Five Strategies for Creating and Running Your D&D Campaign

A basic guide for novice Dungeon Masters

Prepping your campaign is just as important as rolling dice. Photo by author.

In a Dungeons & Dragons game, an effective Dungeon Master (DM) is multi-talented. You’re a prepared organizer, entertaining storyteller, omniscient guru, and tolerant improviser.

Your players want to immerse themselves in a fantasy world for a few hours. It’s your job not only to create the world’s people, surroundings, creatures, magic, traps, and treasures, but also to supervise and enhance the players’ time there.

You’re responsible for ensuring their enjoyment. If you provide opportunities for the characters to fight battles, solve puzzles, make friends and enemies, discover fortune and glory, and experience romance and enchantment, you’ll have the players clamoring to return to your world, whether to continue the same campaign or begin a new adventure.

This guide covers a few basic concepts Dungeon Masters should keep in mind and hopefully inspires your creativity. Sally forth, young adventurer!

1 — Balance your campaign’s encounters

Although some might disagree, “too much of a good thing” can happen in D&D, but you, as the fair-minded DM, can guard against that.