Starting out as a new Dungeon Master can feel grey and obscure. Often the question is asked “Am I ready?” or “What does it take?”. With that, knowing how to prepare for a session is also a major challenge until you develop your rhythm so here is a video to assist with practicing three areas of every Dungeons and Dragons game.
Combat
If you are planning your first session ever, it is very common to want to introduce a combat encounter to the mix. You get to design this and pick what the first fight will be! I use the example of wolves in the video, but here are some specifics to practice for combat with that in mind.
Describe
Practice describing the wolves, the environment, and the overall feel of combat. Knowing what you want this to be ahead of time can help you be familiar with the scene.
Roll Initiative
Do this for your monsters, the party, and track the result. Add the respective Dexterity modifiers to the rolls and set up the order, just to see how the process goes and to learn how you want to organize and track this information.
Play It Out
Run the combat exactly how you would in the game and even play as the characters. While doing this, roll the dice, use the abilities, and describe the combat play-by-play. This simulation can help you get familiar with each character, their stats, their abilities, and how you want to set the scene so that it isn’t all brand new to you in your first session.
Exploration
If you know the part of the world your party will be traveling through, go ahead and run through descriptions of that place out loud. A huge part of a Dungeon Master’s role is to talk through the environment, what it looks, sounds, and feels like, and what important details there are to the story. Improvise these scenes a couple times and see if anything feels like a great run. If you like anything you say a lot, write it down and read it in the session later. Not everything has to be off the top of your head in game, so write down what you like!
Character Interactions
Lastly, practice being a specific Non-Player Character (NPC). Speak as them and describe them as you hope to in your first session. Figure out your comfort zone with character voice and personality, and then play out how you want the conversation to go. The more comfortable you are as this NPC, the more you will be able to improvise and help the players feel like this character is a real part of your world.
Conclusion
If you want to figure out how to be a Dungeon Master or if you are preparing for a session well, give these steps a spin and see how you feel afterwards. The great part about growing as a DM is that you learn your own style and what you need to prepare versus what you are comfortable improvising the more you do it. This method can help you learn those lines as you go!