D&D Made Easy

Being a Dungeon Master is not easy. There's a lot of planning required to get the story prepared and find ways to guide your players along the path of the script without spoiling the story in advance. Then you have to actually get the players together. You can't really play-test a sessions to see if it's balanced before unleashing it on the players since you have no idea how they are going to react to each encounter, or how the dice will roll. Then you have the bureaucracy with the charts, tables, reference sheets, paperwork, counters, cards, and other gaming aids. Oh yeah, and it's expensive. At least you get physically fit carrying all those books around.

There are a few things that many DMs do that take up far too much time because they are over complicating the process. Here's a few cheats to save time, and luggage:


1/ Populate your dungeon quickly via the Random Encounter Tables.

Back in the AD&D 2nd Edition there was a series of Monster Manuals that came in a set of hardback folders that you could expand with additional releases.
For each release you didn't just get a dedicated page full of monster stats and background info, but the packs came with a handy set of tables for different terrain and regional dungeon types. When creating a quick, random dungeon, just grab a Random Encounter Table and write each of the different encounters on a scrap of paper, roll it up into a ball and drop it into a hat. As the players move from one room to the next just grab a random ball of paper, unroll it to see what is coming up next, and let them listen / smell / sneak around trying to guess what is in the next room.

If you have a set of monster cards, or a Collectible Card Game set of monsters, then feel free to shuffle around a deck of your chosen critters and draw a card from the deck as the players move to each new encounter.


2/ Map your dungeon easily with an existing Board Game.

One thing that DM's get into at some point is the Mega-Dungeon. A hopeless, meaningless mess of corridors linking up unrelated rooms with no consistency, no architectural logic and no thoughts on water drainage, breathable air or waste management. They look pretty impressive but to try to play a session on a standard table is impossible due to the scale of the map. With a dungeon that size you need clear definition on dungeon levels as players progress deeper into the map, with regional themes, settlements and established roadways between regions. The dungeon practically becomes your entire campaign world.

Sadly, this means your campaign story will forever be based on random critters living in the darkness and players are going to get bored. The Players Handbook and various Class Manuals tell the players about taking over a castle, building wizard towers and leading churches, but once players have cleared an area of fiends, rescued the workers, secured a stone-mine etc to build their fortress they are likely to have become bored of this region and want to move on to bigger and better things. Also keep in mind their characters are going to start to suffer from lack of Sunlight!

You can keep the game quick and easy by using something like the Munchkin game boards. It's just a series of 10 rooms on a linear path so maybe a bit over simplified if you want to sneak around a creature, but just get two boards next to each other with a couple of printed corridors to link back and forth at key points. 

Any of the pre-printed dungeon tile sheets will do the same trick. Cut-out or draw your own set of 10 rooms on a sheet of standard paper, and create some corridors to link them all together. lay the rooms out in two columns so the players have to snake their way through the level. Keep a couple of spare corridors and if the players want to skip a specific creature you can roll to detect a secret door and place a bypass corridor where needed. The number of spare corridor pieces you have limits the  number of times the players can skip a monster.

If you have the Dungeon board game, this is already a great design map. The entrance and level 1 are in the middle of a 3x3 grid of areas. Level 2 is off to one side which then splits north and south where Level 3 can be found in both the upper and lower left-hand map corners. Looping back around the entrance area over the top and bottom of the map is Level 4, followed by Level 5 in the right-hand corners. Finally, Level 6 can be found on the right-hand side of the entrance making it easy to exit quickly once the session is complete. Each level has it's own set of rooms and major chambers, and its own colour scheme.

Grab some paper and cut out sequential numbers for each of the 6 levels, dropping them onto the rooms randomly. When the players get to the room you can then lookup that number with the Random Encounter Chart to see what enemy they will face. Since levels 3, 4 and 5 each have two regions, you can again split these into different themes for North and South sections of the dungeon.


3/ Use a Board Game for the Campaign World.

This one might take a bit of work and money, but use something like the Talisman board game as your game world. Use the locations on the board game map as points of interest in your campaign world, with the expansion packs adding new themed areas. For example, if the party need to buy new armour they need to travel to the blacksmith. If they are looking for a new quest they need to find the tavern. If they want a potion or cure its off to the church or witches hovel. Talisman is basically a more complicated version of Monopoly. If you decide to make your own map it's easy to expand by adding neighboring regions along the outer edge of the existing map and if your players decide to build a castle or dig a dungeon you can just slap a new bit of paper over the top of that location with a new drawing. As the players move from one location to another they get a change to trigger a wandering encounter. The trick is to keep each square on the map as a functional purpose and not just add 20 squares of "vast desert region". A single square with a dice roll to see if the players miss a turn finding their way over the desert will be enough.


4/ Cheap gaming aids

Commercial stuff is very expensive and comes in limited packs. If you take a look at the current 5th Edition "cards" there are packs for Monster levels 0-5, Monster levels 6-16, Magic item cards, seperate cardsets for Druids, Arcane, Ranger, Paladin and Cleric Class spells, Martial Powers and Races, Xanathar's Spellbook cards, a Tarokka playing card set, and probably more that I haven't seen yet. That's a lot of different cards. On top of these you need your condition markers which tell you who is stunned, prone, poisoned, blessed etc, and some minatures, and a game map.

For game cards, grab a set of blank business cards and hand write the important details on one side. Get your favourite colouring pencils or crayon set and colour in the back of the card so you can easily tell the difference between each card set based on challenge level or terrain type. If you fancy a bit of calligraphy then write a nice bold title on the back too.

Condition markers can be easily and cheaply made using a couple of methods. Some people go shopping down the junk shops and buy those little glass blobs or polished colourful semi-precious stones but these are fairly expensive and bulky, and while they do look pretty they are also a bit impractical to drop a big wonky stone on top of a finely painted minature figurine. Some people go for paper markers which is easiest, and if you play with minatures you can slide them underneath the stands, but with most figures taking up the entire 25mm base size there's little room between figures for a condition marker to stand out. 

A fun solution is to build little hats. Take a rectangular piece of paper and fold it in half along the long edge and then open it up again. Fold the top-left corner over to the middle fold line, and then fold the opposite bottom-right corner over to the middle fold line. Now fold the remaining corners into the middle in the same way, but these will be a little more difficult because they will have an overlap of paper from the previous folds. You'll now have a middle fold line with triangles on each side. Fold along the middle and try to slip the outer fold on one side underneath the outer fold from the other side to make a sort of triangle result with pockets on the outer edges. Now open up one of the pockets and roll it around to make it a circular opening - you now have a pointy hat! Splash some colour and bold text onto it and you have a conditions marker that you can pop over the top of most figurines quickly and easily and this makes the effect highly visible. As a handy side-effect, the paper hats are light weight and can be flatted easily for packing away.

You can use the same hats method to make your figurings using a larger piece of paper, or just grab some lego mini-figures which are not as expensive as figurines and don't need painting but unfortunately come in random packs with a limited set that are suitable for your game theme. There are also cheaper alternatives to lego and if you are happy to buy from China you can get bulk figures for a fraction of the cost.


5/ Paint some low-value coins

This one might sound strange, but almost every country in the world has a face on one side of it's coins. Grab some paints and colour in the face so that it matches your characters. Use the smaller, silver coins if possible for your characters and mix up any random change you get from foreign currencies to help make your characters stand out from each other. You can then user the bigger, brown or gold coins as condition markers and slide them underneath so that the edges can be painted to show which condition is in effect. If you have some sticky putty you can use them as basis to hold the coins upright.

Obviously you need to be careful when painting some coins that it is not a criminal offence to deface the image of a Monarch / Emporer in the real world!
Coins that have historical figures from republic governments usually work best as they have different faces on each coin.


/The End

I hope you find some of these hints useful in your gaming events. If you've spend hundreds of Pounds, Euros, Dollars or whatever currency on the Core Rulebooks then saving a bit of cash will probably come in useful.
Be sure to check my website for other randomly useful stuff!

Alun Hancock
May 2019
http://alun.myftp.org