Weirdly enough, you can really enjoy not playing your D&D game – at least not traditionally. Here are some bits of “lonely fun” for DMs.
Lonely fun is a term for the kind of enjoyment you get from RPGs outside of a full session at the table. This is things like making a character, or thinking about the kinds of things you might do at the next session. Those are great examples of lonely fun for players. But DMs have, arguably, more sources for lonely fun than most.
And sure, there’s a joke to be made in there. But truly, some of the most fun you can have as a DM is expressing your creativity just for the sheer joy of it. Here’s a few ways you might do exactly that.
Draw A World Map
“Draw” is used loosely here. Maybe you use a random world map generator. Maybe you’ve got time to sit down with some graph paper and sketch things out. Or maybe you just commission someone to draw something for you; but sitting down to think about what your world looks like? All the places that players might go to, or where adventures might happen?
It’s super enjoyable. Especially if you just take some time and look at your map and think “well but what might go here.” It’s stuff that might never come up in your game, but it satisfies the creative itch on a deep deep level.
Design A Villain
You may already know the joy of this – but newer DMs out there, don’t be afraid to try homebrewing up your own big boss enemy. Designing the villain of your campaign can be so satisfying. It blends the joy of creating a character (which you’re doing) with also coming up with interesting mechanical hooks to put into an encounter, and then all that wrapped up in whatever juicy plot you’re cooking up for a campaign.
There’s a reason that most campaigns have some overarching villain. It’s because they’re so much fun to invent.
Plan A Catastrophe
Another great bit of lonely fun for DMs can be figuring out an emerging catastrophe. The worlds of D&D are littered with them. From world-shattering cataclysms where the gods become mortal/leave the world or where ancient evils are unleashed, to less apocalyptic but still catastrophic events like a volcano erupting where the players are, or a war breaking out between kingdoms.
A good chunk of a DM’s fun is figuring out how to twist the knife they stab into the heart of their own world. Just so they can see what the players will do next.
Cook Up Treasure For Your Friends
This is one of my favorites. I love cooking up treasure for my friends. Whether it’s rolling on the tables for a dragon’s hoard, or coming up with new magic items that I think they might like, or even designing new spells to put in the spellbook of the carefully designed enemy Wizard I’ve been brewing up. A big part of the fun as a DM is finding ways to delight your players, whether with challenging encounters or surprising story twists, or sometimes, just a cool magic item.
Read Those Backstories – And Then Use ‘Em
And you can always make the lonely fun a little less lonely by spending some time thinking about your player characters. They probably wrote backstories; it can be a lot of fun to read through ’em and figure out how they might apply to your world and your campaign. I love it when a player gives me a knife I can twist; it turns out that if someone makes a tortured backstory when you bring up elements of it in the game, they feel perceived. And that’s all any of us wants.
Plotting out how you might use your characters’ backstories in the overarching plot is a great source of lonely fun for any DM who wants to feel a little more connected to their player characters’ stories.
What do you do as a DM when you aren’t sitting at the table with your group?
Don’t Miss:
Read more at this site