Recently, I’ve seen a lot of discussion about how D&D is run; how it should be run; and how different styles of gaming work. I ran 2nd edition AD&D games for about two decades on and off, starting when I was a kid running games for other kids. The last one was in 2015, and I miss it sometimes. It is with some pride that I can say that I was a very successful dungeon master (commonly abbreviated DM) for most of that time.
The games I ran were games that most players enjoyed and stuck with. Experienced players and DMs are usually either impressed or skeptical when I tell them I never had an AD&D campaign die out from lack of interest. My campaigns ended with semester breaks and the turnover of the academic year. The stories we built together were epic - the kind that former players retell with cheerful enthusiasm, thinking it would make a good fantasy novel someday.
You can’t please everyone, and I didn’t try. Some people didn’t like my style of game, including some close friends - that’s okay. I’m bringing this up, however, to add to the discussion of different game styles and how to run a successful game.1 Although I enjoy writing stories, I did not plot out the campaign’s story ahead of time. Although I enjoy tactical challenges, I rarely did any planning of tactical encounters. My preparation was limited to populating a background world and reading about related history and geography.2
My primary focus as a DM was simulating a believable and interesting world for the players. More than anything else, I could be described as a simulationist DM … and this created epic stories that players would re-tell to each other years later. Focusing my attention on building the world around the players was a good way for me to tell a collaborative story with my players.
Starting the game
Every D&D campaign starts with a DM finding players, or players finding a DM. In 2009, I joined the UC-Irvine RPG club, giving me a window into a much larger number of gaming groups, ones that I wasn’t participating in. Most 3rd, 4th, and 5th edition campaigns started with 1-3 sessions full of planning, discussion, and character creation, oriented around a fixed party size - usually in the range of 4-6 PCs.
Encounters and adventures were frequently finely calibrated to be “balanced” to that party size. The absence of one or two players was enough to cancel the game. Most of these games dissolved within a month - and most of the games with 2-3 sessions of planning never got past a single session of active play.3
My last set of AD&D campaigns featured a rotating cast with somewhere between 6–10 players.4 I expected player absences … and accepted new players more or less continually.5 The AD&D games I ran started with a handout e-mailed to my players; about half of them didn’t read it, but it was still helpful.
The goal of the first session was to have every player roll up two characters in no more than an hour, and then launch right into action.6 I didn’t always succeed at pushing character creation through that quickly, but my first session usually at least set the scene for the players.
Death is epic
Character death makes for epic stories. The possibility of character death adds dramatic tension and gives players the power to make real and impactful choices. Not every popular epic fantasy story has the same level of lethality to its focal characters as Game of Thrones, but even child-friendly fantasy stories like The Hobbit or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or Harry Potter involve the death of important characters. Not just villains, but important characters. Adventure rides the edge of mortal danger, and even if you know that there will be six more Tarzan books, the tension of risk bleeds through in good writing.
That’s not to say my games were realistically lethal, as some old-school DMs recommend. Despite the general lethality of the AD&D system and my expressed willingness to have character death in my games, players rarely lost characters in my campaigns. When they did, it was usually the result of a player’s deliberate decision to have that character die, retire from adventuring, or betray the party and become an NPC.7 If players wanted to bring back a deceased character, there are also ways to do that.8
However, even the optional death’s door rules that I used to limit lethality didn’t remove consequences from the game. Coming back was expensive: A character taken out of action from a near-fatal blow would come back up with one hit point, having lost all prepared spells and being in no condition to fight physically.9 Making near-death experiences consequential helped guide players into more believable decision-making.
Applying meaningful consequences to character choices isn’t the same thing as punishing players for making bad choices, and I tried very hard to make this distinction clear. Players aren’t their characters. If a player’s main character was out of the action in one of my AD&D games, it was an opportunity for them to play a different character for a little while. This was true whether their main character was recuperating, researching a spell, or supervising the construction of a stronghold.
Backup characters shape the game
To me, role-playing games are to a large degree an exercise in collaborative story-telling, and I consider it high praise if the players think the game they just played would make an amazing novel, movie, or television show. Having a backup character ready to go helped create better stories in four ways.
First, it handles character death. Even if PC death was quite rare in my games (and not necessarily permanent), the fact that character death was possible encouraged players to play their characters in ways that made for better and more believable stories. Character death is a common feature of the genre of epic adventure stories that D&D is best designed to support, and the possibility of death usually still looms even when none of the heroes die.
Second, it’s a crucial logistical asset. Watch or read any good story - even ones based on RPG campaigns, such as Critical Role’s Legend of Vox Machina, don’t try to put the same collection of characters in every scene. Having the same group of 4-6 characters in literally every scene is monotonous and jarringly unrealistic. When it makes sense to split the party, split the party.
If a player’s main character is busy elsewhere for an extended time or incapacitated, it’s time for that player to either take out and introduce their backup character or take over an existing NPC. If a few characters have an extended interaction to do, send two or three players off to another corner of the room to have them handle it “off-scene” while you handle the rest of the party. Yes, even extended one-on-one NPC reactions.10
Third, not all players will want to keep playing the same character indefinitely. This is especially true for new players who aren’t sure what they like yet and experienced story-oriented players who give their characters a backstory and clear motives. The character might not be as effective as the player wants, their personality or background might have been chosen poorly, or the character may have succeeded in their goals. If you encourage players to create believable characters and think carefully about their motives, they will choose to retire some characters from adventuring. And that’s okay! Characters can get their happily ever afters before the campaign wraps.
Fourth, the fact that failure is possible makes victory all the sweeter. Backup characters enable styles of play where a main character can fail in meaningful ways (death, being turned into a newt, et cetera). The possibility of failure lends emotional weight and meaning to a story. Acts of heroism become more meaningful and acts of cowardice become more human. Failure is an element of most fantasy adventures, and this is true whether you’re drawing from Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or even Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Telling stories together: “Yes, and …”
A good DM directs and creates. They may tell stories, but they don’t need to be a good storyteller to be a good DM. Good players improvise and imagine. They don’t need to be good actors; they just need to play a role and think about how they should act in that role. Some players will simply be themselves in a different set of clothes; others can adopt different mindsets more readily.
I was a good dungeon master long before I could write a decent novel-length fantasy story.11 The reason a good dungeon master doesn’t need to be able to write and narrate a fantasy novel to create a good story through D&D is because a good dungeon master builds the world around their players. If the players focus on what their characters want to do, and the DM focuses on filling the world around them and building consequences for their choices, a story will happen.
A brief bibliography of related reading:
When running a Star Wars game, reading about Star Wars, also, although this article mostly focuses on my AD&D games. I didn’t run games only with AD&D 2nd edition; I simply ran most of them that way.
I wasn’t in a position to keep accurate statistics, but showing up to the RPG club weekly was pretty informative in this regard.
I don’t actually recommend trying 10 players right out of the gate, there is some level of crowd management required with larger games. However, the more players you start with, the easier it is to have a functional quorum on a regular weekly basis.
After the game started, this usually consisted of players wanting to bring in a friend. I only said “no” if I didn’t expect to physically have space around the table.
With expert guidance from an experienced DM, AD&D 2nd edition character creation can be very fast as long as you’re not using Player’s Option variant rules or creating a psionicist. I am not sure this is possible with all RPGs, including later editions of D&D.
I once had a player decide that based on his character’s backstory, it was time for him to become a recurring NPC villain. This was immensely fun.
Raise Dead, Resurrection, Reincarnation, Clone… these are all expensive and difficult in AD&D, but by no means out of the reach of players. I did have characters come back from the dead. Usually, this is a feature of higher-level play.
This is actually straight from the rules for the optional death’s door rules in 2nd edition. Wizards of the Coast removed these consequences in later editions, creating an entire genre of jokes related to characters bouncing up and down from death’s door. In my games, non-magical healing could stabilize a character and magical healing was available but in limited quantities. The fact that a minor healing salve could effectively bring back a “dead” character made players value them greatly.
Having backup characters and expecting to eventually use them puts players in the right mindset to pick up an NPC character sheet and role-play that character. Some players also enjoy getting to see the “secret” information on an allied NPC’s sheet.