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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5989686" data-attributes="member: 996">I think mostly the same qualities that made for good DMs in the classic D&D era (basically, the previous century, '74-99).  You are going to need to do /some/ 'encounter prep,' though. It looks like you're not going to need to dedicate the large amounts of time it took to create monsters and NPCs in 3.x, for instance, but that you're not just going to have formulaic combat encounters and skill challenges like in 4e.  So, somewhere between the two when it comes to encounter prep, but you have to do some.  You might not be able to get away with simply populating an area and letting the party sand-box their way through it (see 'balance police,' below).You might have to do a fairly large amount of up-front work to get a campaign going - it depends on just how many and varied these modules turn out to be, and to what degree 'house rules' (variants) come back into vogue.  Worst case, getting a campaign ready could be tantamount to designing your own game.  Best case, you make a few module choices, fiddle with a few 'dials' and get about what you want - you just have to know what you want.If the playtest is any indicator, you're going to have to be the earthy incarnation of the god of improv.  Fortunately, many of us long-time DMs /are/.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Less fun, you'll likely have to be the balance police.  That means staying on top of (and banning/nerfing) outre 'builds,' as any 'modern' (3e/4e) DM should be accustomed to doing.  It's a little more involved then just checking for too man/too-broken items or improbably high stats when a new character comes into your campaign.  As Mr. Mearls has already intimated, you'll have some guidance on how to run your game - how many encounters/rounds/XP of monsters you must throw down between long rests to retain balance.  If 5e sticks to it's plans to achieve balance among classes by making each 'best' at something, you'll also want to be sure to script in the proper situations so that everyone gets to do their 'best' thing a reasonable proportion of the time.  (Of course, all that assumes you care - you can just let the players sort out balance issues, themselves, by giving up on characters that aren't up to snuff and trying something else until they hit on something viable.)</blockquote>

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