Table of Contents:

• The Role of The DM In The Dungeon Master’s Guide:
• The DMG Helps You Improvise Your Games
  • Part 1: Master Of Worlds
  • Part 2: Master of Adventures
  • Part 3: Master Of Rules: 
• Taking Your Players Into Account
• An Argument for RAW (Rules As Written): 
• Conclusion

The Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG) for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (5e) is a pillar resource for DMs looking to create their own world with players willing to tell their stories in it. The focus of the DMG is primarily on world-building. It consists of three main sections which are meant to guide the DM throughout their game: 

1. How to build the places your players will inhabit.
2. How to build the adventures and NPCs for players to do quests.
3. The adjudication of rules for specific player scenarios. 

Let me start by saying this whole article is a matter of opinion. Whether you choose to read going forward is up to you. My main aim is to get fellow DMs thinking about what it really means to run a game. While this focuses on the DMG for 5e, this should translate well enough for Game Masters adjudicating other TTRPGs. The DMG is a vital resource, so why shouldn’t DMs and players take it literally? We’ll answer that question and then dive into those three sections of the DMG I mentioned above to talk about how I think people should interpret them. 

The Role of The DM In The Dungeon Master’s Guide:

What makes a Dungeon Master stems from the introduction of the DMG (Pg4). In the intro, it explains the many roles of the DM:

• Campaign Architect
• Inventor
• Storyteller
• Writer
• Actor
• Referee

Essentially, the Dungeon Master is the one to take charge of their games. After all, they created the world the players participate in. It can be a heavy burden for certain people, especially when implementing the game’s rules. That said…

The DMG Helps You Improvise Your Games

Without rules, you don’t have a reliable game. Yet the DMG states it isn’t some law book for DMs to clutch to. –It turns out that breaking the rules of the Players Hand Book (PHB), modifying the creatures in The Monster Manual, and rebelling against ideas in the DMG for your own is encouraged. The DMs at Wizards of the Coast understand that various people will have different playstyles and worlds. No DM will play the same as the other, and that’s okay. 

Here, I’ll summarize some of the critical points in the DMG’s three sections that allow the DM to change rules as they see fit:

Part 1: Master Of Worlds

To quote the very first sentence: 

“Every DM is the creator of his or her own campaign world. Whether you invent a world, adapt a world from a favorite movie or novel, or use a published setting for the D&D game, you make that world your own over the course of a campaign.”

(DMG, Pg.4)

From the beginning, it tells us that you can adapt D&D to whatever you want to build your world upon. The DMG also introduces the idea that D&D is a multiverse where many planes and worlds coincidentally occur. It’s a fancy way of saying to DMs: “Do what you want!” 

While this is a freeing thought, the guide also makes a point to say that consistency is a massive part of world-building. 

“Consistency is a key to a believable fictional world. When the adventurers go back into town for supplies, they should encounter the same nonplayer characters (NPCs) they met before…Once you have achieved this degree of consistency, you can provide an occasional change…one that has nothing to do with the adventures directly, but one that they’ll notice –makes the players feel as though their characters are part of a living world that changes and grows along with them.”

(DMG, Pg.4)

Further, the DMG suggests that by using the PHB in conjunction with your world-building plans, you can merge them to serve your campaign’s needs. 

Part 2: Master of Adventures

Part 2: Master of Adventures merely suggests that you’ll need to prepare beyond the hours you spend at the table with your players in a session. 

That said, Part 2’s introduction states plainly how it will help you craft your own NPCs, including any motives and ambitions. This includes how to make up clever encounters in your story. It also says how you’ll create treasure, magic items, and special rewards so your players stay invested in your world. 

The above are excellent hallmarks of consistent planning and improvisation on the DM’s part. 

Part 3: Master Of Rules: 

It is crucial to remember that the DMG states how important it is to have a referee who guarantees that everyone at the table plays by the rules. That said, eventually, a player’s actions would stump the most studious DM wanting to run their games Rules As Written (RAW) Style. 

The DMG encourages DMs to faithfully determine what their player’s action requires or if it is even possible. Such scenarios include:

• Mentally determining the Difficulty Check (DC) for an action the player may want to take.
• Whether a unique action (Like throwing hot coals in an enemy’s face) imposes extra penalties or advantages for players. 
• Referencing the rules of the PHB to determine success or failure for player actions (Like how far a player can move to a target). 

While the DMG mentions the above scenarios, there are no rules for these scenarios. –Just the suggestion that you, as a DM, must make that call yourself.

Interestingly, the DMG makes a hypocritical statement implying that you should know the rules to appropriately make the calls you need to make in the game while also saying that you don’t need to know everything. However, It closes that loophole with this beautiful quote: 

“You don’t have to memorize this book or the Player’s Handbook, but you should have a clear idea of their contents so that, when a situation requires a ruling, you know where to find the proper reference.” 

DMG (Pg. 5)

As long as you know where the rules reside in the PHB and the DMG, you will be doing okay as the DM. I believe this statement gives certain DMs leeway to bend the rules, but do so at your own risk and make sure that you are communicating with your players should you choose to do so. Or, like the dragon inside this article, they will eat you alive. 

Taking Your Players Into Account

Believe it or not, the success of your world does not depend on how well you craft the environment, the people in it, the adventures, or the encounters. 

It depends on if the players enjoy the experience you’re giving them. 

“The success of a D&D game hinges on your ability to entertain the other players at the game table. Whereas their role is to create characters (the protagonists of the campaign), breathe life into them, and help steer the campaign through their characters’ actions, your role is to keep the players (and yourself) interested and immersed in the world you’ve created, and to let their characters do awesome things.” (DMG, Pg. 6) 

(DMG, Pg.6)

The beauty of D&D is that it is a collaborative storytelling game. Suppose you plan to implement a novel complete with fully fleshed NPCs into your D&D game, complete with detailed revelations just waiting for your players to discover. In that case, you may encounter some serious issues. 

1. Your NPCs are not the protagonists of the D&D world. Your players are. 
2. The nuance of story writing for novels and short stories vastly differs from the writing required for D&D. 
3. The arc of your story world will be trampled on and changed by the players in your D&D campaign based on the choices they are free to make. 

I’ve moderated communities invested in storytelling and novels, and the one thing that stands out to me when reading for aspiring writers? They dump lore, backgrounds, and settings into their story without respecting the reader. Paragraph after paragraph of…just get to the action already! Similarly, for D&D, your players want to play the game and get to the action. I’m not saying you shouldn’t design a detailed world. But you have to go about it with the idea that D&D is more a game than a story. Leaving loopholes open and questions unanswered for your players to latch onto is the best thing you can do to introduce your custom-made world to the game. 

Moving away from that tangent, I want to highlight some of the things the DMG recommends for DMs to consider when it comes to their players:

• Acting: Similar to the requirement of DMs, players can act out their character. Let them!

• Exploring: Understand how much your players enjoy exploring in the game. Providing them with something to uncover the mystery of your world is as easy as giving them monsters or scenes with peculiar details to start investigating. 

• Instigating: Instigators should be allowed to start trouble in your world. It’s up to you to give them the appropriate consequences for getting into encounters that are fun for everybody. Don’t be afraid to let the instigator’s actions change the world around them. 

• Fighting: Similarly, players who like to fight should have you focused on how combat proceeds, thanks to their actions, with vivid detail if at all possible.

• Optimizing: Players who like to optimize their characters should be rewarded with new abilities and items. It’s wise to give these players encounters that let them shine.

• Problem-Solving: Problem solvers would likely love encounters that reward planning and tactics and challenging them with NPCs that have complex motives. 

• Storytelling: Players who love to tell stories are at home when they know they can participate in the DM’s overarching plot. –Using their character background, ensuring encounters advance the story, and making their actions known in future events is recommended. 

Implementing a portion of these suggestions from the DMG will help you craft a world that collaborates and compromises with the player’s needs and the DM’s. Having a Session 0 will help you determine your player’s needs as the story progresses. You need to ask them what they want out of the game. 

An Argument for RAW (Rules As Written): 

My article describes many snippets that I’ve found that support the idea of flexibility when it comes down to the rules of D&D. After all, it is a free-form game where game decisions, consequences, and player reactions will always put the DM to task when it comes down to wayward rulings. It makes sense when it comes down to consistency and reliance when playing D&D RAW style. 

• You will always have the PHB, the DMG, and the other supporting books behind you when you make your rulings at the table. 
• Players will be at ease knowing they will be treated equally at the table. Favoritism is a hard accusation to point at a DM who plays their games RAW. 

Again, consistency is key for playing D&D regularly. Following the rules by the book is guaranteed to allow everybody to have fun at your sessions. 

However, when it comes to making calls on the fly, RAW-style gameplay falters when:

1. You can’t find the specific rule in an official manual.
2. There is no particular rule in the official manual. 
3. Players aren’t having fun. 

Suppose you are looking up the rules for throwing a rope, but there are none? (Too bad, I wrote an article right here!) What now? Suddenly, you are going online to ask specific questions for specific things, where some of the ideas or rules online are suspect or even wrong. Or you have to make it up because your game is paused for too long.

I say you shouldn’t overthink it. Sometimes, when a ruling needs to be made, it’s time to let go of RAW Style when it doesn’t work and exercise the most potent D&D rule. Just make sure not to abuse it: 

Whatever you say goes. –Or the Rule of Cool. 

If a really extraordinary circumstance pops up, and you are unsure if it’s allowed in the rules…why not let it happen? 

If there is an action that makes sense to play, but there’s no official rule for conducting it faithfully, why not make something up and move along? 

I am not the best DM in the world, but some of my best moments in the game were when I bent the rules to allow the player to do something unique. –And it ensured everyone had a blast, too. 

After all, you are the Dungeon Master.

I hope that this article helps anyone thinking about running their own game, or currently doing so think about the impacts of how they choose to implement rulings for their players.

When I first started playing D&D a few years ago, I was enthralled with the idea of seeing how my friends would react to situations I would come up with on the fly. I remember that after a game of D&D, my friends and roommates would sit around, just talking. Seemingly, we still wanted to play, but the DM wasn’t around anymore. So we played pretend instead. –I wasn’t even really DMing with the rules of D&D…we were just rolling a d20 and having a blast through a scenario involving breaking into a castle. 

Fun times. 

My point is that the soul of D&D is in the mutual storytelling itself. The make-believe encounters we put ourselves in so we can socialize, laugh, and talk through together. No rules are required for that. Just willing sacrifices. Err, players. 

Thanks for reading.