Diesel DM

The only mistake you can make with this book is not buying it soon enough. When I first started DMing my own ongoing campaign I came across this book and thought “I’ll wait until I know what I’m doing before I purchase it.” Instead, I should have bought this book while I was figuring out what I was doing. There are many points made in this book that I struggled with early on. Sly Flourish’s book, as its name suggests, doesn’t replace the DMG or try to abridge it, this book augments it, especially if you’re new to running the game.

The book is split into three sections covering the generation of your overall story, designing individual encounters and running the game. The first section is about creation and preparation. Good advice from keeping your story moving, avoiding common pitfalls and creating your own villains that are both believable and memorable. The adventure checklist included here is invaluable for running down during game prep the night before to make sure you’ve got your ducks in a row. This checklist, for which each bullet point is expounded in worthy detail, would have been a great thing to have when I first started writing my own adventures. All the salient adventure building points you need, which are spread across multiple chapters of the DMG are all in one list on a single page. Starting out with this list could have saved me a lot of time and effort in trying to determine what pieces I needed in place before each adventure began. More often than not I just wouldn’t have it ready at all. (I need an NPC…what’s his name? What race is he? Should he have an accent?)

The second section is all about encounters: how to build them, how to balance them and most importantly how to make them fun! From creating an exciting environment to battle to improving the monsters you fight, this section has you covered. This chapter even includes the current hot-topic in 4e: speeding up combat. Four tips are included for speeding up your combats, including ideas on tweaking your monster stats and adding an “out”. Another highlight of this section is the “Build Exciting Battle Maps” section. As a new DM you spend so much time carefully selecting monsters and treasure and dialogue that you’ll end up with your characters fighting on an open field or a long alleyway. Some fantastical terrain and interesting map design can do a lot to draw in your players.

The last section contains tips on actually running the game. There’s more to DMing than just adjudicating rules and keeping the initiative order rolling. The tips in this section all deal with keeping your players engaged, which is a DMs primary responsibility as a story-teller. This section includes tips that you need to have DM experience to know, and if you’re new to DMing like I was, you won’t know any of these. As a new DM you might find yourself with all new to D&D players. D&D isn’t as simple as reading some rules and directions from a board game to a group of people. It’s interaction, it’s thinking, it’s puzzle solving and more. If player’s attentions are wandering or they only pay attention during their own turn, you’re fighting a losing battle. This section is a great reference section for when you hit problems with your group. No one is getting into the RP part of RPG? Attentions wandering? Limited time for your group to play? It’s all covered.

The book can be purchased in both dead tree edition as well as PDF and various eBook formats here.

You can also follow Sly Flourish on Twitter: @slyflourish for frequent DM tips in 140 characters or less.

Sly Flourish has since written a follow-up book: Sly Flourish’s Running Epic Tier D&D Games. I haven’t purchased it yet as my group is only at level 3, but you can be sure I won’t make the same mistake twice; I’ll pick it up well before I start planning any details for the epic tier of my campaign.