Five DM Do's & Don'ts in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

Just on the session 0, if you do enough communication ahead of time you can even do one at the same day as your session 1

Thank you very much for this video. It helped me tremendously!!!! I’ve been playing D&D for a little over three years and started DMing a year ago. As my wife tells me all the time, I am my own worst enemy. I am very hard on myself and come down on myself harshly when I mess up. HOWEVER, over the past three or four months that is changing and am learning to prep less, give the players freedom to change things from my pre scripted plans, etc, and I am finding ,self more relaxed, enjoying the game more, and being way more lenient with myself. I’ve ached many of your videos and it’s nice to hear you guys share your mess ups and realize that it happens to everyone. Thanks again.

“Um, Actually…” in improv it’s known as ‘Yes, and…’ or ‘No, but…’ Them’s the golden rules.

Scar: "Be prepared!"

So. Dudes. Lol I got yo tell you what I get to run. A changeling, a sharkin, and a loxodon. The changeling is EVIL, the loxodon is a neutral good and the shsrkin just wants to kill everything. I got my hand so full

A lot of great Do and donts. I hate games that force me to make decisions I don't want and appreciate y'all discussing linear vs. railroading. Thanks again

Great video, but now I want a dark, gritty, my little poiny themed campaign

Question I had a Player who I gave a magical caravan. I told him hed have to leave it for combat and you cant see very well outside of it mostly forward.

I had a private discussion telling him. I am going to try and get you out of it(For plot) to which he begrudgingly accepts. He honestly has not been participating much at all so. Hes constanlty on his phone and doing other things. Would you say thats antagonistic? I told him pretty much everything i was planning. I let him do practically nothing 80% of the time. Yet some how he still disrupts the flow of the campaign to brush his teeth or get popcorn chicken

My tip/advice for new DMs is have a few things thay you want to happen but leave the notes so that you can have them fight in what ever place/situation your players go to. Was there an ambush outside one city? Well that could be outside the abandon castle instead etc.

The one point I’ll make about over-preparing is that while getting bogged down in details is bad, I think planning out important plot points throughout the campaign is good because I like there to be foreshadowing and hints leading up to a boss fight or big reveal, so the moment feels more meaningful/cool for the party. Sometimes I’ll come up with cool ideas later on in the story, but I then have to go back to earlier points of the story to hint at the idea so players will also get it.

I am running my first game for a bunch of kids with like 5 to 6 games of DnD umder their belts. Luckily they are a bunch of goofy goobers and love to dance battle to win over the evil boss and befriend every large animal they come across.
Im starting us in Atlantis. Im leading them to believe we're doing an olympic games type of thing on our first session. Im just leaving oit the part that its the day Atlantis sinks. 😁

I appreciate all your videos. Thanks for all the help.

i don't agree with changing on the fly to the extreme shown here. if the room isn't trapped then it isn't trapped.

Awesome DM Wisdom.

I've got a good story about yes, but. On my first campaign, only two of us were able to show up to the final session, and we had to fight the big bad lich. I had a luck blade rapier with one wish left, so I wished for the two of us to be immune to necrotic damage. Our dm thought about it it, and gave it to us for one minute. Without that, we almost definitely would have wiped on the boss.

Talking about encounter balance, my dm just did a homebrew Christmas one shot. He realized that he over tuned the first encounter, so he just had some of the enemies run away after getting fireballed. There are many ways you can retune an encounter if you realize it's too hard or too easy.

"They meet in a tavern and the barkeep says 'I have rats in my basement, can you help?'"
the first thought to mind was,
"OK, you freeloaders, your bar tab could buy half the county, but if you go take care of the rats in my basement, I'm willing to knock off a few gold."

The group of people that I play with only show up to roll dice and kill stuff. I've tried to get them to create a backstory or even a character name but their only interest is rolling Dice and killing stuff.

I am about to start my first campaign with a story my players are new too so I want it to last till around level 5. Its open ended so if it works my players and I can continue. My question is though if this goes well i want to run another campaign using your book Dungeons of Drakkenheim. Is this campaign beginner friendly enough for new players and newish DM?

Do not allow players to write rules. What does this mean? First, the players and the DM knows what a modifier is, or what a hit point is. Player characters do not. A player may have a college degree in physics, but their character does not. A good example of this is the ever popular "How-to-one-shot-a-Tarrasque" rule bending theories based on technicalities of the ruleset. Don't allow rule bending based on a stat block. Clever thinking should be rewarded, but not rules lawyering. If the DM decides that a Tarrasque is immune to polymorph, it is whether or not the stat block says so. I've had players sit there and discuss these sort of things trying to find these loopholes at times. Leave min/maxing to video games, and make it clear to your players not to do this. It takes away from the role playing experience. Players do not exist to "beat" the dungeon master. The opposite is also true. The only way to lose in a D&D game is when it's not fun. There is no need for cheat codes or aim bots. The DM can bend rules as needed on a whim. Players may not. But, be fair and consistent. If you wish to have goblins that have poisonous fangs in your world, that's fine. It's up to the DM then to decide whether or not the characters may even know this.

As a DM make sure they can kill a dragon at first level. Keep playing that until they do.

tell your players all the secrets. Tell the players where all the traps are. Tell your players what to do. Tell your players they win.

I know from experience adapting is the most important thing as a DM. I kinda go with the flow in a campaign. You just never know what the players will do .

"Sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta' good at something."
-Jake the Dog

About setting expectations, the characters don't have to fit in if the horrors are real, they will be psychologically broken after 10 sessions either way

Session 0 is honestly the most boring option to start a game with, the people (and you usually) want to jump straight in and you just say "nuh uh, no action today". Set expectations and make characters before you start the first session.

I just watched some of your older videos yesterday, maybe 5 or 6 years old. You guys are aging like fine wine!

About the part with throwing players against impossible challenges:
I once dm'd a Curse of Strahd Campaign and at one point my players went into Baba Lysagas swamp and were very underleveled but in my eyes goaded the witch enough for her to attack them, which lead to almost a Party Kill (Two pcs died tho and it was very close). I didn't want to kill them, but sparing them or letting Lysaga go easy on them just didn't felt right for her to do too. Okay, I admit I did play Lysaga very tactical in that fight (Two of them stayed in the hut while it was filled with the poison cloud which usually moves each turn but I also let the hut wander so the cloud stayed in the hut, which caused a lot of troubles for my players. Not to mention I didn't made the DC for taking the gem easier as well, so they failed a couple of times there). But since half of the team where powerhouses in combat (one of them was able to ward of Strahd nearly alone in a mock battle he had with them), it felt fair at the beginning.
Should I have gone easier on them? For example not using all of Baba Lysagas powerful spells? Or nerf the hut itself?

“Yes, but” is my biggest takeaway. Thanks, Dudes!

Or you subject a cute little pony to a lot of dramatic horror while they try to heal the world.

i can't get enough of these real talk constructive advice videos!

Haha i have a game where one of the players are a graduate physacist, the other is a retired sas soldier. Theyre actually a great wealth of knoweledge for stuff that i have no idea about

How do you deal with "my character wouldn't do that"? We had a very obvious plot hook - a crashed boat and tracks leading away in the sand that looked like someone was being dragged. And one player literally said "Oh my character wouldn't give a shit about someone he doesn't know. Let's keep going." This was a newish character for an existing player in a long-term campaign. No idea why he would deliberately create someone who didn't want to engage in the story.

I've done a thing where he describing a really cool place, and the player is like, "Let's go do that," but we have a time limit on when people are going to have to move away. So I asked if we could not do that for time purposes because our game has gone on for 2 years now, and we only have 1 year left. I have med students, so it's hard to schedule stuff. They agreed and moved on. This is just an example of when railroading is reasonably done.

Good video. Lots of good stuff here.
Session 0 is a must. Run the game you want to run. Don't let others force you into something you won't enjoy.
Encounter balance can be achieved when it is well thought out. I disagree with telling beginner DMs that it can't be done with 5e. Tell them the things to watch out for, like adding in too many or too few combatants, how ambushes make it much harder, don't group all the enemies on the same initiative, etc. This is a very important skill to master and it takes time and experience with your players and their playstyle. If you don't put effort into designing encounters to make them appropriate, then combat doesn't mean anything because you will be fudging to make it more or less difficult on the fly. If a fight you thought would be tough turns out to be easy, plan the next one better.
Saying no is very appropriate as a DM. Many things players ask to try are impossible.

Take a break when you need one. DM burnout is a thing.

The Dungeon dudes are awesome!!

Another thing with DON'T forget to have fun yourself, if you're not having fun, the players will often blame themselves, even though, to be blunt, it's usually your fault if you don't have too much fun.

Wow. What a joke. Where can I listen to the full debate the only thing I can find is the 9-hour long live stream on jerans channel and I don't have the mobile data to stream. Gotta download on Wi-Fi and listen at work.

i had a player who wasn't a geologist but was a dork for mushrooms and geodes. they played a druid and every time i said something akin to "and there be loot", they always asked for details on the gemstones that i just randomly pulled out of a generators and threw into a pile. i'd swear i could have said the whole loot pile was rocks and they'd be thrilled about that more than the values.

I loved the “yes, but” tip! It’s a much better alternative to the “are you sure about that?” Response, because it’s proactive and keeps the game going, presenting players with potentially difficult decisions that drive the narrative! I’ll definitely be using it here on out!

Yeah I don't have any issues with linear plots but there's a difference between "we're on a quest through the dark forest to find the wizard's magic tea plant" and "no you can't us suggestion to stop them from making you fight in a gladiator arena because I have a script for how this is going to go and you can't change it" (yes I've been in both of these and I actually had to help the DM read the statblocks and run the enemies in the second one because he was still had no idea what an action was or how attack rolls and saving throws work even after having played as a player for upwards and 30 hours so I was the "no it's a saving throw so you don't roll the person you attack does" "yes a 18 makes the save, you can take half damage which is x." "Yes that hits" "and they're dead now" "what's your spell save DC?" "Ok now you roll the dice add your wisdom modifier, which is here, is that number over x?" person so even though I've never DMed I kind of have because the DM had no idea what he was doing and I knew enough about the mechanics to make it not as much of a disaster)

Suuuuch a good video! so well said :D

What do you suggest to do when a player has looked ahead at parts of a published adventure you are running?

Thanks for the new video on DM Tips! You guys are the reason I got into DMing and learned the game so fast. I always send your videos to new/old players who want to try new classes and other things! Love the videos!

I got a question, so I am a brand new DM and my players are brand new too, it feels like I'm going way too easy on my players because I am so afraid on a tpk or of killing off a character, especially in an anticlimactic way.

For example, I just ran a session where the party fought against two basilisks, they had been warned by an npc to not look at them, else they'd get turned to stone, but the fighter still did because it essentially came out of the darkness and into his Line of sight because he was looking for threats.

Long story short, he failed both of his saves, and was petrified without being able to do anything, but it felt really bad to effectively kill his character (they are level 5) because he rolled terribly. So I essentially ruled it that these were "lesser basilisks" whose petrification takes time to become permanent, and killing the one that petrified him releases it.

I know it was 100% my bad for running those now, but I thought it would play out differently for some reason. Thing is I feel quite guilty right now, feels like I effectively cheapened the encounter and it just isn't sitting right with me.

Less of a question, more of a rant but I just wanted to put this out here I suppose.

Did anyone else notice the audio sounding a bit off this video?

Babe wake up, new dungeon dudes video

Currently running Phandelver and below for my first ever adventure and one thing that's really helping me is having one of my past DM's be a PC. When I don't know certain things and I'm already fumbling through the adventure manual, it's nice to have a walking talking DM guide lol