Lowering Your Stress Levels as a New Dungeon Master
So you’ve decided to be a Dungeon Master eh? Welcome to the club! Here’s a few tips to help you get off to a good start.
The lowest levels of stress you can have is by running a pre-built adventure. There are some great adventure modules that have been released by Wizards of the Coast and vary in complexity and setting. The book contains the whole storyline and setting along with all the Non Player Characters (NPCs) that your party will meet. The encounters are balanced and all the maps are included. These manuals cost around £30 each and contain hours of gameplay. All you have to do here is follow the book as closely as you want and you will get a sense of how to pace an adventure and how to scale up combat to make it challenging but not instantly deadly. If most of your group or you are brand new to D&D then I would suggest the Starter Set is a great place to start. These adventure modules tend to be open ended as well so you can use one of these adventures to springboard into your own storyline if that’s your plan.
A great way of reducing my stress levels was to stop worrying about the next part of my story. My personal life got in the way of preparing for one of my D&D groups and I had to take a step back from it. I decided to run The Forge of Fury from Tales from the Yawning Portal. Wizards of the Coast decided to put five of the community’s favourite dungeons from previous editions into one book and update them for the latest 5th Edition rules. As these are stand alone dungeons you can drop them into your campaign whenever you need them and they increase in difficulty so there will always be something level appropriate for your game.
If you are struggling with rules or you have that annoying player that pulls you up on rules all the time then turn that weakness into a strength. Appoint them as the rules guy and get them to look up the rules for you, it makes them feel important and stops them nagging at you all the time!
Do a social session. This is where your adventurers get a day off from hacking and slashing and get to spend some of their loot. This tends to be very improvisation heavy as you’ll be talking as shopkeepers, guards, merchants and all manner of NPCs. You won’t know where the session will take you but it will give you an opportunity to use some of the fine detail that you put into the building of your world and settlements. It also has the added benefit of the group bonding over some shared fun and everyone gets to know each others characters better. Take some notes so you know how to appeal to your players and learn any stimuli that get them to react.
Do not over prepare! Going into too much descriptive detail in your notes and preparing dialogue and dungeons is great but if your party doesn’t even interact with what you’ve prepared you have wasted your time. I learned this the hard way in the Sunless Citadel where the party entered the dungeon and were given a choice of two doors. I prepared the whole of the left side of the dungeon and only the first few rooms on the right side. The party opened the right door. This small choice rendered my preparation time pointless. Now they did eventually do the other side of the dungeon so my work wasn’t of nothing but at the time I felt foolish.
Let go of a little control. Sometimes it can feel like you are herding kittens as a DM as your players aren’t doing the carefully crafted thing you want them to do. If you are pushing them too hard in one direction your players are going to feel railroaded and even act out against your plot hooks. Take a step back and let the players do what they want to do and they will probably end up in a situation where they organically put themselves in a place where your plot hook or scenario makes sense. You aren’t there to fight your players, go with the flow and they’ll come to you!
At the end of the day you are supposed to be having fun too, if you aren’t take a break or shake things up.
May you roll well!
