09/18/2026
**What is your guiding principle every time you sit down to DM?**
I was recently asked this question on Quora by a new DM who was worried they might be too focused on their story and planning. Their thought was:
> “Give the players maximal opportunities to feel awesome.”
I think that's a pretty good goal—but after more than 40 years of playing D&D and decades of DMing, I've come to think about it a little differently.
For me, there are really only two things I try to keep at the forefront of my mind:
**Is everyone having fun, including me?**
And:
**What makes sense for the story?**
The important distinction is this:
**It isn't my story.**
As the DM, I'm the narrator and facilitator of a story that the entire group is creating together. I may have written the setting, created the NPCs, designed the encounters, and have an idea of where I think things might go—but the players ultimately determine what happens.
My job is to take the decisions they make and determine how the world responds.
And that means you can't become too attached to your plans.
You can spend weeks developing what you think is an incredible plot, carefully placing clues and creating elaborate encounters, only to have the party completely ignore the NPC you thought would be important, walk right past the obvious clue, decide they don't trust the quest giver, or become fascinated by some completely insignificant character you invented five minutes ago.
**And that's okay.**
In fact, some of the best stories I've ever experienced as a DM have come from players doing things I never anticipated.
I don't consider that the players "derailing" my story.
**That's the story.**
If there's a particular destination you want the campaign to eventually reach, create multiple roads to get there rather than a single path the players have to follow.
Want them to discover the villain's identity? Give them several ways to uncover it.
Want them to reach a particular location? Don't make one NPC the only person who can tell them how to get there.
If they miss your clue, give them another one.
If they kill the NPC who was supposed to provide important information, let someone else know it.
If they refuse the quest you spent three weeks preparing, change the circumstances so something else brings them into the same conflict.
**The players make the decisions. You're determining how the world reacts to those decisions.**
That's where the collaborative storytelling happens.
And honestly, I don't do nearly as much advance planning as people might expect. I'll sometimes write modules out in considerable detail, but I'd estimate that about **90% of what actually happens at the table is improvised** because the players inevitably do something that wasn't in the script.
*The Jubilee of Flowers* is a good example.
It's an adventure set during a spring festival in a coastal town. A traveling circus has arrived, and I've created dozens of games, competitions, booths, performances, and other activities for the players to discover.
There are roughly **60 different games and activities** available.
But I don't expect the party to experience all of them.
I don't even expect them to follow them in any particular order.
**They're there to decide what interests them.**
Meanwhile, underneath the festival, strange and increasingly creepy things are happening involving necromantic magic. The players may encounter pieces of that story as they explore, but they're not forced to investigate it immediately.
Eventually, those events lead into the second part of the adventure, where the players can start investigating what's actually happening before everything comes to a head.
So yes, I have a story planned.
But I'm not telling the players:
*"Here is the story you are going to experience."*
I'm giving them a world, putting interesting things in front of them, and letting **their decisions determine which parts of the story they experience—and how they experience them.**
That's the mindset I'd recommend to a new DM.
Don't worry about giving the players "maximal opportunities to feel awesome." That's certainly not a bad goal, but I think it's a little too narrow.
Players don't necessarily need to feel awesome every time they sit down to play.
Sometimes they need to feel clever.
Sometimes terrified.
Sometimes frustrated because they made a bad decision.
Sometimes they need to laugh at something completely ridiculous.
And sometimes they need to surprise themselves by coming up with a solution you never considered.
What matters is that **they're invested in what is happening.**
So if I had to boil my guiding principle down to one sentence, it would probably be:
**Make the game fun for everyone, including yourself, and facilitate the story rather than trying to control it.**
You aren't writing a novel and then asking the players to act it out.
You're coordinating with a group of people to create a story that none of you could have written by yourselves.
**Your preparation gives you the pieces. The players determine how those pieces come together.**
And if you can learn to enjoy the moments when your carefully prepared plan goes completely off the rails...
You've probably learned one of the most important lessons of being a DM.
