Dungeons & Dragons: Can The Dungeon Master Play The Game Too?

Dungeons & Dragons Official Game Module

Well it's back to school everyone and that means it's time for Dungeons & Dragons, just looking at all the school supplies at the mall gets me excited for every September. Remember, if you're looking to start a Dungeons & Dragons group back to school is the perfect time of year to get started.

When you get back to school in September just put up some posters around the halls and in classrooms advertising that you want to make a Dungeons & Dragons club at school and you'll be all set. I'm sure if you have the whole game at your fingertips like I'm telling you on this page you'll be sure to get at least five to seven people to join your club. 

I'm telling you just play with anyone who wants too, nobody cares who shows up. You want to play Dungeons & Dragons don't you?

For me I like using the Official Dungeons & Dragons modules because I like to see what the actual game makers WANT you to play, so you can see the "official stories" of Dungeons & Dragons, after that you can make up your own adventures. 

Check my previous posts on Dungeons & Dragons for more tips.

However most people I ever met like to make up their own adventures which is the best part for the Dungeon Master, I like to do that and also play the real modules to see the official game play.

In the future I'll post on this blog some ideas for your own adventures and examples of how to preload your adventure with treasures and specific random events to help build your characters.

I made one for a group of girls a few years back called "The Quest For The Golden Arrows" which a group of girls wanted to play.

What they wanted me to show them was how to get the "magical dragon slaying arrow" from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons One which is a magical arrow that kills a Dragon in Dungeons & Dragons with one shot.

Getting this magical arrow out of the book is practically statistically impossible from Dungeons & Dragons so I made them a preloaded adventure containing the arrows as a reward. Basically as I described before you need to load your adventure with the proper monsters that contain the magical arrow as a reward.

So you need to use the monsters in your own adventure that will give you the reward you want. In the actual hard game rules you get a "random reward" after you slay the monster so in my adventure I did away with the random dice roll for the reward and then just assigned the magical arrows as a basic treasure item, meaning it was just in the treasure chest in the monsters dungeon. 

That guaranteed them to get the magical arrows. 

In the adventure they wanted me to build it was to make their characters for future use to go around slaying Dragons at a later date in new adventures with the same characters. So in future adventures they wanted to go around Dragon slaying. 

The premise of the adventure was that the girls playing the game were a "team of archers", meaning that all the girls characters which were all female of Humans and Elves etc. were all just archers in the game. 

Like they were a team of all girl archers of various classes but mostly Human and Elf which they wanted to play in their games, so I made them an adventure which took me about two days to map out to build their characters to be "archery based" for their adventures...then of course they all needed, everyone of them, the magical Dragon Slaying arrow so they could all be of "equal character" in the game.

So I loaded the game to give them the proper reward and guaranteed them all they by they time they completed the adventure they would all have all the magical items etc. that they needed. Of course, they had to get them one character at a time because each secret monster, which is listed in the monster manual and Dungeon Masters Guide, only had one arrow per monster so they had to kill like seven special monsters to get all the arrows which they had to find first and them split them all up between them.

Once they got the magical arrows they never run out in the game.

Of course now, all the girls wanted to be the same character so the dice roll becomes a problem to get the proper character you want to play the game, as in most of your character stats are too low.

Well people get too obsessed with the dice rolling for making characters in Dungeons & Dragons so when we rolled their characters we just dropped the low numbers and then gave them higher ones like 16-18 on purpose to build a higher character.  

Don't get hung up on the dice rolls, if your character is close to what you want just write in on purpose a 16 or 17 to get your character up to proper strength so that you can actually enjoy the game, we're talking its for a bunch of girls here come off it. 

That way they can have an all around strong character and not have to worry about crappy dice rolls, and we're just having fun here anyway so don't get hung up on the strict dice rolling rule for building characters, that will make the game way more fun and get it moving faster.

Kind of like playing Magic Cards or something. You can convert Dungeons & Dragons down to a more simple game like Magic Cards while still using the hard rules for game play while dropping other stricter rules like dice rolling for character generation.  Just write in some larger numbers if your character sucks to get them to be more awesome like it's a Magic Cards game or something.

Other things you can do to make Dungeons & Dragons more fun and simple like Magic Cards is to drop the spell rules per character level rule to make the game like an advanced magic card game. This will super speed up the game and make it more easy and fun. That will make Dungeons & Dragons way easier for people to play when you convert it to a "Magic Cards" format.

Like this, if your character uses spells in the game you acquire spells slowly. You can drop this rule to make the game more simple and fun. Here's how, at each level you progress in the game in Dungeons & Dragons just assign your character the "complete spell book" that goes with your character for each level, that way every time your characters level goes up you get the whole spell book. 

HOWEVER, during the game as a standard rule of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons you can only use THREE SPELLS or so per fight based on your characters level, at higher levels you might have more than three spells per fight - you have to pick the spells you want to use in each fight and that's all you can use.

So even though you have the entire spell book for each new level you reach, you can only pick three spells for each fight but that might increase later in the game and when you're at level 97 or something that rule might vanish, I will have to check because I can't remember. 

In the adventure that I made for some girls "The Quest For The Golden Arrows" we preloaded the game with specific rewards but used the original spell book format. 

So you can substitute the rules in Dungeons & Dragons to play it more like Magic Cards or something.

Also, always make sure to assign the monsters properly when creating your own adventures and always properly assign experience points and rewards so that your character will be compatible with future adventures and official game adventure modules. 

So Can the Dungeon Master play the game too and participate on the Quest For The Golden Arrows etc? 

The answer is Yes, they have to use what is called NPC's or Non-Playing Characters, as represented on the "Henchmen" section of your character sheet.

Henchmen on the character sheet are represented as Non Playing Characters and also require their own character sheet.

Like this, people playing the game can use MULTIPLE CHARACTERS at the same time, so when you play the game make one main character and then include several extra characters that you will use in the game so you will need like five to seven character sheets because each player can use five to seven characters at the same time which is how I like to play the game.

So you get one character, your main character and then like five to seven extra characters. The extra characters are "non playing characters" meaning they are just extra characters and character sheets that you will use when your are fighting. 

Now playing five to seven extra characters gets long in Dungeons & Dragons but it's fun to do that if you only have a like three people to play with, then each battle you get five to seven extra attack turns each.

If you have a larger group of players you might want to limit your extra characters to two or three extra sheets to speed up game play because each one gets a dice roll when fighting monsters in Dungeons & Dragons.

Non playing characters play EXACTLY THE SAME as regular characters in the game so you can use like three to seven character sheets per person in the game.

That way your party has fifteen to twenty five characters in the game adventure.

However, there are specific rules to that. 

You have to pick a MAIN CHARACTER first and then all the extra character sheets are Non Playing Characters that you will also use.

These are the two main rules:

1. Only your Main Character can determine game direction, meaning when you decide the route you take in the game you only get one decision, the NPC's (Non Playing Characters) can only participate in the battles in the game like regular characters that you also own.

2. Experience points must be divided amongst you main character and your NPC's so that all your levels progress at the same rate and go up in level at the same time.

However, that slows the game down. You will not go up in level as fast if you use Non Playing Characters because you have to divide the experience points across all your characters so you will need to play the game longer or use less characters, this is fun for playing more adventures at lower levels in the game then you will slowly go up in level but you have to play the game longer.

THE DUNGEON MASTER: 

The Dungeon Master can play the game with the players using NON PLAYING CHARACTERS ONLY, meaning he is not allowed to determine game direction because he is the "referee".

The Dungeon Master will have to tag along on the adventure while the players determine game direction using Non Playing Characters Only, the Dungeon Master determining game direction in Dungeons & Dragons would be cheating.

Later, the Dungeon Master can use the NPC's in a regular game when he is a PLAYER ONLY and not the referee while someone else is the Dungeon Master.

Also important to remember when Playing Dungeons & Dragons with Non Playing Characters is that if you main character gets "killed" in the game you can switch your main character to a Non Playing Character Sheet and continuing using that character as your main character. The Non Playing Character sheets are set up exactly the same as a regular player, only write NPC on the sheet so you can keep track of it.

To save time you can use an online Dungeons & Dragons Character Generator that you can print off for your character or non playing character's Character Sheets.

https://www.aidedd.org/dnd-builder/index.php

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