Matt Mercer on Bringing NPCs to Life
In July 2017, on the DM's Deep Dive I had the privilege to talk to Matt Mercer of Critical Role about bringing NPCs in our D&D games to life. Matt is a professional voice actor and very popular...
View Article5e Dungeons & Dragons Facebook Survey Results
In October 2016 I ran a 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons survey of 6,600 dungeon masters to better understand how DMs prepare and run their games. I wasn't happy to stop there, however. Lately I've...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Battle Map Comparisons
Note: This article has been updated from the original article posted 3 August 2009. More than ever, we have numerous fantastic ways to run combat in our Dungeons & Dragons games. Over forty years,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tools of the Lazy Dungeon Master
This article has been updated from the original written on 6 September 2011 Prepare what matters to our game. That's the core mantra for the way of the Lazy Dungeon Master. It's an easy statement to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Injecting the Hard Moves
The fantastic roleplaying game Dungeon World is a treasure trove of wonderful ideas we can bring right into our fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons games. We've talked in the past about using...
View ArticleDM's Deep Dive with James Introcaso on Roll20
In another episode of the DM's Deep Dive, I had the wonderful opportunity to talk to my friend and co-creator of the Don't Split the Podcast network, James Introcaso about running games on Roll20....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Improvising Combat Situations with Advantage, Disadvantage, and Inspiration
Keeping combat scenes fresh and interesting is a hard job. Many players have played through thousands of combat encounters and it's up to us DMs to make each one memorable. We DMs probably make this...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Three Things to Do While Traveling
Travel scenes in D&D can be tricky to run. We want travel to be meaningful. If the characters are going to hike it from Nightstone to Bryn Shander, they should feel like they've actually gone five...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Improvising Combat Situations with Advantage, Disadvantage, and Inspiration
Keeping combat scenes fresh and interesting is a hard job. Many players have played and will play through thousands of combat encounters and it's up to us DMs to make each one memorable. We DMs...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Top Tips from a Sample of 4,000 Dungeon Masters
Each one of us has opinions and ideas on how to make our D&D games great. It's harder, however, to group all of these opinions together to find the commonalities. By categorizing a random sample of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Thinking Through the Eyes of our Villains
When we consider the activities that bring the most joy to our game, particularly activities that we can do anywhere, few are as useful as thinking through the eyes of our villains. This is a technique...
View ArticleDM's Deep Dive with Robin Laws
Robin Laws is one of the great deep thinkers of roleplaying games, showing up on many peoples' bookshelf with the thin but powerful Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering. More recently, Robin wrote the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Collected Experiences Running D&D 5e Boss Fights
Boss fights in any edition of Dungeons & Dragons haven't been easy to run well. Only until the fourth edition of D&D were boss monsters designed differently from other monsters, referred to as...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Lazy Approach to Stronger Encounters
Most of the time we can probably run monsters right out of the Monster Manual at our 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons games without having to change anything. There's a freedom that comes from using...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A New Dungeon Master's Guide to the Forgotten Realms
The Forgotten Realms is a fantasy world developed over fifty years and in publication for thirty. There are nearly three hundred products available for the Forgotten Realms according to a quick search...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Encounter Building with Teos Abadia
In the December 2017 episode of the DM's Deep Dive, I spoke to D&D designer Teos Abadia about encounter building for the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Our goal in this show was to dig...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
Five years ago I wrote the book the Lazy Dungeon Master. This was in the middle of the transition between the 4th edition and 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Since then, the book has done...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Published Adventures
We spend more than just our money when we buy a D&D 5e hardback adventure, we spend our time and energy on it as well. Unlike the 16 and 32 page adventures of old, these hefty tomes often include...
View ArticleJeremy Crawford on Encounter Building
On an episode of Dragon Talk, D&D developer and rules sage, Jeremy Crawford, spent a good deal of time digging deep into encounter building, particularly into building combat encounters. It's a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Session Zero of Tomb of Annihilation
Any time we're considering running a campaign it's worth spending some time with the group up front to scope the campaign and the characters within it. This session is often called a "Session Zero"....
View Article