all be able to see what the story is about.
Right now those pre-session one-sheets and the like need to be shared on the web, via email, Discord, at the table, or other tools rather than in the platform that Wizards of the Coast owns. It’s a silly gap in integration.
Make it easier to share variant rules and setting information
Currently, Beyond lets you share all of your books or none of your books. But that doesn’t help for a specific campaign.
Currently, Beyond lets you share books in a deeper layer of content sharing, but doesn’t let you pick and choose rules (like attributes, extra feats, no feats, encumbrance)
The above was updated at 8:57 pm on Nov 27, 2024
My current Age of Myths campaign would make sense to permit Strixhaven, Theros and Dragonlance rules. It’s absurd for it to include the Illrigger, Ravenloft, or Lord of the Rings (TM).
Imagine how much easier it would be for a DM and the table to say “these are the rules we are using for this campaign” and then toggle those rules and books either on our off.
Currently that’s a player-by-player decision within the character creator.
But what type of encumbrance a table is using isn’t a player-by-player decision. That’s a table decision. The appropriate setting and adventure rules aren’t most or none, but a delicate basis that sets the tone for the next several months or years of hanging out with your friends.
Wizards of the Coast and the D&D team can make it even easier for DMs by changing some architecture of their semi-walled garden in such a way that they already believe works, because it’s in their brand new book.
Full Moon Storytelling 