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The 8 D&D Player Types and How to DM Them

In an ancient tome — the 4th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide — WotC broke down what it considered to be the eight main types of players and gave DMs tips on how to handle them. Understanding who your players are, what they want and why they play can be a big help in DMing them. … Read more

What Makes Good Players and Problem Players?

As much as DMs like to take responsibility for the success or failure of their games, you’re one person running a group that could be six or more players. Their personalities, attitudes, relationships, and a hundred other factors will have a big impact on the game. Some players are going to be very easy for … Read more

The Biggest DM Mistakes We’ve Made

From accidental party kills to evil campaigns that went … well, evil … we’re only Wise DMs because we’ve made all the mistakes more times than we care to remember. What happened, what did we do about it, and what do we wish we’d done differently? We get into all the details and what we’ve … Read more

Rules vs. Continuity: Managing the Verisimilitude of Your Game

As a DM, the world is your character. And sometimes the rules as written, what they call “RAW,” may conflict with the way you want your world to work. How do you handle those conflicts? What do you do when a character ability disrupts the way you want that world to work? Perhaps you’ve found … Read more

WotC’s Racism Fix: Can Good DMs Help D&D’s Stereotypes Problems?

Wizards of the Coast recently announced that they’re doing away with “evil” alignments and intelligence penalties as racial attributes. But that’s left some traditional gamers crying about PC culture run amok. How can you build a campaign without “evil” races? Does this undermine your bad guys? Does assuming “orcs are evil” make you look racist … Read more

Roll20 DM Newbs: Tips and Tricks From the Wise DMs’ First Online Campaigns

COVID-19 forced the Wise DMs to put their games on hiatus or take them online with Roll20. And they were not wise to that! Hear how Thorin, Tony and Dave stumbled through the new platform with tips, tricks, and adjustments they’ve made to keep the online campaigns as vivid as their nights around the gaming … Read more

Introductions: Traumatized Players, Improv Tricks and Our Biggest Struggles

In the first episode of 3 Wise DMs, meet the so-called “Wise Dungeon Masters” Thorin, Tony and Dave, and hear how they handle some of their biggest DMing struggles. Along the way hear how the guys are running Storm King’s Thunder, Curse of Strahd, and their own homebrew/improvised stuff. 2:00 Dealing with unexpected and keeping … Read more