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How to Be a Better DM: Dungeon Master Tips for the DM Newbie, the Hobbyist and the Forever DM

Podcast How to Be a Better DM: Dungeon Master Tips for the DM Newbie, the Hobbyist and the Forever DM
Justin Lewis
Learn how to be a better DM (Dungeon Master) so you can tell better stories for yourself and your friends. Learn things like how to start a campaign, how to cre...

Available Episodes

5 of 194
  • 2024 in Review and What Lies In 2025
    In any publicly traded company, shareholders who own a portion of the company can expect a year-end review and a prospectus of what the new year will bring. This is to give some accountability of those running the company to those who’ve invested their time and money into it.Well, seeing as how you’ve decided to invest at least your time into this podcast, I think it only fair that we give you some sort of report so that we can be somewhat accountable to you for what this show is doing and what it will do in the future.Welcome back to How to Be a Better DM.I’m Justin Lewis and for over 3 years now, you and I have been figuring out better ways to help you improve your DMing craft without having to devote extra time, money or stress. You might be new to the show, in which case, thanks for giving us a chance and letting us invade your earspace, or you might have been with us from the beginning, in which place, please make yourself known to us because we actually have no idea who has been listening to us since the beginning. Whoever you are, we’re happy your here.Let me let you in on how I view things.I view you listening to us as an investment. Of course, we are doing everything we can to make sure you get tremendous value everytime you pop us in your earbuds and go for a run, or do the dishes, but frankly, we know what we are. We know we aren’t the most professionally produced show. You can probably tell simply by hearing my baby boy in the background. We also know that we don’t do this full-time and honestly, are still growing as dungeon masters ourselves.But…Many of you choose to listen to us anyway. In fact, many of you are grateful to us and have binged our show! Somehow, despite our weaknesses, you’ve still managed to find some good and enjoy it. To me, that shows that you are putting an investment into us. You’re devoting some of your precious time to listen to us and to us that investment of yours requires us to do the very best we can to make the show better.So for this episode, don’t consider yourself a dungeon master only, but also consider yourself an investor in our show and consider me the CEO giving you a report of how things went this year. Now I know this analogy only goes so far, but I hope you get the idea.Let me first start off by giving a brief summary of what we did this year:Monsters.Rent: When we first started 2024, we had just closed up shop on our previous business model of Monsters.Rent. Obviously, for us to be able to keep doing this podcast, we needed to figure out some way to use it to get resources so we could make it better. Previously, we tried creating a D&D mini subscription rental service. Unfortunately, we just couldn’t figure out how to make the logistics of it work. We had a nice run, but over time we just realized we couldn’t make it work. Session 0 Studios: So instead, we pivoted to Session 0 Studios. We brought on Cayden and Jake and created Session 0 Studios and started our new show The Pact and Boon. For those of you that don’t know, The Pact and Boon is our sister show which is an actual play show following the stories of 3 unlikely adventurers who start their journey in the pits of Hell. Full transparency, over this last year, we had quite a few road bumps with that particular show and have honestly had a pretty hard time aligning ourselves on how to keep it going. If you follow that show, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve been on hiatus for a second. First off, we’re very sorry about that. Because The Pact and Boon is so new, we got excited and bit off more than we could chew. So coming in the new year, we’re going to restart up the show and settle on a more consistent posting schedule even if we don’t post as much. We’ll also have a new element added in where each of us will switch off being the Dungeon Master! Starting in January of 2025 we’ll have Tanner running the show
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  • A Simple Session 0 Checklist
    Welcome back to today's show.Here's a simple session 0 checklist to help you set your games up for successGet the First Session ScheduledSet Expectations2a. Your Expectations2b. The party’s Expectations and WantsTable RulesThe Premise of the StoryPlaytestingParty ConnectionsToolsMentioned in this episode:Brought to you by Session 0 StudiosVisit session0studios.com for more information.Give Us a Rating and ReviewYou obviously have really good taste, you’re listening to How to Be a Better DM after all. We thank you for your support. If you’ve ever gotten anything useful from our show, take a minute to give us a rating and a review. It goes a very long way to making it so How to Be a Better DM can help many more dungeon masters just like you. If you love our content, help others become better dungeon masters too.Hire Us as Your Dungeon MasterDid you know that you can have one of our hosts here at How to Be a Better DM be your dungeon master? That’s right. All of our podcast hosts are professional dungeon masters that you can hire for your private or corporate dungeons and dragons game. We can do one-shots or long-term campaigns. If you want to schedule your first session with us, go to https://session0studios.com/dungeon-master-for-hire/ and get started. Dungeon Master for HireStart Leveling Up As a DMWouldn’t it be nice to gamify your dungeon master abilities? In D&D, characters can reach level 20, so why can’t dungeon masters? We’re happy to tell you that now, you can. We created the Dungeon Master Level-Up Guide. It’s a simple tool to gamify your progression to higher and higher levels of dungeon mastering. It includes Dungeon Master Levels 1 to 20 with associated XP requirements as well as a long list of Dungeon Master activities that will give you XP. Each activity has a Challenge Rating and an XP amount. In order to level up, all you need to do is find out how much XP you have, find out how much you need and pick activities to try. You can get the Dungeon Master Level-Up guide for free by going to session0studios.com/newsletter/, sign up for our newsletter and we’ll email you the Level-Up Guide. Finally, leveling up as a DM can be as fun as leveling up a character. Level Up Guide
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  • Challenging Yourself With Challenge Rating in D&D
    It's hard knowing what to throw at your players during an encounter. Luckily, D&D has a nifty challenge rating system set up to help you out. Easy!.... right? Actually, no. So many DMs don't know how to approach Challenge Ratings for their encounters because of the dense tables and calculations. However, it isn't something worth stressing about at all, as you'll learn in today's episode.Mentioned in this episode:Start Leveling Up As a DMWouldn’t it be nice to gamify your dungeon master abilities? In D&D, characters can reach level 20, so why can’t dungeon masters? We’re happy to tell you that now, you can. We created the Dungeon Master Level-Up Guide. It’s a simple tool to gamify your progression to higher and higher levels of dungeon mastering. It includes Dungeon Master Levels 1 to 20 with associated XP requirements as well as a long list of Dungeon Master activities that will give you XP. Each activity has a Challenge Rating and an XP amount. In order to level up, all you need to do is find out how much XP you have, find out how much you need and pick activities to try. You can get the Dungeon Master Level-Up guide for free by going to session0studios.com/newsletter/, sign up for our newsletter and we’ll email you the Level-Up Guide. Finally, leveling up as a DM can be as fun as leveling up a character. Level Up GuideGive Us a Rating and ReviewYou obviously have really good taste, you’re listening to How to Be a Better DM after all. We thank you for your support. If you’ve ever gotten anything useful from our show, take a minute to give us a rating and a review. It goes a very long way to making it so How to Be a Better DM can help many more dungeon masters just like you. If you love our content, help others become better dungeon masters too.Always Have Your Sessions Prepared!You work 8 hours a day. You spend time with your family when you come home. You do work around the house and it seems you never have as much time as you would like to prepare your D&D sessions. Does this sound like you? Wouldn’t it be amazing to have endless material prepared for your D&D sessions anyways? That’s where Roll and Play Press comes in. Roll and Play Press provides D&D 5e Compatible materials for any type of session. Running a one-shot? Check out their One Shot Wonders book with over 100 one-shot ideas. Getting started with your new sci-fi campaign? Get their Game Master’s Sci-Fi Toolkit to have your games much more prepared. Why reinvent the wheel? Check out Roll and Play Press at rollandplaypress.com and get 10% off when you buy something by using the code BETTERDM10. Roll and Play PressBrought to you by Session 0 StudiosVisit session0studios.com for more information.
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  • Important Lessons Learned in 2024 about being a Dungeon master
    All things must end. But endings always bring new beginnings. As the year 2024 comes to a close, many of us become thoughtful and introspective. In my case, the introspection has allowed to think on the many changes I’ve personally made throughout this year and the dungeon master I’m morphing into. So today, I’d like to share some of the most important lessons I’ve learned over this last year and hopefully some of these lessons can help you too.Welcome back to How to Be a Better DM. If you’re listening to this show, you’ve tried not being the dungeon master. You’ve stopped DMing and have just tried to be a player for a while, but for whatever reason, you just can’t not be the DM. Other people stop showing up, you feel the urge to write and run the story or it’s just in your blood. And because of that, we made this show to help you with your affliction! I’m your host Justin Lewis and I’m very happy to be chatting with you today of all days because tomorrow on December 6th, I will be guesting on 2 panels at Dragonsteel Nexus in Salt Lake City. Dragonsteel Nexus is the convention put on by Brandon Sanderson’s company Dragonsteel and I’m lucky enough to be able to participate. If you’re in the area, you should grab a ticket and come and hang out with me in real life. I’ll be joining a panel on TTRPGs for Authors and Writers and another on GMing 101. It should be a fun experience and frankly, I am a little nervous so any positive vibes are appreciated.This year was the first year where any of us here at Session 0 Studios and How to Be a DM were able to guest on panels. The first happened earlier this year at Dead Wars in Provo Utah and frankly, we’ve all evolved a lot since then.But before I get to the lessons learned, I must tell you guys something; I’m going to be a little vulnerable here. I’m a sham.I’m not saying this for sympathy or anything, I’m just trying to be real and vulnerable. On most days, I feel like a big fat phony. It’s mostly because I honestly consider myself to be a pretty mediocre Dungeon Master. Looking back over my DMing career, I see a huge gap between where I am and where I want to be. It’s humbling really. I’ve gotten so much better over this last year, but that improvement has really only made me more aware of how much farther there still is to go.When I first started How to Be a Better DM, I started it for a few reasons. First of all, I love podcasts and I love podcasting. Back in 2016 and 2017, I’m pretty sure I told people that podcasts were among the things I did for fun. I love the medium and I love being able to say something. I think we all have something to say, and maybe podcasting is my way of saying something.Secondly, and this is something most of you are probably not aware of, I had a previous podcast and that turned out to be less than successful, as least in my eyes. I want to do this full-time and the previous podcast wasn’t really going anywhere. It was a personal development podcast about doing hard things to make your life better. I called it The Hard Thing Podcast. Yeah… I know… Not the greatest name. Towards the end, I actually ended up rebranding it to Becoming the Hero which is actually still live to this day. I stopped doing that podcast because I’d tried putting together a summit of previous guests which included a couple navy seals, army rangers and a CIA spy. It was an online summit and even with a small advertising budget, I didn’t get any signups even when I dropped the price to free. I felt like I didn’t have any authority in that space and I eventually stopped putting out episodes because I felt the target market was too broad and that I couldn’t compete. When I stopped putting out episodes and nobody reached out asking where I’d gone, I knew it was the right decision.In contrast, I saw Dungeons and Dragons as a great market to get into. I love the game and I...
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  • Simplify and Supercharge your World Building with Worldsmith.io
    Welcome back to How to Be a Better DMToday Cayden and Justin sit down with the creators of worldsmith.io to talk about worldbuilding and how to do it more effectively with less time and hassle.Mentioned in this episode:Brought to you by Session 0 StudiosVisit session0studios.com for more information.Follow us on InstagramThanks again for listening to our show. If you like our content and would like to engage with more of our content, head over to our Instagram account, @howtobeabetterdm, and give us a follow. Make sure to watch some of our helpful Dungeon Master Rules videos to give yourself some structure and procedure as a Dungeon Master. Don’t forget to reach out with a DM and we can talk shop. https://www.instagram.com/howtobeabetterdmpodcast/Give Us a Rating and ReviewYou obviously have really good taste, you’re listening to How to Be a Better DM after all. We thank you for your support. If you’ve ever gotten anything useful from our show, take a minute to give us a rating and a review. It goes a very long way to making it so How to Be a Better DM can help many more dungeon masters just like you. If you love our content, help others become better dungeon masters too.Always Have Your Sessions Prepared!You work 8 hours a day. You spend time with your family when you come home. You do work around the house and it seems you never have as much time as you would like to prepare your D&D sessions. Does this sound like you? Wouldn’t it be amazing to have endless material prepared for your D&D sessions anyways? That’s where Roll and Play Press comes in. Roll and Play Press provides D&D 5e Compatible materials for any type of session. Running a one-shot? Check out their One Shot Wonders book with over 100 one-shot ideas. Getting started with your new sci-fi campaign? Get their Game Master’s Sci-Fi Toolkit to have your games much more prepared. Why reinvent the wheel? Check out Roll and Play Press at rollandplaypress.com and get 10% off when you buy something by using the code BETTERDM10. Roll and Play Press
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About How to Be a Better DM: Dungeon Master Tips for the DM Newbie, the Hobbyist and the Forever DM

Learn how to be a better DM (Dungeon Master) so you can tell better stories for yourself and your friends. Learn things like how to start a campaign, how to create realistic NPCs, how to move the plot along, and how and why to use session 0's for your party. Join hosts Justin Lewis, Cayden Ottley and Tanner Weyland as they distill all the DM tips, tools and resources for the beginner DM, for the DM with a few years of experience and for the Forever DM who's been playing for 20 years. If you're sick of searching for things like, "How to create a homebrew DND campaign?", click the play button and listen to become the best dungeon master you ever could be!
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