What is D&D supposed to be about? It behooves every D&D DM to ask himself this all important question and give a thorough answer so as to provide a clear cut understanding of the premise of the game to the players. Now your typical good DM will say the most natural and simplest thing that rolls off the tongue of most good DM’s, its about story. Truer words have never been spoken, however this simple answer does not really lead one to a definitive statement of the premise behind D&D or ensures story is the outcome. Sure its about story, but how do you get that story to the table? How do worthwhile stories make an appearance in our games? How do you ensure the players participation and involvement in the story is ensured?

The answer is motivation. The motivation of players participation and the motivation of their alter egos, the characters are ultimately what drive the natural invention of story at the table. Before we get into this articles primary purpose, to discuss how stories sprout in our games and what methods DM’s can use to ensure that they do, lets discuss what does not.

Fake Storytelling

I have for many years been an advocate for the OSR (Old School Revival) and there is a primary and very good reason for that. I find modern DM’s really suck at bringing story to the game, they suck at creating motivations to care about stories in which our characters participate and they fail to give life to the worlds in which the stories are told. In essence they regulate the entire thing to cliche’s. While I can say that part of the blame goes to RPG culture, really it has been specifically the way gaming systems are designed that has caused the evolution of RPG culture to become so terribly derailed and unfocused.

This has happened because the practice of “storytelling” has evolved to become the domain of mechanics. Elements that were once the exclusively the work of our imaginations and constructs on which the premise of fantasy adventure was built have been washed away in exchange for tactical battle systems and rules oriented replacements.

Modern games no longer care who is at the helm of a player character as it is the character sheet and the mechanism that drive the systems that define the success and failure of a character and not the player driving him. Your choices in modern systems are reduced to die rolls rather then your imagination, your cleverness and your teamwork with your fellow players and note when I say “your” I mean the player, not his imaginary alter ego made up of attributes, skills, feats, special powers etc..

So what are we talking about here. Well to put it plainly with examples, we no longer define what our characters do, we activate mechanical actions to find out if we succeed or fail at our intention.

For example we don’t bargain for price of a sword with a merchant, we make a diplomacy check to see if our character manages to get a deal or not. We don’t decide if an NPC is lying to us, we roll an insight check to see if our character knows whether or not someone is lying to them. We don’t define how we search a room, where we look, how thorough we are, we make a search check to determine if our character finds something or not.

By the sheer act of mechanizing these many role-playing opportunities, we cease to tell a story about our characters and reduce the experience to a series of mechanized checks to see how our characters are doing.

In an environment like this it can be difficult, ney impossible for players to find their characters soul and purpose because the truth of role-playing is that it’s magic is hidden in the detailed and mundane activities of characterization. That interaction with a merchant is the opportunity to explore who our characters are and how they deal with people of the world in which they live. Believing whether or not someone is lying is a component of mystery to be debated among the players, is it truth or a lie, we must decide, not the dice. Whether or not we find treasure in a room should not be delegated to the randomness of a die roll, but rather our attention to the details of a room that must now be defined by the DM creating the atmosphere and imagery so desperately needed for the art of storytelling.

The point here is that in a fundamental way as you remove mechanics from the game, the central focus then instead becomes the story and the motivations of the characters and as such from that grows the responsibility and independence of the players to discover the concept of story. This is what the OSR and really old school games got right. They where simpler mechanics, vague mechanics and often existing in the absence of mechanics. These omissions aren’t an accident, they are a very intentional and purposeful decision to ensure the focus of the games is where it belongs, on the story, not the rules of the game. Oddly enough, the primary driver for DM’s everywhere, modern and past alike.

The morale of the story is that good storytelling and great stories are born in the absence of mechanics. I believe no truer statement can be made about role-playing

Creating Motivation Through Abstinence

It is here then that I make a case for slim, watered down systems that focus on the players and their intent instead of mechanics as is the case in versions of D&D like Basic/Expert, the full BECMI or various clones like Old School Essentials, Castles and Crusades etc..

These systems create a basic construction kit for story by alleviating the complexity of rules and defaulting to the premise of collaborative storytelling, imagination and core concepts. In the absence of rules, players have no choice but to use their imaginations to fill in the blanks, however that still does not provide players with the fundamental premise of the game. What are the things that actually motivate players to find and advance the story.

The Goals of the Game

You have to see D&D and role-playing as a construct in which their must be a primary driver with some secondary drivers that motivate the players, so that they can in turn invent fantasy oriented motivations for their characters. In a sense the players must know what the game is about, to know what sorts of characters to create. In the absence of this construct you end up with what I call “null motivation” characters.

A null motivation character is a result of a player creating a character without an understanding of the premise of the game.

For example. In Vampire The Masquerade, players are asked to create vampire characters in a world of darkness. Now a player who understands the premise of the game, that it is a game about political power in a gothic underground world of vampires, will understand that since this is the over arching concept of what the game is about, that in turn his character must fit into that world. He must answer questions like, how will this character pursue that power, what level of morality will he apply to his actions, will he pursue that power through intrigue, wealth, force or something else? If a player creates a character in pursuit of that premise, understanding that this is the meta goal of the game, he is likely to create a character that is ready for such a place narratively. This character will be attuned to the world around him, motivated to act in it in pursuit of the core premise.

However it is entirely possible to create a null motivation character if you fail to understand this fundamental premise of the game. If you create a character that is not going to engage in the loosely defined but fundamental meta objective of the game, he will likely enter it unprepared to participate in the gothic world of horror and be delegated to irrelevance as he does not pursue or engage in the world/setting built for that very purpose. A player like this might create a lone wolf, an outsider, who finds no logic in getting involved in the plots of vampires seeking higher positions/advancement, he will have no one he views as a competitor or a threat to his own power as he likely will have none. His world becomes one in which he exists as an empty placeholder with no real reason to actually be a member of the troupe.

The outcome however, when characters are built for the core premise is undeniably the story that will emerge from that interaction. When players are motivated to act, when they have their goals defined through a core premise in this way, they will both create and use their characters in that pursuit, ensuring that a story will most certainly emerge without any need for a GM to nudge anyone into action.

I used Vampire The Masquerade as an example here because unlike D&D, the premise of the game is very strictly defined as are the rules of this political game very explicitly defined in the kindred traditions. Your goal in this gothic world is to seek power and control, but you must abide by the rules of vampire society while doing it that very much force your hand into the world of intrigue and plots to achieve your goals.

Modern D&D’s premise, its core concept is not well defined at all, in fact, its really the absence of this fundamental definition that creates the most amount of problems as the players are asked to create “generic adventurers” in a game about “adventure” without any real definition of purpose. So vague is that premise that there really is not much on which to hang your hat. There is no core fundamentals on which to base a players motivations as such players create characters in the absence of any real direction about what the game is about other then the easy to say but hard to accomplish concept of “story”. Yes story, but what story? What is going to motivate the players into action?

Traditionally the answer is “whatever story the DM creates”, but this still lacks the true motivation because the story cannot be revealed to you in advance. You know it will be a fantasy adventure of some sort, but without a fundamental premise this becomes a rather vague catch all phrase and its very likely some players will create characters that simply don’t fit resulting in null motivation characters.

This is a very common problem for DM’s in modern D&D. A quick run through any D&D community forums you will discover just how common the DM complaint that his players “Waste Time”, are “unmotivated”, or are not “following along in the adventure” are. Its an epidemic in modern D&D culture so vast, I’ve personally gotten to the point where I don’t really like running or playing modern editions of D&D.

Old School Premise

Old School D&D, aka, 1st edition B/X, BECMI and 1st edition AD&D all actually had a core premise, just like most RPG’s of the time and really even today, just like Vampire The Masquerade.

The old school premise was fundamentally built on a simple mechanic that has been regulated to being an out dated concept, but was and continues to be in my opinion one of the most important and fundamental mechanics D&D needs to ensure it functions as a game that will ultimately create a story.

The mechanic I’m talking about is the Treasure is XP mechanic (1gp recovered = 1 XP earned). In classic D&D, the core (main) way that characters gained XP was through recovering treasure. This defined a core premise of the game. At the center of the D&D, all players knew that in the end, they where treasure hunters and this was the premise on which the motivation of the player rested. Their job as players, was to lead their alter egos to wealth. This wealth could take many shapes, just like in Vampire The Masquerade, the road to political power could vary dramatically. The important thing was that a premise for the game was established.

The Unfolding Story

From an absence of direction, to a clear cut goal, the very definition of what D&D is about is made crystal clear in the classic 1st edition D&D. However there will be skeptics and its important to remember that rules like this don’t exist in a vacuum. Just like in Vampire The Masquerade there are things that govern how you go about doing it, for example the Kindred Traditions is one such barrier to success. So it is too in classic D&D, there are other, widely misunderstood pieces of logic built into classic D&D that are important to understand and must be used for the premise to work.

First is that the game was deadly, this reputation is well deserved, but part of the core premise was that when you created a D&D character, he was a mundane nobody that was setting out on an adventure, now with a clear cut goal to write their story. They were vulnerable, they could easily perish and that was a barrier to success you had to overcome.

This is connected to the concept of “who is your character”, which gives directions to the players. Who are you? You are a nobody, the game is about finding out if you, the player, can turn this nobody, vulnerable weakling into somebody. That is the story, that is what you are writing when you are playing classic Dungeons and Dragons.

The fact that the game is deadly is to remind you further and really define to the player that the goal here is not to go out and seek your death by trying to fight monsters but to find wealth while avoiding danger. You must figure out how you are going to do that. Will you venture forth into the wilderness and seek your fortune in some ancient ruins of a long forgotten city or will you stay in the safety of town to scheme a way to rob the local nobles? Will you join the ranks of the local militia in hopes of making a name for yourself or start a local adventuring guild to get other adventures to do the dirty work for you as you claim a percentage. How you achieved your goals, was entirely up to you, the game is the story of how you do that.

This was further enforced by the fact that all other methods of earning XP, namely fighting monsters was the absolute worse way to do it. To prove that point consider that a 21 HD monster, the single most powerful in the world of D&D that would require a party of max level characters earned you a measily 2,500 XP, while a 1 HD monster that you would be an even match for at 1st level earned you 10 XP. The chances of you successfully fighting your way into success without dying was virtually ZERO.

Which puts the cliche that D&D is a game about fighting monsters and taking their stuff in a much different light. It is a cliche that is regulated to the OSR, that this is how “D&D used to be”, but the truth of the matter is that this is what D&D is today, in 5e, this is the core and fundamental motivation for players today, to fight monsters and take their stuff. In classic D&D this was the absolute worst thing that you could do and the entire system from low HP of characters, a complete absence of encounter balancing, to tiny XP rewards for fighting monsters and everything in between. The system did everything in its power to discourage fighting monsters. Which is true, as a player of the old school games I can assure you that we always avoided fights like it was the worst possible thing that could happen.

So how does the story evolve from this atmosphere. The answer should be obvious. The players have a clear directive, they know the premise of the game. When they sit down to create their characters, they do so with purpose. They understand their meta motivation and when the game starts, their purpose is also crystal clear. We are here to become rich, famous and powerful, now we need a plan. That plan, that adventure, those pursuits drive the story and players will seek out whatever opportunities you put in front of them with eager anticipation. You will never have unmotivated players again.

The Conclusion

It may not be as romantic, but having a clear cut goal for your players, something on which they can put their elbows is vital to the game. Players who create characters without a full understanding of exactly what the goal of the game is, will always struggle to create meaningful characters with meaningful motivations on their own, or worse, they will have misaligned motivations that will pull them in different directions.

The best thing you can do is to establish a core premise for your game, now you don’t necessarily have to adopt the classic Gold = XP premise of old school D&D, though I would argue this is an excellent logic to have in the game as a starting point. However in the absence of a premise, you will find that null motivation characters and mismatch is inevitable.

In my next article I will focus on creating other motivations (other premises) for D&D, Gold = XP is just one in a sea of possibilities and may indeed be better left to the past, though I encourage you to try it.

Game On People

Without question one of the most controversial discussions you will ever have in the opinionated world of dungeons and dragons, or role-playing in general is about how to be a great DM.  In fact, if you google “how to be a great DM” you are going to find link after link after link of “politically correct” advice, always structured carefully as to not say something that might upset someone.  It’s a really strange thing among D&D gamers that this is such a sensitive subject, where opinions are criticized and people are quick to accuse you of being a Gronard or worse.  In fact, most advice you will find is so general, its too obvious to be of any use to a new DM or a DM having issues trying to get his head around a problem in his game.  The advice tends to be something along the lines of “there is no wrong way”, or “everything you’re doing is great”.

There are however fundamentals of good DMing, many of these fundamentals you will hear a lot of people speak out against because they are generally very… well lets just say, harsh.   DMing a game is both fun and a responsibility, at least if your intention is to ensure quality of the game.  The concept of “just have fun” is important, but games tend to derail even if you are just having fun when not approached with a firm hand and plan.  DM’s will defend this idea of this “all inclusive, there is no wrong way” approach, to which I always pose the question do you want to be right, or do you want to have a good game?

Before I start I do want to say one important thing here, perhaps the most controversial thing of all.  In my not so humble opinion there are many right ways and  many wrong ways to be a DM!  There I said it and I have 30+ years of DMing experience and the battle scars to prove it.    What are the right ways?  Well that is what today’s advice article is all about.  The gloves are coming off and we are going to do this straight up, honest and without the political correctness filter often associated with such advice.

The DM is ALWAYS right, the social contract

The basics of running a game as a DM is that you must establish the standard social contract between you, the DM and your players.  This social contract is sometimes made  to be complex, or not at all both very terrible approaches.  Its quite simple in reality and absolutely vital to establish before your first session to ensure you start off on the right foot, in particularly with a new group.

The basics here are this.  D&D and any other RPG is a game, but unlike board or card games, the boundaries for the rules are not clearly defined, in fact, they are very intentionally made vague and left up for interpretation in many places.  The reason for this is that in the course of an RPG session, player’s (aka characters) will come up with all sorts of crazy ideas about “stuff they want to do” and no rule set could ever efficiently cover every conceivable scenario and activity.   You won’t find answers to most questions posed by players in the book, such a ruleset would be thousands of pages long.  That said, as a DM it’s not your job to dictate what players can try or can’t try, its your job to give them the results.  Which means you must always find a way to rule over the game, no matter how nutty the scenario’s are, you simply cannot say “no” you can’t do that, the correct answer is always “ok, here is what happens”.

The core of the social contract is that someone at the table must decide the results of these actions and that someone is the Dungeon Master, the nominated referee of the game, the translator of the rules and the manager of the game.

The social contract is basically an understanding and acceptance of the DM to be the authority on resolving the activities of the players.  Another words, they tell the DM what they “want to do” and the DM gives them “the result”.  That result is not up for debate, its not up for negotiation, its a ruling made by the DM and accepted by the players, this IS the social contract everyone must sign (figuratively speaking).  The social contract empowers the DM to be always right.

This social contract is something the players must go into willingly, another words, this isn’t about a player at the table taking power and being a tyrant, nor is it an assumption that he is the most qualified person to have this authority or that he is (actually) always right, but rather an understanding that someone has to decide what happens when a player says “I jump on his head and stab him in the eye”, and there is no space in the game to debate it.  There is no rule for that, someone must determine what happens, what rules might be used or what rolls might be used to determine the success  and someone must decide what actually happens narratively as a result of all that.

Consider that there may be potentially 6 players at the table with a wide range of opinions on what “should” happen, and they may even be more logical than what the DM proposes, they might even know the rules better than the DM.  You could spend time debating it, hell you could spend your entire day making arguments about it, debating it and discussing it.  The social contract empowering the DM to make the call is vital to ensuring you focus on the game, rather than debating its rules/mechanics/results endlessly piece by piece or the merits of the DM’s decision or narration.   Its a contract designed to prevent constant hard stops to the action of the game, but more than anything to keep the game moving forward without a lot of out of character discussion.

The social contract says “The DM decides and we accept whatever decision he makes”, aka, the DM is always right!

What will inevitably happen if you do not clearly define this social contract with your players is that you open your decisions, interpretations of the rules and narrations to debate and negotiation.  Each and every one of them.  You give an inch and they will take the whole arm.  Your players will become more and more challenging over time, in particular if they win negotiations and sway your decisions, setting the precedence that you can be swayed.  Before you know it, every-time you open your mouth, someone will have an opinion about what should come out of it.   It’s physically not possible to have a successful game in the long run without this social understanding between the players and their DM.  Do yourself, your players and your game a favor and establish this social contract firmly on day one of any campaign.

Always in the present, never allow the testing of waters

First, lets define what Testing the water means, in short, it works like this.

The player tells the DM what he wants to do, when you give him the results, he says “oh in that case I don’t do that”.

Alternatively and perhaps even more grievously is the DM version.

The players tells the DM what he wants to do, then the DM says “IF you do that, this will happen”, giving the player an opportunity to change his mind and back out of the action.

I can’t think of a more destructive thing a DM can do to a game than allow the testing of waters to become a precedent in his game.  This really is the shortest route to ruin that you can take.  What it really does to a game is that players will know the results of their actions before they take them, the exact opposite of what role-playing is.

As a DM you are doing your players a disservice and being firm and setting a precedence for running the game in real time is the most effective way to keep your game on track and in the present, putting the players in a position that they must listen, absorb the information and use it to make decisions knowing that whatever they decide, is now part of the game.  It really is one of those subtle keys to success.

The advice here is simple.  NEVER tell your players what is going to happen until its happening/happened.  Another words, don’t tell them the future, describe the present.  If a player poses a testing the water question, the answer is always the same.  “Tell me what you want to do and I will tell you what happens”.  A players action can’t be an inquiry to find out what would happen “if” he decides to do something.

Fear & Anticipation makes it real

There is a very common antidote in play writing and storytelling,  “tragedy makes the best story,  everything else is just noise”.  The reason this antidote exists is because as human beings we have a natural empathy for tragedy.  A tragedy is a motivation for hope, inspiration to rise from the darkness, a way to sympathize with our characters and a way to put ourselves in the shoes of the afflicted.  You cannot triumph unless you have something to triumph over.

This is why I always say that all good D&D adventures, are the stories of heroes who die tragically while saving the world.

I feel very strongly that as a good DM you must constantly present the players with challenges which if failed would result in their characters deaths.  The more tragic that death, the more memorable the story of it will be.  In short, don’t be afraid to kill characters and be merciless with their emotions when doing so, give them the tragedy.

This advice really pisses against the wind of D&D logic and design.  In a sense, the game mechanically is designed to ensure that the players always face balanced encounters and there are so many “save me” mechanics in the system that to die is really just a statistical anomaly.  This is a good thing, because you don’t want to kill characters by the mechanics, but rather by their decisions.  You want to make sure that when you kill a character, it can be traced back to a decision a player made.  A choice he had that lead him to his death, not a random encounter, die roll or some other form of “bad luck”.

Death should never be random, nor a concoction of the DM, but it should always be a surprise linked to choice and it should always be a heartbreaking event.  The design of a campaign should always include points at which characters lives are at risk, a risk they chose themselves,  the rest of the time events should be balanced in the favor of the players. The more of these events there are, the better.   Above all else however when the time comes, don’t hesitate, when a characters ends up in a situation where his death is inevitable, make it harsh, abrupt… make it tragic, dig into their emotions, give them no refuge or hope, force them into acceptance, give them the emotion their characters death deserves.

If you do this right you will create a permanent state of fear and anticipation for the rest of the players and all new characters that join the campaign.  Everyone will know that you don’t “save” characters, that death of characters is a real possibility, that it could come at any time and their actions and decisions drive that engine, not luck.  This is KEY to running a great D&D campaign, without it you will find your campaigns are always missing some intangible quality, this is what is missing!

Time is not an issue, unless it is an issue

One very common mistake DM’s make, or perhaps better to say, one common sentiment DM’s have is that “their players are taking too long” or “They are wasting time”.  Another words, you have written a adventure, campaign or story and you want to get to it, but your players seem to be doing everything but just that.  Frustrated you steer the session towards the story, skipping over less important scenes, railroading through parts of the story and events and driving the game to where you want it to be.

This is a terrible, habit that you must break.  The reality of an RPG session is that its the story of the characters.  Who they are, how they act, what they believe, what they think, who they know, how they interact with the world and what they love and hate.  Those attachments, emotions and drive does not appear in the story nor can it be artificially created, it happens outside of it and this is a really hard thing for DM’s to get their heads around.  You only fully understand it as a player.

The reality is that those half a session tavern crawls where the characters get drunk and make asses out of themselves are often even more important to the games story, than whatever grand scheme you have invented for the campaign.  They might be on a mission to stop a powerful necromancer from opening the gates to hell, but if you don’t make time to let them live in the world they are saving, the story of how they save it becomes less relevant.

Allowing the characters to become friends in character, allowing them to get to know the local tavern keeper, befriend the local blacksmith or marry the local milk maid may seem irrelevant, but it drives attachments to the world and to their characters, as a result are absolutely vital to the main plot, in most cases even more so than the main plot itself.

Allow your players to take the time from the session to role-play these moments with the same gusto you put into your main campaign events.  Make sure that they can explore the world and give them the time to do it.  Only when the players see it as a waste of time should you approach the game with more progress driven thinking.  Time is only an issue, if they make it an issue, but as a DM you should never “skip” anything the players want to take the time to get involved in.  Another words you are DMing a game at the pleasure of your players.  Your opinion about what they are and aren’t doing, frankly, has no relevance, you are the least important member of the adventuring party.  Make peace with that.

Prepare to be unprepared

Most veteran DM’s will spot this very general advice and nod their heads in sad agreement but the reality of DMing is that generally speaking, most preparation you do for a session will be wasted.  True preparation is about knowing the world and knowing it well, realizing that its the world not the adventure that you must have ready for whatever the players throw at it and that much of an actual adventure you will have to invent on the fly no matter how much you prepare.

While less controversial advice, perhaps not at all, one thing I can say about what I see in terms of preparation by most DM’s is a rather silly focus on trying to steer a session into a particular place, while being completely ill prepared for when the players inevitably derail the whole thing.  Don’t do this.  Its good to always have read (if you haven’t written) any material in preparation for a session but always know going into it that not only will the players likely completely skip over, avoid and derail it, but that its ok and you can’t give the appearance of not being ready for that, nor is it appropriate for you to steer them into it against their will.

From the perspective of the players, everything that happens should appear to be totally planned and expected.  Never let the players realize that they are off the rails, they should always feel like “they are onto something”.  Its in particularly important when they are dead wrong, when a decision is a horrible mistake that will cost them dearly.  If they think the idea is brilliant you should absolutely not steer them away from it.  Bad decisions are a key part of the game and you have to let them make these mistakes and suffer the consequences without them ever having any clue how far off they are from the material you intended for them.  This is a vital component of making the world feel real, vibrant and giving the players a sense of control over their own destiny’s, which notably will often lead them to tragedy, another key element of a good story.

Don’t take breaks from campaigns, make it a religion

This can be really tough advice to follow, real life is a pain and it’s not always possible to have a steady game going but the truth is that a successful campaign is reliant on the commitment of the DM and the players to play regularly with a established time and place.  Typically once a week is ideal, you can get away with once every other week but anything longer than that and people will be having trouble remembering events, people and places in-between session and you will not be able to maintain that “attachment” to the game that is necessary to run a solid, story that maintains cohesion over several sessions with built up personal attachments.

After 30 years of playing D&D, I have been involved in countless campaigns and the only successful ones I have ever been a part of have always been ones with a steady, weekly session with all participants being able to make the large majority of the games.  Everything else pretty much fell apart in relative short order.   I’m convinced steady, regular sessions are absolutely mandatory to the success of a D&D campaign.

When you are establishing your group and you are planning a D&D campaign, if you can’t get everyone to commit on this level my suggestion is that you create, shorter, unrelated 1 night adventure style games rather than trying to run a linked long term campaign.  D&D is always fun, even if sporadic, but as a DM you don’t want to put in a lot of effort if the end result is a campaign that flounders as a result of extended breaks between sessions.  It’s frustrating as a hell, and ultimately deflates your enthusiasm for future games with a sense of in-completion.  If at the end of a night, the story is done, even if you don’t revisit those characters again, their isn’t this looming sense of failure around the game, opening the doors to future stories with enthusiasm.

There is advantage to one shots to in that each time you do it, the players are treated to new plot twists, characters and locations which is always a fun piece of starting new campaigns.  In a sense with one shot you are starting a new campaign each time you play.

Tough DM’s are Good DM’s

I saved perhaps my most controversial advice for the last I’m going to leave you with but I firmly believe it to be the single most true statement about running games as a DM that applies to all groups everywhere.  The only good DM is a firm, tough DM that gives no quarter and is always in command of the game.

It takes a strong personality, good handle on the rules, effective philosophy and zero tolerance for bullshit to be a good DM. If that doesn’t describe you, my advice is either to develop those skills as quickly as possible, fake them if you have to or resign from the position and let someone else DM.

Players, even good ones, including friends and family, pretty much everyone you might expect or not expect to will try to pull the wool over your eyes during a D&D game.  Some will argue with you, try to rules lawyer you, manipulate you, whine, bitch and moan and everything in-between.  Some of it will be subtle, some of it not so subtle and truth be told, this is all very normal.  Chalk it off to human nature.

None the less you will have to deal with it all and as a DM it’s your responsibility to be the firm authority and handle every situation quickly and effectively, not only for the preservation of the game, but as a courtesy to the other players at the table.

In a D&D game there is no room for “issues” and really there shouldn’t be any, after all, everyone is there to have fun, its a social activity, this is not a competitive sport.  Still D&D is a game that will pull the emotion out of players, this is a good thing, but with that passion for the game and for the story, will sneak out bits and pieces of that human condition that can create uncomfortable situations and issues. Its here the DM’s authority and decisive action is vital to maintain a good game and keep things in a happy place.

The advice is simple.  Be firm, be an authority and nip the bullshit in the butt quickly and effectively.  Give no quarter, accept no compromise, be vigilant about growing problems in the group and don’t hesitate to make changes if things are not progressing in a way everyone at the table enjoys.  This is really less advice and more a responsibility every DM has and it is perhaps the toughest to follow given that every person at the table is going to be a friend or relative.  Be a strong, firm DM, that’s the best advice I can offer anyone.

Conclusion

Being a DM is a lot of fun, for many, its the only way to play D&D as some of us are simply bursting for an outlet for our creativity and the idea of just being a player is to stifling.  Despite all the creativity and joy being a host to a story brings, there are plenty of things that can go wrong and I believe unequivocally that having a strong philosophy and applying good methods is absolutely vital to success.  DM’s fail all the time at producing their visions but most of the time its not a lack of creativity that destroys their efforts, but rather the little meta details, that approach to the process of running a game that creates the most problems.

Every DM eventually develops their own methods, often they are unique but if you really research the success story’s, really listen to DM’s experiences you will find that there are definitive conclusions you can draw to certain pitfalls they are all trying to avoid.  Much of the advice offered here is really designed around those pitfalls and though I haven’t named them all by name, if you follow this advice you will find it easy to avoid the vast majority of problems that rise up as a DM hosting a game.

Above all other advice however I can say that the key is to make sure you are enjoying it.  A happy DM is a good DM, you can never be a successful DM if you don’t love doing it and its hard to imagine a DM failing if he loves what he does.    Surround yourself by friends, take your time with the creative process, be patient with your players and always keep an eye out for those subtle pitfalls by being prepared to deal with them long before they rear their ugly head and you will always find success as a DM.  Have fun out there!