S03E10 – DMing 103

Today on Save Vs. Rant, we’re discussing ways to improve as a DM. In this episode, we present tools, strategies and techniques that will help you grow and improve as a DM, ultimately resulting in a better experience for both you and your players.

I’ve joked before that DMing is a subtle form of performance art where you trick a room full of people into thinking that they’re playing a game, and while that’s a rather drastic (and more than a bit pretentious) description of DMing, the ideal is to have the parts that you’re just making up blend as seamlessly as possible with the parts that are set in stone, or exist as part of the game’s shared reality. To that end, we offer 5 more essential tips, each of which is something we ourselves once had to learn.

1. Use Cheat Sheets

One of the most important things that must be true for self-improvement to even be possible is that we need to know where we can improve. If you find yourself looking up certain rules or consulting the exact wording of a spell, it’s probably something you should make a cheat sheet for. In high school and college, this process was often called “taking notes,” and the concept is largely the same. I find, personally, that almost every cheat sheet I make becomes naturally obsolete a little while after I make it. With no effort at all, the things I use on a regular basis internalize and I start to be able to anticipate what results I’m going to find on my cheat sheet until I find that I’m no longer consulting the cheat sheet at all.

Except grappling. I’ll never remember the d20 grapple rules.

2. Use a DM Screen

You know a convenient place for your cheat sheets? You DM screen! Every DM screen in history has had a bunch of useful tables printed on it, and every single one has had something (or even mostly things) I’ve found to be unnecessary for one reason or another. An especially egregious example is the Pathfinder 1st Edition DM Screen, which had the XP progression by level (as if your players aren’t going to obsessively track how close they are to the next level!). By comparison, almost every iteration of the Storyteller’s Screen for the World of Darkness had the rules for fire and electrical damage. Although these weren’t exceptionally complicated, they weren’t perfectly intuitive and having them handy made it a lot easier to mitigate electrical and fire damage when they happened to occur unexpectedly (which, more often than not, they did).

But more than a convenient place for cheat sheets, a DM screen is a great way to organize and shield your notes, giving you the ability to peruse them with confidence, knowing that your secrets are safe from the (often accidental) prying eyes of your players. And while we at Save Vs. Rant are neutral in the war between the fudgers and the never-fudgers, nearly every game will periodically benefit from the ability to make a roll in secret and conceal the outcome from the players.

Secrecy is a form of suspense building, which can be a very good thing.

3. Realism Isn’t Consistency (and Neither Is Automatically Good)

I admit that this is a mouthful, and without getting too postmodern in this semi-lighthearted gaming blog, I want to expound on what we mean by this. Almost every attempt at granular realism – the realism of having charts and numbers and percentages and bell curves and ideals – is thwarted by the reality that the world is a complicated place where counter-intuitive outcomes are common. Alan Pinkerton – one of those human beings blending a less than charming mix of genuine bravado and reprehensible morals – was a rugged soldier who died from an infected tongue.

I’ve learned not to say, “No one,” because I cannot possibly anticipate the staggering diversity of personal preference, but few indeed are likely to be interested in a game where your ch