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

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