Four bedraggled adventurers stand together on the shore of a desolate island, shivering in the evening mist. They don’t know each other, and their motives for being here are unclear. But as they make stilted conversation they see, emerging from the briny waters, figures dressed in the rags of sailor outfits, moaning and shuffling and horrible. The adventurers stand around, roll some dice and chat some more, as the undead seamen lurch ever closer. Looking on at this desperate scene, I think to myself, “What the hell? Why can’t anyone make a decision? We’ve been here for half an hour! We’ve not even begun the proper adventure yet!”
Dungeons and Dragons has always been there in the background of my life. When I was a kid in the late 70s, my dad’s best friend got into it; he’d show me the rule books and dice and tried to explain to me that this was a game about imagination, about pretending to be elves and wizards and warriors on a completely made up adventure. In the 1980s, as I got into video games, we saw the first fantasy adventures based around D&D lore – games with lots of stats on screen, and monsters inspired by Lord of the Rings. Then finally in the 90s I played with a group of friends at university. We huddled in cold rooms with rulebooks, character sheets and cheap supermarket cider and quested into the night. But I was never the Dungeon Master.
For those who’ve never played, the Dungeon Master is basically a storyteller, an umpire and a game designer rolled into one; they’re the person who invents the quest that players experience. Rulebooks and world-building encyclopedias give you the outline of a story, and an adventure book tells you what possible enemies and treasures players will discover, but that’s it: everything else is down to the DM. Exploration and combat are dictated by dice rolls and character abilities, but it’s flexible – even though I hadn’t designed this adventure, I felt I could be creative. It’s a form of collaborative story-making, and because players can do what they want within the rule set and limits of their characters, it is highly unpredictable.
Now my sons Zac and Albie are really into D&D and for Zac’s 17th birthday last week, I promised to finally DM a game. I was definitely not prepared.
I went with a new starter-pack campaign called Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. We invited my friend, the comic book artist Cole Henley, and his son Gethin to join us. I knew Gethin meant business when he arrived with his own set of manuals and notebooks. It was a little intimidating.
What hit me first when we started playing was that everything was a lot slower and more chaotic than I’d imagined. This adventure begins with the player characters arriving on the shores of a mysterious island, where rival dragon clans once did battle. Up on top of the jagged cliffs, there is a cloister populated by humanoid lizards and their religious leader (whom I imagined as Cate Blanchett in Lord of the Rings, but a lizard). In the background is a rumour about a sleeping dragon guarding an important treasure. I anticipated that once my players arrived on the beach, they would immediately go for the stairway leading up the cliffs, but they just stood around for ages, asking me questions about what time of day it was and what the weather was like.
When the zombies started shuffling out of the ocean, they had a long debate about what to do. “Can they be affected by normal weapons?” asked Albie. “Can I see them clearly enough to throw a harpoon?” asked Cole. “Can I make a molotov cocktail out of some oil and a bottle?” enquired Zac. This led to a long discussion about whether zombies are affected by fire damage. I wasn’t prepared for this because of my video game sensibilities: the first set of baddies are usually just sword-fodder, quickly dispatched and forgotten. This was like trying to play The Witcher 3 with the Oxford University debating team.
When we eventually reached the cloister, the debates started again. Should the group attack the inhabitants? If not, what questions should they ask? Should they trust the food they were offered? It was fascinating. All the little details I thought would be completely secondary – a statue in the temple, a shrub being tended to by a gardener, the cave they were offered as accommodation – were pored over for hours. We hadn’t even got to the dreaded owlbear monster, or the harpy lurking in the crow’s nest of the sunken galleon. These were the bits I’d actually planned. Instead, I was spending a lot of time improvising the exact contents of a garden.
This, it turns out, is the first rule of being a good DM: your players will confound you, even if they don’t mean to, and you have to work with that. The mortal sin of DMing is “railroading”, when you make it impossible for your players to do what they want, continually shoving them towards the story you have prepared. But at the same time, you need to try to keep them on track. In the end, I had the gardener character give the party some advice: “It’s getting late. Perhaps you should go to bed and begin exploring the island tomorrow. There’s a lot to see and many terrors to face.” The adventurers nod sagely and then … go to the library to hassle a character named Varnoth, who is trying to read a book on cave maintenance. Zac decides to give her a crowbar.
It takes us a few hours but we do get through most of the campaign in the end. There’s a long encounter with some fume drakes guarding a woodland healing pool, surrounded by valuable mushrooms. I end up continually shouting “Stay away from our mushrooms!” in a weird screeching voice, which so delights the group that they hang around for a long time, harassing water sprites. My throat still hurts, but then, before I started this, I asked Twitter for suggestions on DMing and a lot of people said that acting was important. I studied drama at university and so was well qualified to invent stupid voices and mannerisms for a whole cast of creatures. The only problem was remembering who had a screechy voice and who spoke like Tom Hardy in Legend.
It was a great afternoon. My party battled zombies and ghouls; they threw javelins at the harpy (she spoke like Terry Jones in Life of Brian), they managed to pull a treasure chest from the sunken hull of a boat using ropes and rolling a dice to see how long they could hold their breath underwater. At first the many stat checks that accompany each battle felt longwinded and intrusive, but after a while they faded into the background. There is a lot of laughter when the whole thing goes awry because I forget to read a vital section, but nobody seems to care.
I’m not going to lie – at first the rule book was intimidating. There are stats for everything, from falling off a cliff to being underwater to the exact weight and properties of various armour types. Every movement your party makes can be calculated on graph paper, with reference to maps and tables. But when you get more confident you can decide how closely to abide by these technical constraints. The thing I learned was that the rules of D&D are like the rules of written language – you need to understand the grammar and punctuation, but when you do, you can then ignore or subvert them.
As we played and laughed and fought, the one section of the rulebook that kept coming back to me was a short paragraph under the heading Making Mistakes: “No one expects you to memorise every part of this adventure and all the rules in the rule book. As long as your players are having fun, everything will be just fine.” I feel this is a good rule, not just for being a DM, but for being a player, a parent, a partner, a pal … sharing stories with friends, telling them together, is a form of magic. We had it as kids, and it’s easy to lose. But fuel your imagination with a fantasy guidebook and some favourite people, and you can find it again.
Five quick tips for new DMs
1. Start out by playing a few games with an experienced DM to see what they do. You could even volunteer to be their apprentice for a few campaigns.
2. If you don’t know an experienced DM in real life, watch YouTube videos. My sons love Critical Role and Oxventure, which both run long, highly entertaining campaigns with lots of hints and tips. Wizards of the Coast has its own guide right here.
3. Be prepared but don’t panic. Part of the fun is learning to improvise and tell emergent stories. As Eurogamer’s Aoife Wilson told me on Twitter, “every DM will massively over-prepare their first session. Do everything you feel you need to, then throw it all out the window and just enjoy the chaos.”
4. Diarmuid Burke from the PR agency Big Games Machine told me to find small ways to fit players’ backstory into the adventure. That way, they feel more ownership over the narrative. He also pointed me to this site, which generates random traps for your players to fall into. Donjon also has lots of tools for generating encounters.
5. Think modular rather than linear. Don’t make a campaign that can only be played in a certain order – design it so you can move key aspects around based on what players do. Improvisation is the key!
