What’s Fun for the Dungeon Master? - a podcast by Thorin McGee

A lot of what we see around the Dungeons & Dragons culture is so focused on how dungeon masters can be good DMs — and how you can ruin a game if you’re not — that we lose sight of the fact that DMs are players, too. What’s fun for you? What interferes with that fun? How do you try to keep things fun? And what happens when it stops being fun for you?

Hear what Thorin, Tony and Dave think is fun — and not fun — for them as DMs, along with a bunch of anecdotes about how games turned out in unexpected ways and how the guys handled it.

2:00 Camaraderie, player investment and wanting the day to go well

10:00 Published modules: Love ‘em, hate ‘em, how do you use them?

17:00 It’s your world, don’t be afraid to adjust published material

20:00 Why homebrew and improv? “The characters are yours; the world is mine.”

27:00 How we build settings that account for unpredictable players (and fit it into busy adult schedules)

37:00 Using box sets and campaign settings as the base of your homebrew (also reminiscing about Greyhawk)

43:00 How character death is like firing somebody

47:00 What makes the game not fun to DM

59:00 Whose story are we telling: the DM’s or the PCs’?

62:00 How players make it worthwhile for the DM, and what to do when they don’t. (i.e. “I don’t think you can have fun as the DM if you’re constantly getting blamed for all the players’ problems.”)

72:00 How much time we spend prepping for a session and how we spend it

85:00 Final thoughts

Further episodes of 3 Wise DMs

Further podcasts by Thorin McGee

Website of Thorin McGee