Want to be a Dungeon Master? Don’t play D&D 5th Edition.

D&D 5th Edition is the world’s most popular RPG by a long shot, but the multitude of unnecessary crutches can undermine a novice DM.

In early 2019, my tabletop hobby began in earnest, as a player in the Lost Mines of Phandelver module for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. This was when I first truly immersed myself in the hobby, but my first exposure to tabletop RPGs had come long before that, with a few sessions in 2001 playing Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition.

In fact, like many tabletop gamers of my generation, my first actual exposure to Dungeons & Dragons rules came before playing the game itself — the first tabletop rules that I learned were for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, thanks to CRPGs like Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, Dark Sun: Shattered Lands and Eye of the Beholder. And, if you want to get pedantic, I suppose you could claim I gained some familiarity with another tabletop RPG, GURPS, thanks to Fallout (which was originally intended to be a wholesale adaptation of the ruleset before it diverged).

However, despite all the caveats above, I’ve been tabletop gaming in earnest for a little over four years now, and roughly two-thirds of that time I’ve tackled the sometimes challenging but always rewarding task of being the “Dungeon Master".