How Important Is Rules Knowledge In Being A Good D&D DM?

I'm not a fantastic DM by any means. I still have a long way to go in many aspects of the DM'ing craft. One area that I am slowly improving in, session by session, is rules knowledge. In the last year that I have been DM'ing I have found it to be one of the most important factors in being a good D&D DM (Please note the emphasis on D&D. I'm sure that rules knowledge is not as big a factor in being a good DM in many RPG's. However, I feel that it is very important in D&D.)

For example, there have been a couple of climactic final battles in my campaign to date. Some of them, especially the earlier ones, were flops. The PC's weren't really challenged at all as I underestimated what good tactics (which includes using your rules knowledge to your advantage) could achieve. One of them wasn't as challenging as it should have been because the main baddie was a caster. I don't have very good knowledge of what spells are the best to use in a given situation. As a result, the fight was a lot easier than it should have been.

Poor rules knowledge can also slow the game down and make things boring for the players as the DM searches around, trying to figure out what the rules are for a given situation or action. Sure, you could just make an ad-hoc ruling on it but sometimes the rule may change the balance of the game. It may make some things more powerful than others. It may disadvantage some characters over others, resulting in some players not getting as much enjoyment out of the game.

So what do you think? Do you need good rules knowledge to be a good D&D DM or can you be just as good without really knowing the rules and just making ad-hoc decisions on the fly?

Olaf the Stout

You don't need to be good at the rules, but you either need to be decently good at the rules or equal to your players (or at least close to it) at the rules. If you are both bad with the rules and worse than your players, it can be tricky to create balanced tactics and encounters.

However, even if you are not good with the rules, you can balance out encounters by playtesting them yourself beforehand--however, as mentioned above, this only works if you are at least about as good as your players with the rules, since a playtest is worthless if the players wind up doing much better than when you are playing for their characters in playtest.

Then again, if you are bad with the rules and the players are good, you could convince one of them to GM for a while to help you get the hang of the rules.

I think in D&D 3.5 you need to be better atthe rules than many systems. SOem systems are very forgiving, but D&D is more and more complicated each month, and you need to knwo what is going on. I lurk on the Optimization boards over at WOTC boards just to know what new tricks are coming up next.

But I am not saying the DM has to be a total expert, they just need enough knowledge to ru n the game how it is inteneded at its foundation, and then wing it in the real game. Too many times judgement calls are needed in gmae. Espeically with skill DCS and other mroe real-world situations where the ruels don't bother to cover.

Rystil Arden said:

You don't need to be good at the rules, but you either need to be decently good at the rules or equal to your players (or at least close to it) at the rules.

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This is what I would say as well. Regardless of the game, you have to be at least as knowledgeable as the players.

ThirdWizard said:

This is what I would say as well. Regardless of the game, you have to be at least as knowledgeable as the players.

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I would say that you're fine if you are just 'good' and the players are masters, and you're fine if you're just a novice and the players are equally clueless.

Olaf the Stout said:

So what do you think? Do you need good rules knowledge to be a good D&D DM or can you be just as good without really knowing the rules and just making ad-hoc decisions on the fly?

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I think you need good rules knowledge to be a good DM. I don't think you have to be as knowledgable as every one of your players, but you'd better be in the top half of your group.

Rystil Arden said:

I would say that you're fine if you are just 'good' and the players are masters, and you're fine if you're just a novice and the players are equally clueless.

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It depends on how often those strange corner cases come up. Really, knowing 50% of the rules well will probably get you through 90% of normal play just fine with no real screw ups. If the game suddenly features a long boat ride, and you're constantly messing up sea-based rules, however, then the players will suddenly get frustrated. That goes for anything that takes the DM by surprise.

I just know that as a player, it can be very frustrating to be DMed by someone who obviously isn't prepared for events in the game that require a higher proficiency of rules knowledge than the basics of combat. If I didn't know the rules as well as I do, then it obviously wouldn't bother me.

ThirdWizard said:

It depends on how often those strange corner cases come up. Really, knowing 50% of the rules well will probably get you through 90% of normal play just fine with no real screw ups. If the game suddenly features a long boat ride, and you're constantly messing up sea-based rules, however, then the players will suddenly get frustrated. That goes for anything that takes the DM by surprise.

I just know that as a player, it can be very frustrating to be DMed by someone who obviously isn't prepared for events in the game that require a higher proficiency of rules knowledge than the basics of combat. If I didn't know the rules as well as I do, then it obviously wouldn't bother me.

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I dunno. I almost always GM, and there is no doubt I know the rules at least ten times as well as my players just by virtue of using them more often (and I learned them quickly enough that I admit I sometimes implement complex rules for my players in my head, denying them the chance to ever learn the rules better, but speeding up the game). But when I convinced one of my players to GM, he's gotten Shackled City to work out fine. Admittedly, he often has to ask me for rules calls to speed up games when someone (yeah, okay, that someone is often me too ) does something weird. But he says it makes it even more entertaining when we come out of left field with odd tactics, and it hasn't seemed to hurt the game--everyone has a lot of fun.

ThirdWizard said:

It depends on how often those strange corner cases come up. Really, knowing 50% of the rules well will probably get you through 90% of normal play just fine with no real screw ups. If the game suddenly features a long boat ride, and you're constantly messing up sea-based rules, however, then the players will suddenly get frustrated. That goes for anything that takes the DM by surprise.

I just know that as a player, it can be very frustrating to be DMed by someone who obviously isn't prepared for events in the game that require a higher proficiency of rules knowledge than the basics of combat. If I didn't know the rules as well as I do, then it obviously wouldn't bother me.

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Knowing 50% of the rules may get you through 90% of normal play. However, I have found that with rules mastery normally comes the ability to run monsters better. A poorly run dragon can go down relatively easily. Played by a clever DM who makes use of all the dragon's strengths and weaknesses and it is a totally different proposition. I think that this is one example of rules knowledge making a big difference to the play experience of the game.

Olaf the Stout

I dunno. I figure in this incarnation of the game, that a bit of advance prep for encounters is necessary to be a "good" DM.

You don't need to be able to quote chapter and verse, but if you are DMing an encounter with a monster that can cast spell X as a 7th level sorcerer, and you have to look up exactly what that means during the encounter, then maybe you're not prepping as well as you should. I've been guilty of this many times...I can't tell you the number of times my group took down a monster with a significantly higher CR without even breaking a sweat!

Face it, in this game if you want to get the most bang for your CR, you need to know how to best utilize your critters. That can come more from experience than rules knowledge.

I think one good side effect of the current Delve format is that it gives you tactical advice for PC opponents. This knowledge will carry over for stuff people put together on their own. (mostly for guys like me that are tactically challenged...my 8 year old niece can kick my butt from one end of a chessboard to the other.)

Anyway, the notion of a "good" DM is kinda subjective, But having good working rules knowledge will definitely give you a smoother game.