Be a Dungeon Master! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Monster Manual

While you could probably play a game in which you invent all monsters and their statistics yourself, having consistent statistics for all common monster types is a very useful thing because it allows your players to use their knowledge and experience. For this reason, Wizards of the Coast has added the first of the five Monster Manuals available for the game to the list of core rulebooks that every D&D group should use.

Answer: A dungeon map

In your introductory adventure, you will want to give your players and characters a good mix of all sorts of challenges - role-playing, combat and puzzles. You will find out which of them which players enjoy and which they less like. An elaborate dungeon map, while always a nice feature, could actually be of a hindrance as you would have less of a possibility to quickly adapt your adventure if you notice that your plans don't meet your players' expectations. Plus, your introductory adventure may not even feature a dungeon - a city or wilderness setting often makes for a much better start as it will let players learn about your world.

Answer: 4 to 6

For a party of four adventurers, a monster with a challenge rating (CR) equal to the party's average level will make for a moderate difficulty encounter - your "bread and butter" fight. Going lower than the party's level will create an easy fight, good to use as a diversion or red herring. An encounter with a creature one to three challenge rating points above the party's level will make a memorable, difficult but winnable fight (the actual number depends on how much opportunity the party has to prepare and whether they arrive at full strength or already weakened from previous encounters). An opponent six or more CR above your party's level would make an almost impassable obstacle, one they would likely need to surrender to or flee from.

Answer: Give the player a character you created, for this session only.

As a Dungeon Master, you should always be prepared for issues to come up during the game. If you do not do an explicit character creation session with the players prior to the campaign, there is always the possibility that a player forgets to make a character or makes one you can neither accept nor easily fix.

The best solution for this situation is to have a few appropriate, generic characters around for the player to choose from. This lets the player play for the evening and then he can come better prepared the next time. Making all others wait is no fun for them and you should never stick a player with a character they don't really want to play for a long time. Of course, if the player likes what you created, there is no reason he can't flesh out your basic concept and make it his own!

Answer: Find some way and reason to weaken the creature or provide the characters with an unexpected advantage.

This situation is one that breaks many campaigns - you have created an opponent the party was never meant to face head on, but your players underestimate it and attack, ensuring certain defeat and major plot disruptions. The best way to fix the problem is to make the encounter survivable, albeit barely so. If you have a creature with a strong physical attack, you could for example give it an existing injury that weakens its blows, causing less damage per hit. When you do this, however, your explanation must fit the story and you should still get the party to the brink of defeat or defeat them in a nonlethal way, costing them more resources than they will gain, otherwise your players will soon begin to rely on your reluctance to cause them serious harm. If you can put it into the storyline, you can also have a non-player character show up and help out, only to demand some service in return - a good starting point for an additional short adventure!

Killing the characters off would seem to be what the rules ask for, but in this situation, it is not the best option as you'd lose progress on the storyline and new characters would not have the knowledge and status to seamlessly take over.

The "respawn at the last save" solution is really a last resort (if you spot the problem too late and nothing else can save the main plot) - you can in an absolutely dire situation use it once to counteract an extreme string of bad luck, but if you have to use it more often, you completely destroy the atmosphere of your game.

After using any ad hoc adjustments to save your game, make sure you award experience and treasure only at the difficulty level your modified creature posed, not the original printed one (or give none at all). Also, do not overuse this: If the party makes such mistakes multiple times in a short period, you are absolutely justified in wiping them out, preferably at a moment where new characters can well continue where the previous ones left off.

Answer: Nothing at all

This situation can be extremely frustrating to a Dungeon Master who, hoping to see an epic battle unfold, must watch his "boss" creature get brutally slaughtered in three rounds. However, unless this encounter is the last, most epic battle of your entire campaign and you have no way to replace it with something new, you should not randomly adjust it. The players have played well - they have done the research, used their hard-earned treasure to buy equipment and behaved like prudent adventurers. You should reward them for excellent role-playing by giving them the easy victory with all its spoils - they worked for it beforehand.

However, be prepared to throw the characters some curves if they consistently play too cautiously and over-prepare. Rumors can be wrong and their informer might just be in the service of the evil overlord who wants to wipe out the party. Another way to foil overly cautious adventurers is to introduce tight in-game time constraints: If they have to clear out the cave in six hours, they can't spend a week finding out who lives there!

Answer: Continue without the character regardless of consequences

The failure of one player to attend should not reduce the enjoyment of the others. The best way of dealing with an absence is to simply keep the character in play by giving her to another experienced player who can handle the double load and play the role or play the role yourself as well as you can, making sure you give the character back intact, without using up irreplaceable resources the player might have had plans for.

Some players however object to anyone else playing their characters in which case you should find a way to temporarily get the character out of the game and introduce a non-player character (maybe one the players save from danger at the start of the session) to fill the gap. The same applies if you feel that no one could play the character right (as would often be the case in a more role-playing, diplomatic scenario where the personality is very important). Ultimately, you should leave the decision of which of the three paths works best to your players.

Answer: Give the party a chance to save the day in a way that will expend the item

While all of these methods work, most of them have a significant side effect. Consistently increasing the encounter strength ensures that the party essentially has only the item to solve the situation (as their own abilities are insufficient), leading to very boring play. Taking the item away or toning it down is a negative experience for the player and, in the case of the out of character solution, even creates a break in the story (if the item was actually weaker in the first place, how did the party beat the past encounters?)

The best way to solve the issue is to create a single encounter or event of sufficiently memorable proportions that the party can solve by giving up the item, gaining some other, more appropriate and better distributed reward. This method keeps the storyline intact, creates role-playing options, gives the player using the item another moment of positive spotlight and, of course, also achieves the primary purpose of getting rid of your mistake. Rumor has it that this very plotline has spawned a major fantasy novel which in turn inspired Dungeons and Dragons, so you're in good company.

Answer: Ensure that every session has combat, tension, dialogue and humor with neither too long at a time

In most groups, you will find that player preferences are different and that some players will dislike specific styles to the point where they will mentally withdraw from the game and do only the minimum necessary to keep the game flowing, but mostly are bored. If such a group wants to stay together, you have to avoid these stretches of boredom by running a variable game that uses elements from all styles. In this situation, you can alternate between combat scenes and character interaction, use some comic relief during the downtime and let different players take the lead at different time. Ideally, you should always strive to keep the other characters' interests involved - maybe they'll start seeing the enjoyment in the other styles too.

For example, you could grant the characters an audience at court, have them pursue and fight an assassin on the way there, then have the bard perform for the king while the fighter gets to demonstrate her prowess at jousting and, on the way out, they get attacked by the bard's rival who didn't like the favorable reception the party got.

The other ways will all ultimately cause the group to break up although an occasional split session can be a good idea in a heterogeneous group to once every while let a player exclusively have what he enjoys most.

Answer: Take the player aside, explain how he is hurting the game and ask him to play more cooperatively

A disruptive player is the worst threat to any group and you will need to deal with it quickly, before this player causes the other ones to get annoyed and leave. The first step should always be a private chat with the player. Give examples of when and how he disrupted the game and tell him how you expect him to act. Assure him that he will get spotlight and opportunities even if he cooperates.

Then tell the other players that you had a chat with the offender and that you want to give him another chance. If the behavior persists, you can escalate to a public reprimand and, ultimately, after consulting with the other players, ejection from the group. Having the player act as Dungeon Master for a one-off adventure (not your actual campaign) can be educational because then he will see how much a Dungeon Master does depend on the players' good will to run a great game, but it should not be done in times of open conflict but rather after the player has shown will to improve.