There are many reasons to want to try your hand as a Dungeon Master, and the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide makes learning how to DM easier than ever! If you’ve got a story you’re just dying to tell with your friends, or you want to help out your table’s “forever DM” so they can take a break, this book will help guide you through the process in manageable steps.

In this article, we’ll focus on what novice DMs can expect to find within the pages of the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, as well as how it provides tips and strategies for all DM skill levels!

• How the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide Helps You Learn to Run Sessions
• Why The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide Excels as a Resource For New DMs

Pre-Order the 2024 Core Rulebooks and Save $60

Ready to see what's next for D&D? The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide and 2024 Monster Manual are available for pre-order on the D&D Beyond marketplace. If you want all three core rulebooks, you can save $60, get exclusive digital bonuses, and immediately access the 2024 Player's Handbook when you pre-order the Digital & Physical Core Rulebook Bundle!

Plus, you can get early access to the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide with your D&D Beyond subscription! Master Tier subscribers get access two weeks early, starting October 29, and Hero Tier subscribers get access one week early, starting November 5.

How the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide Helps You Learn to Run Sessions

The first chapter of the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide gives a grand overview of the role of the DM. There’s a rundown of the hats a DM is expected to wear, such as referee, storyteller, or worldbuilder. There are some useful tips and reminders for DMs of all levels, like communicating with players or remembering that it’s not a competition. There are also examples of different DMing styles, so you can make sure you’re setting the atmosphere and table culture that best suits your group. 

In addition to these resources, here are some sections of this chapter that we find especially helpful for brand-new DMs. 

Preparing a Session

New DMs will often get advice from conflicting sources stating, “Don’t overprepare” or “Don’t underprepare." This advice can be confusing, especially when you're just starting out and aren't sure what level of prep is needed. It’s like asking you to aim for a bullseye that you’ve never seen. 

The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide cuts through the confusion with The One-Hour Guideline. This simple breakdown outlines examples of what sort of things most groups can accomplish during one hour of play. This makes it simple to look at the block of time you and the other players have scheduled for the game and have a rough estimate of how many things you need to prepare for that time window. 

The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide then offers up a series of guidelines for how to prepare to run those ideas based on how much time you have to get ready before the game. It also gives you a solid checklist of what to focus on if you have one, two, or three hours to prepare for your game. These useful steps range from identifying which encounters you want to run for a session to zeroing in on encounters designed to relate to specific player character motivations and goals. 

These guidelines give you a general concept of what you should be working towards when building a session. As you continue to DM, you’ll start to recognize which steps are most important to your own process and which elements might need tweaking to better serve you and your game.

Running a Session

Once you have your session prepped, now the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is primed to help you run it. This section starts out with suggestions on how to recap previous sessions if you’re running an ongoing campaign. 

Next, it breaks down the individual parts of running an encounter, including your own descriptions of the scene, giving space for player contributions, and then describing what happens as a result of those actions. This section also provides examples of rules and tools that may be useful for resolving the possible outcomes of the player characters’ actions. 

Once you’re feeling comfortable with running encounters, the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide gives you tips for stringing a series of encounters together into an overall session. This section also gives you suggestions for ending a session, winding down the action in a way that either feels satisfactory or leaves the players on an interesting cliffhanger for next time. 

Finally, the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide gives you a few pages featuring an example of play. Similar to the examples you may have already seen in the “Playing the Game” section of the 2024 Player’s Handbook, these pages illustrate how running a session can evolve. This not only shows you all the aforementioned steps in practice, but it also works as a helpful way of reviewing all the information you learned prior so it sticks in your memory a bit better. 

Why The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide Excels as a Resource For New DMs

Artist: Luca Bancone

Much of the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide was reorganized, expanded, and rewritten to better help you craft your games as a DM. Some of these especially helpful bits for new Dungeon Masters are as follows:

Demystifying The DMing Process

In the above section, we highlighted how the first chapter focuses on preparing for and running a D&D session. What this chapter excels at is breaking the DMing process down to a base element: encounters. These scenes are challenges that include things like combat, social interactions, puzzles, or other tasks the player characters might encounter during the game. While the mechanics of each might differ and have their own nuance, they all boil down to types of problem-solving. One of the most important lessons you'll learn is how to tie encounters together into a single game session. 

Later chapters of the book similarly help you learn how to form sessions into adventures and then how to string adventures together into campaigns. Rather than presenting running a campaign as a big monolithic, intimidating concept, the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide helps you build it piece by piece. It’s like those little instruction books that come with LEGO. At first, it just seems like a few random red blocks, but eventually, you realize you’ve been adding articulated wings to a red dragon this whole time.

Functional Examples

Like the Example of Play section we mentioned above, the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide frequently provides you with concrete, easy-to-understand examples of the concepts it presents. When teaching you how to build adventures step-by-step in chapter 4, it presents five different examples of adventures optimized for player characters from levels 1 to 7. 

These adventures, as well as the collection of maps included in the appendix section, also serve as great tools to have on hand in case you need to jump quickly into an encounter. 

Similarly, when presenting campaign settings, it provides information on many of the known planes of the D&D multiverse but, in addition, provides a whole chapter on the iconic Greyhawk setting so you can see how the elements of a campaign come together. 

Emphasis On The Different Ways You Can Play

Time and time again, the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide emphasizes that there are a variety of ways to approach DMing and playing Dungeons & Dragons. This includes listing off different approaches to DMing, as well as different flavors of fantasy you may choose to use for your game. It even provides more of those functional examples of things you could incorporate into your game for those different genres, such as the divine trials of a mythic fantasy story or the tyrannical dragons in an epic fantasy story. 

These highlighted differences aren’t just limited to inspirational tidbits either. Early on, the book provides resources for the tools that you might want to utilize. This starts with the elements that have been part of the game since its creation, such as dice, paper, and, you know, players. But it also dives into things that have become more commonplace over the years, such as a DM screen, maps and minis, and even suggestions for running games on virtual tabletops. 

Tracking Sheets

A brand new feature you’ll find in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is the inclusion of several different tracking sheets to help you, as a DM, organize your play, similar to the character sheets the other players are using. There are nine of these tracking sheets altogether, which include a sheet for setting game expectations at the start of a new campaign, a sheet for tracking NPCs you create, keeping track of magic items that have been introduced into the game, and keeping an inventory of the current conflicts active in your game. These are just to name a few. 

It Recognizes That the DM Is a Player

Finally, a small but important detail that serves a core role in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is the emphasis that the Dungeon Master is a role that a player at the table fills. The very first paragraph of the book describes the DM as a player who presides over the game.

When you are DMing, you have different responsibilities to the narrative than the players with characters, but you are still a person at a table playing a game, and so you should also be having fun. The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide concludes its very first chapter with several pages focused specifically on ensuring fun for everyone at the table, and that includes you. 

Your Guide Map to Adventure

Being a Dungeon Master is a unique role at the table, but it’s one that can be extremely satisfying as you find your footing and your story unfolds. The more you play, the more nuances and personal preferences you’ll find that work best for you. But the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is here to provide you with a firm rail to hold onto and to be your companion as you head further into your DMing journey.

Pre-order your copy today, and you'll be ready to embark on adventure with more tools, inspiration, and confidence than ever before! 

Riley Silverman (@rileyjsilverman) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, Nerdist, and SYFY Wire. She DMs the Theros-set Dice Ex Machina for the Saving Throw Show, and has been a player on the Wizards of the Coast-sponsored The Broken Pact. Riley also played as Braga in the official tabletop adaptation of the Rat Queens comic for HyperRPG, and currently plays as The Doctor on the Doctor Who RPG podcast The Game of Rassilon. She currently lives in Los Angeles.