A Dungeon Master’s Guide to DMing a Podcast
When I wanted to start a Dungeons and Dragons podcast, I thought I knew what I was doing. I devoured every genre of fantasy stories, I listened and re-listened to the McElroy Brothers’ role-playing powerhouse The Adventure Zone, and I liked making dumb voices to amuse my friends. What could go wrong?
Everything could go wrong.
Lucky for me, everything going wrong is the point of Dungeons & Dragons. When the players inject themselves into the structured world that the Dungeon Master has set up, it’s bound to get broken, dirty, and corrected. So, in Join the Party’s third episode, when my players decide to jump out of the window of a massive castle and I hadn’t figured out what was on that side of the estate, I reshuffled my ideas and introduce a gargoyle friend with a pompadour to save them.
The DM has one goal — make sure everyone, including themselves, has fun. That is the beacon that guides every broken plot point, encounter, and improvised conversation. As long as we’re all laughing, it’s good. But as we turned on the microphones, I realized there’s someone else in the room who matters just as much as my players, even though we can’t see them — the audience.
DMing for Audio is Different
When playing on the record, whether a stream or a podcast or a live show, the DM’s ultimate goal to facilitate fun for all becomes more amorphous. Sure, my players can be losing it at their microphones at my jokes and plot twists, but if the audience doesn’t understand what’s going on the show dies quicker than a drow in the sunlight. Beyond just entertaining listeners, I want to widen the pool of potential listeners way outside the traditional D&D fanbase. With a lot of newcomers to D&D and tabletop games listening to my show, I need to assume that not every listener won’t know the ins and outs of the dense D&D rulebook. I can explain rules in out-of-game audio or social media, but the handholds of plot and action can’t hinge on knowing the game mechanics of underwater combat.
A note: if you’re sitting around with your friends, doubled over at another hilarious joke Ragnor the fighter made at the expense of the goblin clan, you may think, “we should record this! People would love it.” Don’t do it. No one wants to listen to your home game and you shouldn’t want to share it. You have in-jokes and overt silliness and arguing and communal jokes and simple fun! And the fun that your friends have forged through many, many game sessions is unselfish and uninhibited and lovely. The delicate ecosystem of your game cannot handle the harsh realities of Apple Podcasts. Don’t publish that.
With all that in mind, I try to keep my game both fun for my players and accessible and exciting for the listeners. Here are three ways to DM for a podcast audience — one of which has nothing to do with me.
Don’t Use Initiative That Much
Here’s my hot take: traditional initiative is not great for audio. Initiative is how Dungeons and Dragons advises you should order fight situations. Everyone rolls a d20, including the DM on behalf of the enemies. Whoever rolls the highest goes first, the next highest goes second, etc. This makes total sense to me; D&D evolved from a tabletop military simulator and there’s a reason miniatures play such a huge part in visualizing gameplay. But the audio medium can’t lean on tactics and battle plans. Imagine listening to a real play podcast for the board game Risk or the chatter from Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds. You would get bored and drift off, have to rewind five minutes to catch up, drift off, rewind, etc. Even if you’re a professional talker who can hold your listeners’ attention, it will be hard for you to concentrate on battling while entertaining the audience.
Initiative is also the densest part of Dungeons and Dragons. It uses the most math and has the most moving parts since both the attacker and the target are involved. The most rules-heavy questions also pop up during a fight — if someone can easily explain sneak attack to me, I will give them 100 dollars. Leaning on the default mechanics of initiative and fighting runs the risk of alienating listeners new to D&D and listeners that show up for the role-playing aspects of the game. And the intricate rules of combat are frequently used as gatekeeping — complex puzzles misused to keep out women, players of color, the LGBT+ community and more.
Avoiding or rethinking traditional initiative doesn’t prevent DMs from introducing action-packed stretches into the podcast. On JTP, we’ve conducted a chase through city streets, steered a pirate ship through stormy waters, and played a lightning-quick round of Chopped with potions. I lean on contests and challenges to introduce action while minimizing boring calculations. The skill challenge, reworked from the Fourth Edition DM manual, is a great way to make this work. I think of these action sequences like video game stages, allowing players to accomplish discrete parts of a bigger challenge in any order they want. The plodding nature of initiative — waiting for other players to go, not being prepared when it’s your turn — is eliminated because whoever is ready can act. The DM can fluidly “score” successes and failures to determine the consequences of each stage, then tally up a final result at the end of the challenge.
Another method I developed to run combat for audio is The 60 Second Rule. First, ask your players to roll initiative. Do the same for the enemies, then average each side’s rolls to see who goes first. When it’s the enemies’ turn, the DM will run their attacks and movements as a group. When it is the players’ turn, the DM sets 60 seconds on a timer. The players have only one minute of real time to plan their moves, but their characters can move in any order. Control of the game moves back and forth, timed for the players IRL before their collective turn each time, until the encounter is resolved.
The 60 Second Rule reminds me of an action movie. The hero may get the first move to roundhouse-kick through a pile of baddies, but the enemies always get their chance to respond. And just because it seems that the heroes get the upper hand by working together, it’s cut short by the timer and can still have a negative consequence, like the kidnappers getting away. It’s about keeping the metaphorical camera centered on whoever the listener should care about. This is key to keep focus when the sick stunts are happening in the theater of the mind. (I talk a lot more about this mechanic in this episode of Radio Drama Revival!)
Keep the Pace Moving
Your audience never wants to feel like the third wheel when listening to a podcast. They want to feel like they’re a part of the action, a silent party who everyone loves — and remembers is there!
With a real play D&D podcast, it is so easy to forget about the world outside your table and start to play like you’re in the back room of a game store. For a campaign, that usually looks like cracking jokes endlessly and unendingly bothering the shopkeepers. I am sure you’re funny and charismatic and lovely and entertaining; that’s why you have this show. But no one wants to listen to a party goof around for thirty minutes. And that includes games that have me in them! I cannot sustain your attention with puns alone. As the DM of any game, it’s your responsibility to keep the plot moving forward. As the DM on a podcast, this goal become your ultimate calling.
If the characters are dawdling in the front room of the palace, send a butler in to receive them into the party. Now, they’re being introduced by a chorus of heralds instead of conducting a stealth mission (“Introducing Sir and Lady Fiddleflaff!”). If they’re berating a local bard to write them a song and the interaction isn’t funny, montage through it (or call for a transition or “star swipe!” to the next scene). If one of your players is debating two options and can’t decide, just start counting down from five. It’s amazing how quickly hearing the DM say “5, 4, 3…” forces a player to make a decision. Listening back to your recording later, you’ll be happy you sped things up.
Don’t know if your game drags? Playtest your first few episodes. Treat them like one-shots and run them for your friends. Then run the same game for your podcast players and see what’s interesting, what doesn’t make sense, what gets bogged down, and how the ending fits. Notice how your players react and talk to each other, and how you can minimize problems while giving them opportunities to do what they do best. Edit your plan, replace some details of the twists and surprises, and you’re ready to play that same premise again, on mic, for real. Remember, your real play podcast is still a podcast — you can still do as much pre-production as you’d like.
Keeping up the pace is half on the DM and half on editing. Cut out bits that don’t work, arguments about rules, prolonged silences, and restarts. These are natural parts of creating an improvisational podcast, but hearing them can get in the way of the listening experience . The D&D podcast should be a lean, mean, exciting fantasy machine. Pro Tools/Audition/Reaper will be your best friend in getting there.
If you can, try to make sure you’re not both DMing and editing the episodes. As you cut what isn’t essential to the mood or story, you may accidentally show parts of your plot that you don’t want to reveal or over-emphasize story beats that are already apparent. Having someone else edit your show means you can have a dialogue about what jokes, plot points, and rolls actually benefit the story. Writers work closely with editors for a reason — the author of a story might be too close to the plot to know what’s really important. (Hi Brandon!)
Trust The Players
A DM is nothing without their players. And a D&D podcast without players is just a person monologuing into a microphone. Players put the “real play” in “real play podcast.” They will also make choices that baffle you, challenge you on things you think are obvious, and inadvertently surprise you and make you scrap hours of work. But without that dynamic, your game is not really D&D.
You may control the world, but a real play podcast is still a shared project between the players and DM. They want your show to grow, be successful, and get tweeted about by Austin Walker just as much as you do. So trust that they’re doing everything they can to make the show great. Talk about your goals for the show and what success looks like to you. Assume positive intent when they make choices that throw off your expected outline for that session. Try to imagine yourself as a net underneath trapeze artists. If they fall, miss their mark, or even intentionally dive down, you will be there to bounce them back onto the bars. So if you’re starting a D&D podcast and you know That Player who is out to rip your structure apart limb from limb — do NOT ask them to join your podcast. You need co-adventurers at your side if you’re going to do this right.
At the same time, I cannot rely entirely on my players to spin gold from straw. I prep a LOT to make our show as good as possible, both in the traditional DMing sense and as a creative steward of the podcast. No team of podcasters can walk in and say “I’m going to be Critical Role!” or “I’m going to be The Adventure Zone!” and succeed right away. Even if your party are all full-time voice actors or comedians, you cannot go in and wing it. You need to spend extra time to set yourself up for success. And that means a lot of work and mindfulness, starting with the structure of your game and your philosophy of DMing.
Go forth!
Good luck, adventurers. If you have any tips to optimize fun and entertainment on your D&D pod, let me know. And please, do share this link with folks who might find it useful. The less D&D podcasts as a whole sound like four dudes with one microphone in a basement, the better represented our genre truly is.
Thank you to Wil Williams and Michelle Nickolaisen for starting the conversation that inspired this article!
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