D&D General Most helpful/useful product to help run sessions for a DM ?

[GMMichael]

I was just wondering, but: what would be (to you) the quote/unquote 'best' product you came across from a DM perspective ?

Haven't tried it yet, but Advent's Amazing Advice (Patreon) looks to cover all the bases.

For me, the best product has been a simplified game that doesn't need details as much as creativity. When I don't have to worry about rules, I can focus on deciphering my chicken-scratch notes.

 

[Milli Rabbit]

I was just wondering, but: what would be (to you) the quote/unquote 'best' product you came across from a DM perspective ? In the sense of making it easier or more helpful to you as a DM to run sessions.

For the specific product, perhaps it was the level of detail so you don't have to come up with as much for yourself, or perhaps it was light on details so you could fill things in on your own ? Was it the way the material was presented ? Was it an adventure or perhaps a source-book ? Was it the details and amount of maps or perhaps the vagueness of them so you could fill them in for yourself ? Was it a 'generic' DM guide like the D&D DMG or something similar ? Something else entirely ?

Ive read a lot of DMGs for different games and also DM facing books. The 5.5e DMG is a pretty solid foundation on its own. Every time I open it I realize it had rules for things I forgot were in there and advice I didn't realize I needed. A close second is Mike Shea's The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master.

 

[plecostomus]

This is maybe a different angle from the rest of these responses, but I run an online game. Recently I had to scale a solo adventure (The Test of High Sorcery) from its default 4th level to 6th level for a player that joined my game late.

The tools that made this possible for me are:

• Kobold Fight Club set to 2024 encounter rules - This website let me view the intended difficulty of the encounters in the 4th level version of the adventure and predict what CR the monsters needed to be to achieve the same difficulty against a 6th level character.
• Boss Loot Monster Tools (video link) - An addon for FoundryVTT that scales monster CR for you. I was able to use the original monsters from the adventure and automatically raise their CR to match the rating predicted by KoboldPlus. This addon's scaling comes from tables by Alphastream and Sly Flourish, but you are allowed to edit the tables themselves as well as what is scaled on a particular monster (for example you could scale attack damage but not HP).
• The 2024 DMG has advice for scaling hazard/trap damage and saves in Chapter 3.
• I also consulted the old standby, ancient reddit posts, on damage and skill check scaling:
  • Average damage severity by level
  • Skill check DC scaling by level - I'm sad at the many comments telling the OP not to bother with this because it was so helpful to me!

People can and do make these adjustments manually, but these tools allowed me to put together a 6th-level version of the adventure in a couple days so I could run it between sessions and catch my new player up before our regular game.

 

[pnewman]

A pen. I could never remember it all if I did not write it down.

 

[Zardnaar]

Ah, sorry - I was thinking obviously more about at-table resources moreso than prep.

I like the original FR grey box set, but a lot of people seem to like the 3E book better. Both are excellent templates for setting up a vibrant campaign world, and for me the 1st ed is a more enjoyable read.

For 5E, I really like the Gamemastery series of books (Game Master's Book of...); they contain a lot of tables to build things on the fly and some of the later books in the series have excellent drop-in locations, NPCs and villains that are well-fleshed out.

I'm also a sucker for monster books, and the Monster Manual Expanded series is my go-to book (or at least my wife's go-to ). Lots of pre-5E monsters and advanced versions of existing monsters and very professionally put together.

A lot of my adventure design roots came from the old 1E & B/X adventures and disassembling those to put together my own stuff. However, I greatly enjoyed the Reincarnated series, especially "Into the Borderlands", "Isle of Dread" and "The Lost City" as not only did they reproduce the originals and convert these to 5E, but they got the authors to go into the design aspects of these adventures so you got insights into why they did what they did and point out some of the more interesting aspects of these adventures. Out of the three mentioned above I find I like "The Lost City" the most, because it isn't just a run-of-the-mill dungeon crawl, it's an investigation into the collapse of a whole society and interaction (and possibly rebuilding) while dealing with a powerful (but not world-ending) enemy force/organization.

Recency bias perhaps.

3.0 FRCS is great. Never seen the 1E box in the wild.

 

[Meech17]

Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. It's easily the best "unofficial" DM's guide out there. Don't let the name fool you. It's not about being lazy, it's about prepping smarter. Modular prep that you can drag and drop that centers the PCs and makes things infinitely easier on the referee.

I want to second this. M&M, Matt, and Mike are the two people I most credit to helping me get out of my own head, and actually behind the screen. Matt Colville's first 10 or so episodes of 'Running the Game' series got me to quit futzing around thinking I wasn't prepared enough to run and to actually just run.. And then Mike's Lazy DM's guide, and especially his videos about how he preps for a session got me to a point where session prep is manageable for my over-active brain that wants to do too much.

Even if you don't read the book, I highly encourage you to watch one of Mike's prep videos and try his method.

 

[abazaba]

Thanks for all the replies people. It's appreciated.

 

[SlyFlourish]

Thanks, Mike. I love your stuff and I'm floored every time I'm reminded you've released this stuff under the CC-BY license. You're good people. You make the hobby better. Thank you.

Thank you! The books are still worth owning... =D

 

[overgeeked]

I want to second this. M&M, Matt, and Mike are the two people I most credit to helping me get out of my own head, and actually behind the screen. Matt Colville's first 10 or so episodes of 'Running the Game' series got me to quit futzing around thinking I wasn't prepared enough to run and to actually just run.. And then Mike's Lazy DM's guide, and especially his videos about how he preps for a session got me to a point where session prep is manageable for my over-active brain that wants to do too much.

Even if you don't read the book, I highly encourage you to watch one of Mike's prep videos and try his method.

100%. Mike & Matt's videos are an invaluable resource. I was just sticking with physical stuff for some reason.

Matt's videos on politics in RPGs are also another absolute highlight. If anyone's even a little interested in running political games, watch those videos. Great stuff.

 

[billd91]

Small dry-erase board behind the screen

Yep, these things are SUPER helpful.