Wanna be a better DM? Try Practicing.

I’ve always been fascinated with pedagogy. I played classical cello for 15 years, and one of the things I took away to the rest of my life (after a major career change) was that teaching, and learning from teachers, is an art unto itself.

My cello professor told me something that stuck with me forever. He told me that his job was not to teach me how to play cello - I already knew how to do that by the time I was in his studio. He was there to teach me how to learn cello. As with most things, one can continue to learn and improve for one’s entire lifetime. Pablo Casals, one of the all time great cellists, was asked:

“Mr. Casals, you are 95 and the greatest cellist that ever lived. Why do you still practice six hours a day?”

Mr. Casals answered, “Because I think I’m making progress.”

Potent stuff.

How do we hone our skills as a DM? I think if you posed this question to most communities, they’d say to play more, run games, play in games - you’ll get comfortable over time.

I’m here to suggest that while this is true, it may be possible that there is a better way.

Practice and Performance are two different things. When you run a session or play in a game, you are performing. Sure, the stakes are low, and it’s all for good fun, but it’s a performance. You are performing the skills you have prepared and developed.

So how do we practice?

I’ve become enamored with dungeon crawling. I used to find it terribly boring, probably because the systems that I were using were simply the wrong fit for the content. Once I was introduced to His Majesty the Worm and Shadowdark and read some more articles in Knock Magazine, I started to understand the appeal again. But running dungeons is hard. Like, properly hard.

Diogo Nogueira, in Knock #2, talks about Boring Dungeons. He states that you should never describe a room like this:

you get to an intersection and there is a door to the north and two passages, one to the west and one to the east

I feel attacked.

But he’s right, and it’s probably the core reason why most dungeons feel so miserable for players and game masters. It’s hard to do this at the table if you’re not very well versed in the dungeon, but you need to hint at what’s to come. He provides this alternative (paraphrased):

You see an open door frame to the north covered in dangling spider webs. The webs twitch - as if something is probing the web. There’s a passage to the east, and down that passage you see a faint glow of bioluminescence and a faint cool breeze.

Ahh, that’s the stuff. Players have some agency here - they have an idea of what they’re getting into, and get into the right state of mind for what may be beyond those doors.

I want to be better at this. I need to be better at this, because dungeons are calling my name, and I want to run great games. Let’s figure out how to practice.

Practicing can be a deep rabbit hole. There are lots of methods and opinions out there, and they’re all likely valid. But, since this is (as far as I’m aware) a burgeoning field of practice, let’s keep it simple.

Take a dungeon off your bookshelf. I’m sure you have one, something you ran a long time ago or haven’t run at all, and then consider the following exercises.

Find a room with more than one exit. Look at what rooms lie beyond those exits, and then describe the exits.

Use the information about the rooms on the other ends of those passages to telegraph the ideas to the players. You might find that in the dungeon you picked, the author didn’t include these details when they described the doors or passageways. Make it a habit in your prep to consider these details.

Pick a monster off of the random encounters list, and come up with a conflict motivation for them that isn’t just “kill the players.”

A well designed encounter does not lead inevitably to knock down, drag out fights. What does the monster want? Does it want to steal jewels from the players pouches? Does it want to pick off the weakest looking party member and drag them into the darkness? Does it want to hold the door and wait for reinforcements to arrive? Does it only attack if someone in the group has stolen something? These questions are what make dungeons feel like more than just board games where you make funny voices.

Pick a room that has a clear theme but is a little sparse on descriptors, and add more detail to it.

Sometimes the rooms are a bit.. empty. It’s on the GM to add little bits of set dressing and decor and tidbits of life to these rooms. Get used to doing this - your players will never encounter another boring room.

Look for opportunities for players to fail at something, and come up with some consequences for failure.

One way to make dungeons very boring is to have the players fail at something and nothing in their situation changes. The thief picks a lock but is unsuccessful. Cool.. do they just get to try again? There are lots of opportunities to fail, but if nothing changes, they should just succeed instead. Change the situation meaningfully when players fail - and you can practice this by looking for things they can fail at.

These are the things I’m going to be doing to try to get better at running dungeons. Do you have other ideas? What would you practice in your own games? What about outside of the dungeon - what if you were practicing overland travel and wanted to get better at interesting random encounters? Or generating NPCs in the city that have stories and hooks attached to them? There’s a lot of possibilities here, but the question I want answers to is:

How can I practice this?