In this article, we’ll be looking at what the Dungeon Master’s Guide says about preparing for a game, including starting location, important elements of an adventure, individual encounters, and some pre-game logistics that you should consider as well.

Before we begin, I want to address one of the Dungeon Master’s Guide’s flaws also known as Tiefling names. Good information in the Guide can help you prepare to run a game, whether you’re creating your content, running a published adventure, or using a mix of the two.

However, because the Dungeon Master’s Guide was written to, not for but to, Dungeon Masters who are creating their campaign, sometimes this information is organized in a way that makes it easy to overlook.

Find Difference Between Campaign And Adventure

A lot of information on game prep is presented as a list of things that Dungeon Masters must create for their game like shock trooper.

However, this same information works quite well as a step-by-step list of things that Dungeon Masters need to identify in published adventures with options for customizing them if you want to make your game unique.

Also, the Dungeon Master’s Guide will often refer to campaigns discussing information that applies to both campaigns and adventures.

If you’re not familiar with the difference between adventures and campaigns in Dungeons and Dragons, an adventure is a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

It can be as short as a one-shot that can be completed in a single session, or it can be as long as a published adventure like “The Curse of Strahd,” which will take you many sessions to complete. A campaign, on the other hand, is an optional way to link multiple adventures together.

Because campaigns are made up of adventures, a lot of the advice for campaigns and adventures overlaps. So we talk about the different sections of the Dungeon Master’s Guide in this video; keep in mind that when you hear the word campaign or adventure, the two terms are interchangeable.

That said, let’s get started. We’re going, beginning with “Creating a Campaign”  in Chapter One. And as I said, this could have easily been titled Creating an Adventure or How to Prepare for an Adventure.

This section begins by looking at the starting location, and the most important thing to note in this section is the scale, or as it says, to start small. You only need to prepare for the things that you will use in your game session.

This includes some basic information about the local region as detailed in the “Start Small” section and some information on how the setting and story may impact player characters.

Setting The Stage

The last three sub-sections in this section, “Setting the Stage,” “Involving the characters,” and “Creating a Background,” are a great way to get players invested in both their characters and the story, particularly for longer adventures. In addition to the starting location, you’ll also want to know some important information about your adventure that will allow you to pace your game, foreshadow upcoming events, and improvise with confidence.

For this, we’ll turn to chapter three, “Creating Adventures.” The first section here, “Elements of a great adventure,” is good advice for whether you’re preparing for your game or running your game.

Elements like “A Credible Threat,” A Clear Focus on the Present,” and “Heroes who Matter” will help keep your players engaged. The section “Adventure Structure” covers the important story beats to include the beginning, middle, and end of your adventure.

“Adventure Type” is your step-by-step Guide to either creating or identifying the important elements of the adventure.

There is one Guide for event-based adventures and one Guide for location-based adventures and sub-sections for mysteries, intrigue, and framing events. Complications, such as moral quandaries and plot twists, covers the last of the important information that Dungeon Masters should be aware of.

If you are running a campaign or an epic level adventure, at this point, you may want to jump back to Chapter One and read “Campaign Events.”

This section provides an overview of often types of world-changing events that can sustain and inspire such a long-lasting campaign and provide background for unique adventures.

Also, the subsections on “Episodic or Continuing Campaigns” and “Campaign Themes” under “Play Style” in Chapter One, as well as “Linking Adventures” in Chapter Six, can help you determine what binds the larger story together.

Once you know your adventure, you’re ready to begin preparing for the encounters, or the individual scenes, that are likely to happen during your session.

The introductory paragraphs of “Creating Encounters” in Chapter Three cover all encounters’ critical components, particularly the importance of having multiple potential outcomes.

Overall there are two types of encounters in Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t mean combat encounters and everything else, even though the Dungeon Master’s Guide does choose only to cover combat encounters in this section.

In reality, an encounter can include any or all of the three pillars of play: combat, social interaction, and exploration. The actual encounters are planned encounters, often referred to as encounters and random encounters.

When preparing for a game, you will need to know what encounters are likely to occur and the objective of each encounter. Planned encounters focus on character objectives and often advance the plot.

The Subsection

The subsection on “Character Objectives” covers seven potential objectives and characters’ tendency to create their own. Random Encounters, on the other hand, serve game objectives.

The section on “Random Encounters” includes six potential objectives: creating urgency, establishing atmosphere, and providing assistance. Pay particular attention to the subsections “Triggering Random Encounters” and “Checking for Random Encounters.

“The word random does not mean that you, as the Dungeon Master, have no control over these encounters or that they happen without reason.

Player and character choices and the environment all have a major impact on when you, the Dungeon Master, will choose to either trigger or check for random encounters.

The last two sub-sections on “Creating Random Encounter Tables” and “Random Encounter Challenge” will help you build or understand the random encounters available in your adventure.

How to include each of the pillars of play in encounters is a topic that will take much more time than I can give in this one video so that I will be making future videos in this series covering each of the pillars of play.

With your game content prepared, there are still a few pre-game logistics that you should consider as well. First, it’s good to establish some table rules that will cover player behavior during the session.

“Table Rules” in Chapter Eight has a list of potential topics ranging from the table talk to how to handle absent players’ characters. Second, it’s a good idea to decide how you want to handle some of the bookkeeping involved in combat.

A little later in Chapter Eight, the “Combat” section has subsections on tracking initiative, monster hp, and conditions. The methods listed focus on physical trackers, so if you are playing online using a virtual tabletop like Roll20 or using digital resources like D&D Beyond, they will likely have similar trackers built-in.

Having these tools prepared before your game can make running combat much simpler. Third, if your game will cover multiple levels, you’ll want to decide how you want to handle “Experience Points” as detailed at the end of Chapter Eight.

Options include traditional experience points, milestone experience points, and advancement without experience points. This section also has subsections on how to handle experience for absent players and non-combat encounters.

Conclusion

Finally, if your game is going to last multiple sessions, you’ll want to decide how you want to record what happens during each session. “Campaign Tracking” in Chapter Six has excellent advice on both what and how to track information for campaigns and adventures.

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