The Tao of D&D

We've come a long way through the complexities and challenges of dungeon mastering, moving from the foundational aspects of handling pla...

These worldbuilding elements aid in the creation of a structured approach, but the manner in which competent dungeon masters still often res...

Of all the elements that contribute to a campaign's worthiness, the setting's history is perhaps the most elusive and least straight...

As with other aspects of the developed setting, trade and available resources play a significant role in defining the campaign's charact...

With the standard adventure format, authority figures are often reduced to roles that either enable or obstruct the party's intentions. ...

Culture is a wide scale concept that describes the customs, artworks, social institutions and evidence of a society's achievements — as ...

 An open, player-driven world requires a geography that goes beyond a simple map of the setting. There has long been debate about whether to...

Our break with D&D's standard format arises as we become jaded with isolated adventures, which progressively provide less satisfacti...

Running a session as an advanced beginner, we steadily amass a collection of procedures in which we begin to rely upon practiced responses; ...

Steadily, as we've described, as a dungeon master we acquire familiarity with the metrics of D&D and shifts towards automatic proces...

Posted this on my patreon, but what the heck.  It's an add-on. I've been writing about the difference between a novice DM and an adv...

 It falls upon us at this point to quantify the improvement of the novice to the second stage in Dreyfus's stage analysis, that of the ...

This example of the novice highlights an inaccuracy in the designation, "dungeon master." As Danielle Osterman notes in the book, ...

Acting as a dungeon master is not something that we learn to do in a structured environment. As we've said, there are no instructors, no...

 Before every session, there's typically a natural, unstructured conversation where players and dungeon masters chat about the game. The...

 Nearly all persons who have read to this point have spent many hours either playing or running... and no doubt, their engagement with the g...

The process of teaching, whether as formal as a classroom or as personable as a parent teaching a child, begins with a desire to instill con...

In building emotional depth into the game's campaign, we are fascinated by the manner in which a single action we take reverberates thro...

A common weakness in many dungeon masters is to focus on the immediate needs of their campaign, to find a module that can be quickly adapted...

We come now to the most difficult part of this series, where we have to set aside what "resources" are and how to use them, and ta...