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Want To Practice Your Management Skills? Try Being a Dungeon Master
You’ll never know everything about management, and that’s alright!
Earlier this winter, a group of friends and I were chatting about Dungeons & Dragons (5th Edition). A few had played previously, and some were brand new, but all were interested in getting a campaign together.
We started with a one-shot, a self-contained adventure that takes 3–4 hours, to test the waters. I played the role of the Dungeon Master and was tasked with putting the adventure together (I’m now likely the Forever DM).
We’re now four sessions in (two one-shots, and two sessions into a full campaign), and I began noticing similarities between DM’ing and being a manager. That’s when it hit me that this game was a strange bridge between my day job and my high-fantasy RPG brain.
At the end of the day, I was managing a whole game world, and the NPCs within, while letting three unpredictable adventurers run wild, keeping them within the guardrails of the rules, and moving some semblance of a story forward. These were all ways to practice my role as a manager and director, something that is tough to come by in the business world.
Forever DMs might roll their eyes at this article saying, “you’re four sessions in, you don’t know enough of the pain or suffering to write this.” Totally possible, but I imagine there will be many parts to this post in the future, so here are a few high-level learnings.
Preparation
At the beginning of your Dungeon Mastering days, there are a lot of things to know. Who are the PCs (player characters at the table)? What are they trying to do? Why are they in the world? What’s the point of your adventure? Can you throw a gnome 15 feet into an open attack while being attacked by Stirges with an Athletics check that nets a 6?
Preparing for our first game was daunting, similar to preparing for my first team as a manager. I was out of my element and reached for any book or video that would give me some sense of how others had done it in the past.
