In D&D, when players have infinite choices in front of them, they’ll often surprise you in unexpected ways. Luckily for DMs, there are a variety of methods to reward characters when players come up with a plan you’d never have expected, work together as a team to plot the perfect approach, or even forgo the optimal choice in order to roleplay their characters in interesting and fun ways.

Today, we’ll look at a few of the suggestions that the Dungeon Master’s Guide has for powerful gifts, social rewards, or storytelling boons to reflect your players’ job well done.

• Advantage, Heroic Inspiration, and XP
• Renown
• Supernatural Gifts
• Marks of Prestige
• Bastions
• Good Old-Fashioned Loot

Understanding the Motivation of Your Player’s Characters

Not every adventurer wants to fill their purse with gold. Some have righteous oaths they must uphold, while others search the universe for the answers to mysterious questions.

Understanding what your player’s characters seek is the first step in providing meaningful rewards. You can find this out during your session zero, listening to the character’s in-game goals, or simply by asking players during some downtime between sessions.

The DM’s Character Tracker sheet in the D&D Beyond Basic Rules is perfect for tracking this kind of information. Think of it almost as a DM’s version of the player’s character sheet. It can give you a quick reference to the typical motivation and personality of the character to help you follow along and guide their progress, and you could use the magic items section or the adventure ideas section to make notes of rewards you’ve delivered or are planning to.

Advantage, Heroic Inspiration, and XP

Artist: Viko Menezes

D&D’s more common mechanical rewards are great to keep in mind for those moments when you want to quickly dole out gold stars and keep the story moving forward. If a player spends a moment to narrate how their character preps to butter up a merchant before bartering an item, giving them Advantage on their Charisma (Persuasion) check will encourage them to make similar moves in the future.

Similarly, rewarding Heroic Inspiration after a particularly impressive in-character choice never fails to make a player’s efforts feel seen and appreciated.

If you’re using Experience Points in your game, the Dungeon Master’s Guide provides details for how you can award XP for non-combat challenges, such as navigating tough negotiations or completing a significant milestone.

Renown

An optional rule listed in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, Renown gives you a metric that can be used to track characters’ standing with a particular faction, organization, or community. This Renown could apply to the whole party or to specific characters.

How does Renown work?

If a character—or the entire party—is working with the Harpers, they might increase their Renown Score by accomplishing a mission that benefits the faction, or they could lose some Renown if they were caught doing something antithetical to the Harpers’ ideals.

Renown can be a useful tool in a story that involves a lot of different groups, especially if the campaign will be run over a long period of time. Using Renown as a way to track the impact that characters’ actions have within each group allows you to quickly remember how those groups feel about them when you use them again after a long break.

Using Renown in Story

Depending on the level of Renown that a character has with a group, characters might be able to call upon them for favors or aid.

As their Renown Score increases, they might secure discounts on gear, gain access to safe houses, or even eventually call upon the group to aid them in a dangerous undertaking.

Renown can be the difference between a faction like the Flaming Fist giving the party a tough time, allowing them safe passage through their territory, or standing next to them during a dangerous situation.

Ways to Reward Your Player’s Character with Renown

There are three major ways to reward your player’s character with a change to their Renown Scores.

1. They could earn some Renown with a group by completing a mission that has been given to them by the group.
2. They could spend time between adventures socializing with the group’s members.
3. Or, if you want to make it simpler to track, once a character has strong ties to an organization, you could tie their Renown Score to their character level.

Supernatural Gifts

Artist: Axel Defois

When you want rewards to feel like something the characters are receiving from a source of immense power, supernatural gifts are a great option. These gifts come in two forms: Charms and Blessings. These are intangible boosts given to characters that, unlike magic items, aren't objects and don't require Attunement.

Blessings

Blessings are rewards bestowed by deities for actions that are impressive enough to catch a god’s attention.

This could be something like particularly devout service to a god, such as re-sanctifying an important shrine, or extraordinary heroism, like undertaking a world-saving quest.

Blessings are intended to be permanent, although a god who granted it reserves the option to pull it away if they so choose. So if a character doesn’t follow through on their goals or blasphemes against their god, their Blessing may be revoked.

The Dungeon Master’s Guide contains several examples of Blessings and guidelines for distributing them.

Blessing Examples:

From a story standpoint, Blessings allow you as a DM a way of giving characters a reward through narrative. You can narrate visions sent to them by the gods or describe the way their bodies glow with radiant light for a moment as the warmth of a deity’s Blessing pours through them. You could even make a quest out of it, having the characters travel to a series of shrines to beseech the gods for their blessings prior to a big battle.

Charms

While Blessings are gifts from the gods themselves, Charms can be found in a variety of ways. They can be gifts from a mythical creature, but they can also be bestowed through circumstantial means. A strange trinket in a long-forgotten dungeon could grant a Charm upon the first adventurer who touches it. Runes set into a mysterious stone could be infused with a Charm for the one who translates them.

Charms have a more limited effect than Blessings because they come with a limited number of uses or duration. Charms can mimic the effects of potions, spells, or magic items, so you can create your own Charms for characters by selecting from those.

Charm Examples:

Marks of Prestige

When characters’ accomplishments and exploits gain them notoriety on a realm-wide level, it may earn them fame, allies, and titles that can be used to progress their goals. These rewards are known as marks of prestige.

These rewards are a bit more flexible when it comes to specific mechanics and are much more weighted to the impact they have on the story. The characters could gain official titles within an aristocratic society or be given plots of land from royalty.

Powerful and respected figures could write letters of recommendation for the players’ characters that might allow them access to locations or NPCs they might have previously been unable to get through to.

As a DM, you can also have fun with these sorts of rewards, especially the ones with physical objects like crafting out printed or handwritten deeds to land. Similarly, giving someone a physical medal for them to hold while their character shows it off can really make a reward like this stand out.

Bastions

Artist: Noor Rahman

The Dungeon Master’s Guide has a whole chapter dedicated to Bastions, which are bases of operations managed by the characters.

Typically, characters receive a Bastion at level 5, but they are a perfect reward for characters regardless of their level:

• If your character's level is too low, you could simply have the construction or renovation of the Bastion take some in-game time until they are ready to move in at level 5.
• If the characters have already surpassed level 5, they could receive Bastions pre-stocked with—or get to choose—additional Special Facilities suitable for their level.

Once players have Bastions, you can reward them with discounts on upgrades, extra Bastion defenders, or positive Bastion Events whenever appropriate.

If you haven’t started using Bastions in your game or are still getting the hang of them, we’ve also covered the Bastion rules in detail here on D&D Beyond.

Good Old-Fashioned Loot

Finally, let’s just say it: loot. Players love it. There’s just something viscerally exciting about scouring a dungeon or driving that final killing blow into a monster and learning how much GP you earned or what items you find strewn about their lair.

Usually, I don’t have to tell my players there’s loot; they’re already searching for it when I’m still sorting through my notes.

Since loot is commonly part of a dungeon crawl, players may not interpret it as a reward as quickly as some of the other stuff we’ve discussed. If you’re trying to emphasize that you’re giving someone a special gift because of gameplay or another reason, it might be worth homebrewing a custom magic item for them or at least curating a specific item that you know ties into their character or that character’s story.

For example, in a game I ran a few years ago, I had a player whose character was obsessed with sandwiches. She was always asking about sandwiches or talking about the best ones she’d ever had. So for that player’s birthday, I created a magic item called the Baggie of Infinite Sandwiches. Once per Long Rest, the owner may open their indestructible sandwich baggie and claim one of any kind of sandwich they’d like, which bestows the effect of a Potion of Healing.

Tracking Magic Items

Magic Items are powerful boons that should be distributed carefully to ensure the balance of the campaign isn’t thrown off.

If you’re looking for a simple way to track these types of rewards, the DM’s Magic Item Tracker sheet is available for free in the D&D Beyond Basic Rules.

Wrapping Up

The Dungeon Master’s Guide offers several excellent suggestions for in-game rewards. Whether you’re granting Advantage on a D20 Test, giving your characters renown for completing a mission, or dishing out a Holy Avenger after they took down a BBEG, these extra shiny bits are excellent tools to make play rewarding—on top of the warm fuzzy feeling they get for doing the right thing, of course.

Ultimately, the best rewards for your players are going to be the ones that fit the best into your game and the stories you’ve collectively decided to tell.

Riley Silverman (rileysilverman.bsky.social) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, and has written for Nerdist, SYFY Wire, Star Wars, and Doctor Who. She is a professional DM and currently plays as Chase Variant on the Good Chaotic TTRPG podcast.