Rodney Thompson Looks Behind The Screen

WotC's Rodney Thompson is the author of the first in a new series of articles on the official D&D website, "a regular column by Dungeon Masters for Dungeon Masters that presents helpful tips for use in your D&D campaign." The first article looks at the creation of an adventure cheat/prep sheet, incuding the adventure, interludes, character arcs, encounters, and more.

You can read it here. Additionally, check out the DM Support Group video below!

[video=youtube;teHtEpCk64Y]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teHtEpCk64Y#t=123[/video]
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[Nellisir]

Some of you folks need to remember that not everyone is an experienced and/or recently practiced DM. There are new DMs out there, and DMs like me who have been playing for decades but not a lot lately and looking for ways to simplify and speed up prep.

This. I've been DMing for, ah...(hang on here, that can't be right...) a lot of years, but stopped during 4e. Just getting back into it and it's been...sucky. Why? I haven't been locking the PCs, the world, and the campaign arc together very well. Having simple stuff like this laid out is useful, and I'm going to steal the heck out of it.

 

[Connorsrpg]

I actually liked this article. Even as an experienced DM, I liked the clear divisions of interludes. Very good advice. I am not sure what the snide is, but articles like this are fine by me. I love hearing ideas about running the game from others - no matter how simple an idea is.

Even in new books, I am finding the little DM 'Asides' one of the most interesting parts.

 

[bmcdaniel]

That would have been way more interesting to me (and helpful to new DMs), actually go through describing the creation of a real game's cheat sheet and why you added this note or that reminder.

I'm curious how other DMs prep. Who would be willing to show their prep/cheat sheets?

 

[wiseguy]

Video

this video is nice one

 

[Chimpy]

I found this article useful and will be using some of these ideas in my next session. Having a brief list of incidental events that could occur to help portray the setting and link to the PCs hadn't occurred to me before.

 

[DaveDash]

I approve of using Krakens instead of Kobolds.

 

[delericho]

I found the section on "Interludes" useful - I hadn't considered that before.

The rest of the article was pretty Meh, because I had been doing that before. But that's fair enough - I don't expect every article to be just for me.

But it was missing one key thing: scans of the cheat sheet RT prepared for his most recent session. This would be useful especially if it was a hand-written scrawl not fit for publication - thus showing that the DM doesn't need to aspire to creating professional-quality sourcebooks for every session but should instead use whatever works for him. (A mistake I made for several years. Finally correcting that mistake was liberating, to say the least!)

 

[Morrus]

I whipped up a quick blank DM Prep Sheet.

 

[Chimpy]

I whipped up a quick blank DM Prep Sheet.

I was thinking of doing a similar thing for each session - would be a good prep habit to get into.

 

[Queer Venger]

This was fun, really like this series, Im very happy to see that more DM specific tools are being added to the D&D website. I would love if the new article by Rodney Thompson could be downloaded as a text document, it would be great to collect these.