Welcome to the New Year! The times have changed, spring is (eventually) coming, and with Christmas behind us, you might be resuming your usual gaming schedule.

To make your 2021 your best year of Dungeons and Dragons yet, here are 100 top tips for improving just about everything at your table as a Dungeon Master (in no particular order)!

1. The most important thing to remember is that everyone should be having fun. If you want to change a rule, use different props, or do something differently, try it!
2. Players want to feel involved in the game and use their character sheets – try to give them as many rolls as possible, even for small things. If they say they want to look at something in detail, get them to roll Investigation, even if the details would be obvious – it helps them feel engaged.
3. Plan as many NPCs as you can in advance, even if it’s just their names. It’s harder to come up with them on the fly than you might think!
4. Using a picture for each NPC can help you describe them and give them a unique personality! Resources like Art Station or Art Breeder are great ways to find new NPCs.
5. Keeping an NPC with a catchphrase in your notes can make it ten times easier to remember them if they don’t come up often. The same applies to pictures!
6. If you need a quick description for a character, pick a single body part and say something unusual about it. A single quirk is interesting: a misshapen nose, one clouded eye, a backwards foot, a wooden hand. You don’t need to do any other description for them!
7. You don’t need to be a professional voice actor to do different voices for NPCs. Just focus on their personality and let that express itself through your words.
8. If you don’t feel comfortable doing direct speech with NPCs (it can be more intimidating and harder to improvise!) you can convey information with phrases like “The king tells you that…” or “He asks you if…”
9. It can be hard taking notes on the fly – you might want to consider a voice recorder that automatically transcribes vocals. They’re not always accurate and you should discuss with your players before using one, but they can let you search an entire session for a quick snippet of conversation you might have forgotten.
10. Players don’t remember things nearly as well as you might think they would. They’ll merge two characters together, completely forget locations they visited, and invent connections you never planned. Consider asking them at the start of a session to describe where they remember leaving off.
11. Combat doesn’t always have to be a massively pre-planned affair where you know the ins and outs of every monster. Pick a handful of monster stat blocks and become familiar with them, and you can throw them in as a short encounter in the middle of a game to break up slower sessions.
12. Equally, you should spend more than a few seconds developing more important fights or pre-planned encounters. There are lots of tools you can use to make a fight great – and the really great ones, your party will remember forever! Some of these tools follow in the next few tips.
13. It’s easy to underestimate difficult terrain as a threat. Consider maps where difficult terrain covers most of it, with smaller areas where movement is normal: you’ll be surprised how your party ends up moving.
14. Other terrain types are also incredibly useful for changing the way a fight goes. Throw in hazards like fire and acid, areas of water that have to be swum through: they all give different character abilities chances to shine.
15. Jumping rules don’t get much of a look-in: consider using gaps between platforms to prevent some players from moving while others have to jump, fly, or teleport in fights.
16. Height is also a great way to break up combat areas. Put archers above the main combat area to force your party to shoot, climb, or get behind cover.
17. Why not have an underwater fight? Characters will need to focus on getting to air when possible and movement will be completely different.
18. Lair actions can completely change the landscape of a boss fight. You can use ones from existing monster blocks, but it’s also worth thinking about what a boss could do to the environment each round. Turn it into difficult terrain? Flood it? Cause all its allies to fly?
19. The winning condition of a fight doesn’t have to be “kill all enemies”. Consider sequences like chases where a creature is trying to escape with an item or a hostage to force the party to change tactics.
20. Want to create a quicker fight that still uses up PC resources? Include one enemy with normal health and several with only one hit point. When those with one hit point take damage, roll a Constitution saving throw like you would for a concentration check on a spell. If they fail, they die.
21. There are all sorts of ways to run games, from pen and paper to systems like Roll20 and Foundry. Online systems don’t have to be just for playing remotely – if your players all bring laptops to the table, you can use all sorts of resources to enhance play!
22. Consider changing up monster blocks with different resistances or vulnerabilities. If your party focuses on fire damage, enemies might hear about it and invest in enchantments that make them resistant (or even immune!) to fire.
23. Worried your players are getting bored with the game being too easy or repetitive? Make sure you’re burning through their resources. Players will find it more exciting if they’re a little on edge for longer periods.
24. Resources your players will treasure aren’t just health. Spell slots, abilities, and items are all things they should be considering before use. If they’re spending them too freely, consider punishing them every so often with a bigger fight after several smaller encounters so they plan carefully in future.
25. An encounter doesn’t have to be combat. A broken cart in the middle of the road, trapped with poison gas and containing some gold and potions, can be just as useful for getting your players to consider using their abilities.
26. Give your players reasons to use their abilities! If they’re in a dungeon, don’t just make it traps, puzzles, and encounters. A partially blocked path, a heavy grate that they can see through, a room filled with fire, or simple decorative inscriptions on the wall can fill out your world and get them using spells and items.
27. Make your players work a little harder for magic items! Throwing too many at them can make them uninteresting. It can be more exciting to offer up a quest that leads them to a basic +1 sword than just letting them buy it. They’ll treasure it for longer.
28. Let your players write sessions! Not completely, but it can be a great way to delve into a character with your whole party to privately collaborate with one of the party and let them tell you what character moments they’d like to have in a session.
29. Don’t prioritise your script over your players! This is particularly true if you’re running a prewritten module. It’s not always necessary to have every fight or throw in every plot hook if you don’t think your players are enjoying it.
30. Likewise, tweak any modules to suit play. If your players ask a question about a room, don’t just answer by rote from the book in front of you if you can avoid it. It may not fully answer their question.
31. A great way to come up with fantasy names for places and people is to write out a normal word and remove letters from the start or end, or both. For example, lamppost can become Amppos (or more elegantly, Ampos), Whisky can be Hisky or Hisk, and so on.
32. You can also try typing words, but move one letter to the left or right. “Like this” becomes “Kujw Rgua”; if you find two consonants next to each other that look like a mistake, add a vowel between them, e.g. “Kujaw Regua”.
33. If you need an old-fashioned name for a town, try Googling “Small towns in…” and use countries that have the right feel you’re going for. Your players may not have heard of towns like “Tobermory” or “Millport” in Scotland, but they give a medieval vibe, while Japanese town names like “Magome” and “Utashinai” can completely change how your players will view the location.
34. The more players you have, a longer a session will take. This isn’t just because of combat. Even with puzzles, which you might think would be solved quicker with more people, they usually become much slower. Plan accordingly.
35. If you forget a plot hook you planned to get in or an enemy ability you missed, don’t try and retcon it unless it’s very convenient to do so. Better to save it for later – there’ll always be another opportunity. Sometimes you can create whole new stories by accident!
36. Roll a d20 every now and again. It’ll make your players nervous.
37. If you’re just starting on a new campaign, consider removing the feats Lucky, Sharpshooter, and Great Weapon Master, as well as possibly Polearm Master. These are great for minmaxing characters, but can make players feel forced to take them to stay valuable to their team.
38. If a player asks about a custom ability, race, or class for their character, don’t dismiss it out of hand, but don’t accept it too readily either. Look at reviews online if possible, and if there aren’t any, try it out in a one shot before letting it into the campaign.
39. It’s not just important that your players have fun – you need to have fun too! It goes both ways: if in doubt, discuss with your players what you think is missing.
40. Creating homebrew can be great fun for your table, but it’s very easy to create something that either already exists or is very unbalanced. If you do create something you want to allow, it’s worth telling your players that you might change it later if it turns out to be broken.
41. Not every monster or villain you use has to be super world-destroying to be interesting. Played right, a goblin tribe or a malicious dwarf can be as good a villain as a lich or a dragon – and can be more memorable.
42. In-world travel is one of the hardest things to manage with players after they leave low levels and gain access to spells for teleportation or polymorphing. If you don’t find a method for tracking travel that both your players and you enjoy, don’t try to force them out of a travel method. It’s often more trouble than it’s worth trying to keep track of distances travelled at certain speeds for certain times.
43. One method you might enjoy include using hexes on a world map and assigning travel speeds, as you can roll for encounters after a certain number of hexes.
44. Another includes creating a master-table of encounters in advance and rolling to see what happens once every time players travel. While more time-consuming upfront, this can feel much more organic and less taxing during play.
45. Prepping sessions can be easy or it can be the hardest thing in the world. There are a few simple things you can build into one if you’re having trouble: a motivation (e.g. get X treasure), a location (e.g. a temple outside of town), one puzzle (more on that below!), three fights (one middling difficulty one towards the start of the session, one low difficulty one in the middle, and one hard one at the end), and one “surprise”. Surprises are in the next tip!
46. Surprises are what keep your players guessing. Some are simple – the questgiver is the enemy boss of the quest, or the treasure was taken by a previous adventurer before the party arrived. Some are more complicated – the party was tricked into attacking innocents, or the treasure can’t be gained without playing into the enemy’s hands in some way. Including them in a session is a great way to shake up a simple dynamic.
47. Puzzles are tricky to design unless you’ve got a knack for it. An easy place to borrow puzzle ideas from are mobile games on the App Store or Google Play Store, while classic riddles are available in great quantities online. You can also borrow puzzles from games like Baldur’s Gate or Knights of the Old Republic. Don’t be afraid to steal ideas!
48. Physical props can be great fun for players. A collection of seven magical keys are even more fun if you give players metal keys to keep.
49. Borrow ideas from anywhere and everywhere! You don’t need to be an amazing writer: just take quests from video games, side plots from TV shows, or even Choose Your Own Adventure books.
50. Stuck for inspiration or need feedback? Try Reddit or Discord servers like Crit or Quit to run ideas past strangers or use theirs!
51. Maps can be troublesome and time consuming to create, but there are loads of resources online you can just pull existing ones from. Shop around!
52. If you want to create your own maps, Inkarnate and Wonderdraft/Dungeondraft are great options. Inkarnate even has a free version you can play around with!
53. Look through the spell list. Many are familiar options that’ll come up time and time again, but some are more unusual and you might not even have heard of them – they can be great things to pull out of the box when players least expect it.
54. Art items can be a bit boring if your players are just going to convert them into cash every time. Look into possible base mechanics for storing them as decoration or even making use of them!
55. Gold’s not actually that much use either as written, unless you severely reduce the amount players are picking up and start offering lots of rare and legendary items. It’s another use for the home base: allow players to spend on customising it to suit their own tastes.
56. Once players have their own base, throw in an encounter surrounding it once in a while. It could be burglars, a magic rat infestation or even someone trying to demand taxes from the heroes. It makes it feel more like a place they own and should invest in.
57. Players’ number one interest is always advancing their character. That can be new items, new abilities, or just new scars. Give them a chance to earn something memorable. Even if it doesn’t change how they play, it’ll make them feel more involved.
58. Some combat encounters should be tough and make the players feel challenged. Enemies that regenerate or deal high damage can do that. But consider giving the party the occasional fight, particularly at high levels, where it’s a complete curbstomp in the party’s favour. It’ll make them feel powerful.
59. Easy fights can also be great ways to burn up resources. Trigger-happy spellcasters might throw a fireball at a mook that only warranted an arrow.
60. Players hate fights where they can’t do anything. Effects that stun them or prevent them using abilities should be used sparingly.
61. Be prepared to balance combat on the fly. It’s not that your players shouldn’t feel threatened: you should punish them if they go into something unprepared. But if they go into a fight fully stocked and ready to go, and play smart, and they’re still losing, you shouldn’t pursue a Total Party Kill.
62. Cheating as the Dungeon Master isn’t cheating. Some DMs prefer to stick close to the rules, and that’s fine, but if you plan out a combat encounter and it looks like it’s going to be a TPK, there’s no harm in rolling a fake miss now and again if you’re not showing your dice to players. Remember: the game is supposed to be fun and challenging, but no player likes their character dying, and a TPK is likely to be the end of a campaign.
63. Even if you do show dice, it’s possible to help the players out if they’re struggling. Don’t always target the weak ones: go for chances for the enemy to recover, or defend, rather than pushing the attack.
64. Equally, if you intend for a fight to be a climactic boss battle and the party aren’t having any difficulty at all and you keep missing your rolls, feel free to roll the dice in your favour, add lair or legendary actions, or have more enemies arrive as necessary. The players will only feel cheated if you suddenly tilt the battle massively in your favour – if you bring in more enemies to balance it, they’ll see it as something they should have anticipated from how easy they were finding it.
65. Bosses you want to hold on to don’t always have to die at the end of a fight. They can flee or teleport away. Don’t force this plan, however – if the party blocks the boss from escaping and forces them to fight, don’t pull something out of nowhere to allow the boss to escape. You can always fix it later, but your party will remember if you cheat them out of a win.
66. Try to distinguish between mindless creature behaviour and enemies with tactics. Uncontrolled zombies will attack whatever’s closest, usually, while liches should focus on eliminating casters first. After all, the Jedi are traitors to the Republic.
67. Plans going wrong is how your campaign develops. You’ll forget to introduce a character, your party will talk to the wrong NPC, you’ll drop a hint way too early. Go with the flow. There’s nothing the party can do that you can’t fix in prep for future sessions.
68. Unusual abilities inaccessible to the PCs can and should be given to enemy NPCs. There’s no reason a dragon shouldn’t have found some way to create a cage of lightning around its lair. Just don’t include instant win buttons.
69. When handing out loot, don’t always focus on giving players things that boost their power, like +1 items or extra spell slots. Items that give the players new abilities or options and can change how they play are welcome too. Even items that just enhance their gameplay, like a cloak that lights up with the night sky when they flourish it, can be great loot.
70. Don’t be stingy with loot, but don’t hand it out too freely either. Giving too many items makes them less valuable and more likely to be dumped in the party inventory.
71. You don’t always have to give the party an item they can use. An alignment-locked sword that fits none of them is something they can sell to the highest bidder – or cause an alignment shift out of greed.
72. Don’t focus too heavily on alignments if you can help it. There’s a great deal of room for argument over whether certain actions fit certain alignments, and it’s better used as a guide.
73. Backgrounds are a very loose mechanic as written and easy to create compared with other homebrew. Feel free to create new ones or help your players develop their own.
74. Not everything written in the rules is necessarily perfect. If you think gameplay can be improved, talk it over with your players and try new things. Popcorn initiative, power boosts and nerfs to certain classes, and even custom classes can all make your table more fun.
75. If you have control over the environment you play in, create playlists and select music to accompany certain scenes. Music can have a massive effect on the atmosphere in a scene.
76. Music isn’t the only option. Changes to lighting and setting and sound effects all add something to a scene.
77. Don’t rely too heavily on maps if you’re using them outside of combat in 5e, particularly if you’re using a resource like FoundryVTT or Roll20. Theatre of the mind is always better than allowing players to move tokens around a map to explore. Otherwise you’re just playing a bad video game.
78. While props, maps, and D and D miniatures can all add to a game, you can still play with just dice and character sheets. It’s worth remembering that.
79. If you’re bringing on a new player, particularly one who hasn’t played the game before, make sure they’re well supported with the rules and allow them plenty of leeway at the start. A good party will do most of the work introducing them to the game without the DM needing to, but you should still go out of your way to integrate them with the table.
80. Don’t tell your players how their characters feel or what they do. You control nearly everything in this game world; the players only control their characters. Don’t rob them of that.
81. Not everything is possible, and a natural 20 doesn’t make the impossible possible. If a player tries something like walking through a wall without using magic, you don’t have to give them a roll for it. Alternatively, if it’s something possible but not with their current resources, give them a roll, but make the DC very high, and don’t count natural 20 as an automatic success.
82. Consider how the presence of magic affects the behaviour of NPCs in your world. Given that spellcasters can affect people’s minds from quite low levels, monarchs are likely to have some form of defence against it – whether that be court mages, amulets that protect them, or issuing proclamations via intermediaries.
83. There are spells which can protect the party while resting by creating barriers. These can be hard to deal with, and you shouldn’t disrupt them every time. But if you want to pose a threat against it, consider enemies setting up ambushes outside, or enemies that can teleport into it. There are many low level monsters that teleport naturally.
84. Enemies don’t always have to use the same stat block. Players can grow complacent if they know a zombie has a certain number of hitpoints or is vulnerable to certain damage. Use a variety of statblocks and reflavour them to keep the party on its toes.
85. Players love nostalgia. If you’ve been playing a campaign for a while, consider bringing them back to somewhere they visited early on so they can feel how their characters have grown.
86. Invest in your writing and come up with a few particularly evocative descriptions for use now and again. A tavern can real come to life when you describe the tendrils of hanging felt used for decoration, the light haze of smoke from a poorly ventilated fire, and the sour, sweaty air from the patrons spilling as much ale as they drink.
87. XP-based levelling is tricky to manage and focuses heavily on encouraging combat unless you hand it out frequently for other tasks. Consider using milestone-based levelling instead, which is often much easier to gauge.
88. Used sparingly, player deaths increase the tension and realness of a game. Don’t be afraid to kill a character in a tough fight if it’s meaningful and they had a chance, but don’t overdo it. Bringing a character back from the dead can be a big moment for a party.
89. Death can, however, be cheap at higher levels when more spells are available. If you find players aren’t fazed by the concept, consider Matt Mercer’s Fading Spirit rules to amp up the tension.
90. Used sparingly, having a favourite NPC betray the party or be killed can massively boost player investment in the game. Don’t over-use it though, or your players will stop caring about any NPC.
91. If a player wants their character to focus on certain concepts like specific religions, following certain patrons, or working on certain crafts, it’s worth reading up on any existing lore or writing out more so you can reference it quickly during play.
92. Choose the starting level for players carefully. Starting at level 1 gives players very few options and abilities, but can make them feel suitably weak at the start. Level 3 is often a good starting point to hit the ground running.
93. Explore variant rules or rules that don’t come up often for new ideas. Rarely used things like creatures climbing onto the backs of larger creatures, mounted combat, and alien technology can all inspire new concepts.
94. Have a session zero to discuss what your players expect out of your campaign and what you want to do with it, but also consider having session 0 part 2 at various points through a campaign to discuss what is and isn’t working.
95. Make notes on grab-bags of loot that you’d be happy to give to players. When handing loot out, you can refer back to this without needing to roll repeatedly or fish around for ideas.
96. Make grab-bags of sidequests too – a quest board in a town can be a quick way for PCs to make money or gain loot when you need time to think. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than a fetch quest or “kill rats in a basement”.
97. Consider giving your characters downtime now and again with opportunities for things to do during it. It allows the players to explore who their character is outside of ongoing adventure.
98. Don’t be afraid to pause mid-session for ten minutes if you’re flying by the seat of your pants! It’s okay to stop and update your notes.
99. Different players want different things out of games. Try and cater to all tastes. Not everyone wants a realistic campaign, but if you do, it’s worth trying to find a compromise that suits everyone.
100. Give everything a chance until you know what works and what doesn’t. It’s okay to make mistakes.